Maria W. Stewart was a trailblazing political philosopher and social reformer, who migrated from the Connecticut of her birth, south to Baltimore and then Washington, D.C. on the eve of the Civil War. Stewart was a free-born African American who became a teacher, journalist, lecturer, abolitionist, and women's rights activist. She is the first known American woman to offer political lectures before an interracial audience of men and woman.

Maria W. Stewart: Essential Writings of a 19th-Century Black Abolitionist offers the most comprehensive and contextually dynamic collection of Stewart's fascinating corpus to date. In addition to including an intellectual biography on this formidable female historical figure. Douglas A. Jones brings together Stewart's known essays, lectures, and fiction, including recently discovered texts, all of which directly influenced other major black abolitionist contemporaries, including Frederick Douglass and many others. The volume's extended introduction and detailed notes situate Stewart's then-radical political philosophy in the rich intellectual contexts in which she worked, including abolitionism, black nationalism, feminism, and sentimentalism.