Lunch and Learn – Bound Out: The Spiritual Lives of Freeborn Black Domestic Servants

Virtual Presentation!

Before she made history in 1831 as the first United States-born woman of any race to publicly address a mixed audience of men and women, Maria Wellington Miller Stewart was orphaned and served a term of indenture in a clergyman’s household. The freeborn mixed-race woman of African descent explained that although she “had the seeds of piety and virtue . . . sown in [her] mind, her “soul thirsted for knowledge.”

In this virtual presentation, Jaimie Crumley, a New England Regional Fellowship Consortium grantee, will discuss how what historians have described as the fragility of freedom was made evident through the indenture system in early nineteenth-century Connecticut. For freeborn Black children like Maria Wellington Miller Stewart, indenture offered a far better life than chattel slavery. Nevertheless, it normalized subservience to white people and prevented them from attaining an education. This presentation discusses how her childhood as a domestic servant in a clergyman’s household might have influenced Stewart’s later political thought.

This virtual event is free and open to the public. Get tickets to receive the Zoom link.

Questions? Contact Jen Busa, Public Programs Coordinator at jbusa@connecticutmuseum.org.

About the speaker: Jaimie D. Crumley is an Assistant Professor in the Divisions of Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is currently working on a book project called We Will Live: Black Christian Feminists in the Age of Revolutions. We Will Live is about Christian women of African descent’s contributions to the abolitionist movement in New England from 1770 until 1870.

Image: Yerrinton, James Brown, and William Lloyd Garrison. “The Liberator.” Newspaper. Boston, Mass.: William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp, Volume 3, Number 8, February 3, 1833, page 31. Digital Commonwealth, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/mc87rp03x (accessed April 24, 2024).