Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought by Kristin Waters

Abstract

Reviewed by: Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought by Kristin Waters Janaka Lewis (bio) Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought. By Kristin Waters. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. 338. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $30.00.) In twenty-five chapters, Kristin Waters chronicles the life of Maria W. Stewart (née Miller). From Stewart’s childhood in Hartford, Connecticut, to the moment when, as “a nearly destitute twenty-nine-year-old widow,” she placed the manuscript of what became her famous collection of meditations into William Lloyd Garrison’s hands, Waters’s biography paints an imaginative portrait of “America’s first black woman political writer” (3). Waters seeks to understand why and how Stewart’s work stands today as “one of the most significant and least well-known foundational voices in African American and Black feminist thought” (4). While tracing Stewart’s early years, Waters includes little-known details of Stewart’s Connecticut-based parents, along with narratives of their possible enslavement during the 1790s. The young Maria Miller herself was indentured to a clergyman when municipalities were still governed by Congregational churches. While painstakingly reconstructing Miller’s decade of servitude in Hartford, Waters contextualizes these experiences within the relationship of the city to regional and national events, such as the War of 1812 and the Hartford Convention. She examines Miller’s Sabbath School education in Hartford, which put her in proximity to other Black individuals, while she planned her escape to Boston. Waters also [End Page 241] uses naval vessel records to document James W. Stewart, Miller’s later husband and a major intellectual influence, as a merchant mariner and then a seaman under David Porter in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812 and the Second Barbary War. By starting with Stewart’s beginnings, Waters reclaims “the lives and thought of Black women as they co-created community as well as social and political theory, contributing original analysis of the gendered dimensions of life, action, and thought” (6). Waters reconstructs the names, families, and occupations of women of the North Slope, who made up fifteen of the twenty-four founders of the First African Church, the “first autonomous Black church in the Northeast,” constituted on August 8, 1805. In so doing, Waters “piece[s] together their lives and contributions as friends, neighbors, co-congregants, co-theorists and sometimes critics of Stewart, whose writing is replete with gender analyses” (6). The author also recreates local African American community life, in which Stewart likely participated, including community festivals and public feast days, such as Boston Bunker Hill Day—an opportunity to honor African American Revolutionary War veterans—and African Day, which celebrated the legal demise of the slave trade and revolution in Haiti. Waters then contextualizes Stewart’s feminist activism, speaking, and writing in ongoing developments in Boston, such as the establishment of the Prince Hall Masons, the inauguration in 1827 of Freedom’s Journal as the first Black newspaper in New York City, the publication of David Walker’s Appeal in 1829, and the publication of the white-owned Liberator in 1831. Waters also details the courtship and brief marriage of the Stewarts, as well as the death of James W. Stewart to heart failure and Maria Stewart’s long battle for her husband’s estate. Based in the field of philosophy, but also using history, fictional narrative, biography, and archival research, Waters puts into conversation Black feminist theorists, such as Patricia Hill Collins and Brittney C. Cooper; historians, such as Christopher Cameron and James and Lois Horton; and political philosophers, such as Charles Mills and Leonard Harris. In so doing, she explores how Stewart had to hold and practice principles of morality, knowledge and power, and multiple consciousnesses (citing W. E. B. DuBois). Waters’s methods are informed by African American and women’s studies movements, as she seeks to rewrite and recenter the roots of Black political theory. She ends her account of the woman she calls “a hero and a warrior” with Stewart securing for herself a pension for widows of War of 1812 veterans and then publishing Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria...