[Letter to] My dear Mrs. Chapman
Contributors: Chapman, Maria Weston, 1806-1885, recipient
Series: Maria Weston Chapman Correspondence (1835-1885)
Published: 1841
Language: eng
Format: [manuscript]
Subjects: Correspondence; Freedmen; Women abolitionists; History; Racism; Antislavery movements
Notes: Holograph.

This unsigned letter was perhaps written by Rachel W. Stearns of Springfield, Mass. Stearns welcomes Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman back to New England and her anti-slavery labors. Stearns tells of her gradual conversion to abolition. She describes the section (of Springfield, Mass.?) called "Hayti," where black people live in "poverty, wretchedness & sin in every form, but especially Intemperance." In spite of the squalor and depravity, these free blacks are not worse off than slaves. Rachel W. Stearns and her sister, who kept a school at the house of a "respectable family," were evicted because they received an evening visit from a black preacher, an escaped ex-slave. Stearns, however, found a champion, who made it possible for them to stay till the end of the term. The same friend stopped the plot of some young men planning to mob Stearns and her sister when they went to "Hayti."