Sympathy in Struggle Against Servitude: Maria Stewart’s Black Civic Republicanism

In the early 1830s, Black abolitionist Maria Stewart reimagined core concepts of republicanism—domination and civic virtue—to articulate a republican politics suited to the political condition of Black Americans in the antebellum United States. Stewart argued that Black Americans, both enslaved and nominally free, were reduced by the white-dominated polity to a position of servitude: as fit to serve the good of the white Americans who dominated them and without any claim upon the polity’s common good themselves. Stewart also drew a nuanced distinction between servitude and service that cast Black mothers as exemplars of republican virtue, engaged in social reproductive labour that supported the common good of Black Americans as a people, in which Black mothers themselves partook. Furthermore, Stewart emphasized the liberatory power of partial sympathy as a foundation for racialized civic virtue and solidarity, organized around the common good of Black Americans as a people.