Maria Weston Chapman

• Maria Weston Chapman
• Born: July 26, 1806
• Died: July 12, 1885

Abolitionist, was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, the eldest child of the five daughters and two sons of Captain Warren Weston and Anne (Bates) Weston. The family was of Pilgrim stock. Maria Weston was educated in Weymouth schools and, from 1824 to 1828, in London, where she lived with her banker uncle Joshua Bates, receiving private tutoring and attending a school for young women. In 1829 she became the principal of the new Young Ladies’ High School in Boston, and in October of the following year she married Henry Grafton Chapman, a Harvard-educated merchant in business with his father.

Influenced by their Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing, and radicalized by the British abolitionist George Thompson, the Chapmans became advocates of immediate, uncompensated emancipation in 1834. Henry Grafton Chapman was treasurer of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society until his death in 1842. From 1835 to 1844 Maria Chapman held office in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. which she founded with three of her sisters, and wrote its annual reports. Believing that money was “the pinch of the game,” she took over the movement’s local fund-raising activities. managing a bazaar from 1835 to 1848 and again after 1855. The mother of four children (Elizabeth Bates, Henry Grafton, Anne, and Gertrude) born between 1833 and 1840, she increased her influence by making her home the meeting place of antislavery folk, who were both charmed by her beauty and poise and intimidated by a sense of purpose that won her such sobriquets as Joan of Arc and Lady Macbeth.

Chapman was in charge of an interracial meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society that was broken up by a mob in October 1835. Ordered to leave the hall, she replied: “If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere.” Afterward she led the women through the mob to her own home. (It was on this occasion that William Lloyd Garrison was bound and dragged through the streets.) Convinced that the issue of civil liberties lay at the heart of the antislavery cause, she undertook petition campaigns to persuade Congress to end slavery in the capital, abolish the domestic slave trade, and deny annexation to Texas. In 1836 she organized resistance to the return of the fugitive Med Somersett to slavery. A follower of and assistant to William Lloyd Garrison, she insisted on the right of women to participate in antislavery organizations on the same terms and with the same powers as men and on the obligation of abolitionists to leave churches that admitted slaveholders to fellowship.

Chapman’s first and only set speech to a general audience took place in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hall, the newly built abolitionist auditorium, in May 1838. Competing with the howling mob that surrounded the hall (and burned it the following day), Chapman’s calm bearing was more impressive than her speech.

Days later, she succumbed to “brain fever,” which threatened both her life and her sanity. Within four months, however, she was again raising money, helping to organize the New England Non-Resistance Society, and writing yet another controversial report, Right and Wrong in Massachusetts (1839), in which she maintained that the issue of women’s rights had caused the split in the antislavery movement.

Two personal crises came in quick succession. In 1841 the Chapmans’ infant daughter Gertrude died while they were in Haiti, and the next year Henry Grafton Chapman died of tuberculosis. From that time on, Maria Weston Chapman maintained close relationships with her four unmarried sisters and with her recently widowed friend Eliza Follen. She refused to go into mourning, as she had earlier refused to abstain from public action when visibly pregnant. A councillor of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (1841–65), a member of the “Boston Quorum” that ran the national society’s executive committee (1843-63), the editor (with Edmund Quincy) of The Liberator when William Lloyd Garrison was absent (1842–48), a member of the National Anti-Slavery Standard’s editorial board and contributing staff (1844–48), and a perennial money-raiser, organizer, and adviser, Chapman was, according to her fellow abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster, the “moral Napoleon” of the cause.

Then, in 1848, at the height of her influence, she went to live in Paris and travel in England, presumably to give her children the international education she had had herself. She attended the 1849 Paris Peace Congress and the 1850 London congress; visited British reformers; collected objects for the Boston antislavery bazaar; created her own reform-oriented salon; and persuaded French intellectuals to write for The Liberty Bell, a gift-book annual that she and her sister Anne edited from 1839 to 1858.

When she returned to Boston in 1855, Chapman took up her old organizational responsibilities and tried to reassert her leadership. She attempted to end the social isolation of the Boston abolitionists by holding brilliant soirées in the European fashion in place of the old bazaars. That she acted without consulting the thirty other members of the fair committee increased her reputation for autocratic behavior.

Once the Civil War had begun, Chapman gave up reform, believing that the work of the antislavery groups was over. Although she continued to be elected to office in state and national societies, she ceased even contributing money to them after 1862, giving instead to freed slaves’ aid societies, in which she played no role. Her family circle was broken by the deaths of her father and Eliza Follen, by her sisters’ travels, and by the marriages of her children, and Chapman became withdrawn. After the war her only public activity was the preparation of her memoir of the English writer and economist Harriet Martineau, whose literary executor she was. She died at the age of seventy-eight of heart disease in Weymouth, where she was buried.

Chapman, according to her grandson, the essayist John Jay Chapman, had been the “embodiment” of antislavery efforts, her striking presence “convey[ing] more than her spoken or written words.” Reform had provided her with an alternative to the emptiness or excessive drinking that she believed haunted educated American women. A self-conscious feminist, she valued “womanly” skills, noting that intellectual achievement could not be expected of any woman who gave the “years between [the ages of] fifteen and forty[-]five . . . to her family”; superior women, she decided, should not marry at all. Her minor literary achievements, like her participation in other reforms, only supplemented her dedication to abolition and to the ideas of William Lloyd Garrison, which for more than twenty years defined her life.

Correspondence among the Weston sisters, as well as Chapman’s letters to other Bostonians and to English correspondents and her notes on various antislavery meetings, are part of the Antislavery Collection of the Boston Public Library. The Chapman Papers at Cornell University primarily cover her two Haitian trips. The Sydney Howard Gay Papers at Columbia University and the Oliver Johnson Papers at the Vermont Historical Society clarify Chapman’s role in the National Anti-Slavery Standard (1840-70), which, with the Liberator (1831-65), reported her activities and contained many signed and unsigned contributions by her. Her antislavery writing also includes the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society’s Annual Reports, often titled Right and Wrong in Boston (1835-44), and How Can I Help Abolish Slavery? (1855). Harriet Martineau’s, Autobiography . . . with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman (1877) is her major literary production. Her grandson’s recollection of Chapman’s late years are included in J. J. Chapman, Memories and Milestones (1915). W. P. Garrison and F. J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison 1805-1879, 4 vols. (1885-89), contains excerpts from letters and articles by and about her. J. H. Pease and W. H. Pease, Bound with Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Antislavery Movement (1972), analyzes her reform career. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1930) and Notable American Women (1971).