Among the most “efficient” of the “female brethren”—a term that was picked up with glee by anti-abolitionists—the Westons joined the movement in 1834–35. They helped organize female antislavery in Roxbury and New Bedford, Massachusetts; managed the BFAS and, with their aunt Mary Weston, the Weymouth and Braintree Female Emancipation Society; assumed responsibility for antislavery fund-raising by organizing the “cent box” campaign and sustaining the BFAS annual fair (from 1835 to 1858), which supported antislavery agents, organs, and associations in Massachusetts; wrote such significant propaganda as Right and Wrong in Boston (1836), which detailed mob violence and social intimidation of abolitionists in the city, and Right and Wrong in Massachusetts (1839), which decried the efforts of some antislavery activists to isolate William Lloyd Garrison and female abolitionists who espoused immediatism, disunion, and independent female activism; and served as editors and authors for such abolitionist and reform newspapers as the Liberator, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and the Non-Resistant. In an effort to appeal to genteel, cultivated readers who shied away from these newspapers, the Westons also created and produced the Liberty Bell, a magazine of poetry, short essays, biographical sketches, and short fiction. (As Maria put it, the American public “must be treated like children, to whom a medicine is made as pleasant as it[s] nature admits. A childish mind desires a small measure of truth in gilt edges, when it would reject it in whitty-brown.”)³

The Westons helped organize and conduct a massive, multiyear campaign throughout the state of Massachusetts petitioning the federal government to end slavery. As part of this effort they solicited individuals in their assigned counties to take responsibility for organizing local campaigns, provided these men and women with petition forms, and bundled the signatures for presentation to Congress. They themselves went door-to-door in Boston, Roxbury, Weymouth, Fall River, and New Bedford in an effort to educate women about slavery and enroll female assistance in challenging the laws sustaining it. The sisters helped coordinate and accompanied the first abolitionist speaking tour by female agents (the Grimké sisters of South Carolina and Philadelphia), and wrote volumes of letters, newspaper articles, organizational documents, tracts, hymns, and poetry in the process of shaping public opinion and recording the movement’s history. One or more Westons served, at any given time, as officer(s) of the BFAS from 1835 through the lifetime of the association, and of the MAS and AAS from 1840 to 1865. The Weston and Chapman homes in Weymouth and Boston served as centers of abolition organization and sociability.

Thus, among the many women and men who engaged in abolition, the Weston sisters occupied a position of unusual visibility, even notoriety. For decades they provided leadership while working to exhaustion in the trenches of reform. As individuals and as a group they were renowned, both loved and despised within and without the antislavery movement. Yet exactly how and why the Westons came to abolition remains unclear.

Maria, Caroline, and Anne were teachers or students in Boston when its black and white communities first embraced antislavery activism, and various evidence suggests that they came to abolition in part through an interest in education and child welfare, particularly that of black students and orphans.⁴ They may well have heard or read about the controversial lectures given by Maria [Miller] W. Stewart in 1832 as she made the case for improved education to better African American lives. The earliest actual evidence of Weston engagement in the cause of racial equality is provided by a September 1832 fund-raiser, possibly to support Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury, Connecticut, as she considered admitting a mixed-race student body.⁵

Another draw was certainly temperance reform.⁶ Probably as a result of their father’s drinking, the Weston daughters closely followed temperance efforts in Weymouth and Boston. Maria encouraged her sisters to canvass for votes in 1834 when Boston first proposed laws limiting the retail sale of liquor, and then again in the 1835 Norfolk and Suffolk county commissioner elections, in which temperance candidates who advocated restricted licensing won 52 percent of the vote.⁷ In 1838, Boston proposed the first law in the nation limiting retail sales of distilled spirits to less than fifteen gallons.⁸ Hoping “the Temperance folks may prevail,” Anne urged her sisters “to go out and canvass for votes.”⁹ Thereafter, even as nonresistants, the Westons consistently campaigned among their male kin, fellow abolitionists, and friends on behalf of temperate Whigs and against “democratic rum drinkers” in local elections.¹⁰

Weymouth embraced temperance. Well-known lecturers such as Dr. Charles Jewett and Edwin Thompson campaigned there. Members of the Washington Total Abstinence Society of Weymouth and Braintree conducted a pledge drive shortly after it was founded in March 1842,¹¹ and they gathered the signatures of 639 locals (about 16 percent of the population) who affirmed their desire to give up liquor. Weston cousin Edmund Hunt reported, “Everyone signed the pledge”; his father, Major Elias Hunt, “signed with the rest.” However, when the local visiting committee came around to police those who continued to drink, Hunt rejected their belief that he had broken his oath. “They said, ‘Major Hunt, we understand you have broken the pledge.’ With much surprise, [Hunt] replied, ‘No I have not.’ They said, ‘We are told you drink gin.’ ‘Of course I do. I always have, and have to,’ was the reply. And so the Major was turned out of the ‘Cold Water Army.’”¹² There is no evidence as to whether or not Captain Warren Weston signed the pledge, but his understanding likely mirrored that of his stepfather.

Also as a result of Warren Weston’s drinking, character formed a central theme in the lives and works of his daughters. As Maria wrote of her father, “What a fine mind was wrecked by his want of self-government! I sometimes think that his family are possibly superior to what they would have been, through the powerful admonition that his defects have given them.”¹³ In 1837, she reported (perhaps overoptimistically) to her abstemious uncle, banker Joshua Bates, that her fifty-six-year-old father was “now a temperate man.”¹⁴

For the Westons, as for many of their contemporaries, enslavement meant not only a physical but also a mental process affecting anyone who could not exercise his or her own will for lack of self-mastery, whether due to drink, greed, lust, cruelty, or laziness.¹⁵ Just as alcohol enslaved the drinker, the enslaving of human beings aroused passions of brutality and lust in masters while encouraging indolence and immorality in slaves.¹⁶

Weston abolitionism was also encouraged by means of marital ties. Maria Ann Weston married Henry Grafton Chapman in 1830. Henry’s cousin Ann T. Greene, a niece of Maria’s mother-in-law, Sarah Greene Chapman, was an invalid who lived with Henry’s parents at their home in Boston’s Chauncy Place in the early 1830s,¹⁷ and Ann’s cousins, Susan and Mary Grew, were very early abolitionists. No evidence remains of discussions about slavery or abolition between the Grew sisters and their relatives, but by January 1834, Anne Warren Weston had announced her decision to attend a recruitment meeting of the Middlesex County Abolitionist Society.¹⁸ That March, against a rising tide of antiblack and anti-abolitionist violence across the Northeast, the women of the newly constituted BFAS elected Mary Grew its first secretary, passed a constitution, and issued a call for additional members.¹⁹ The following spring, when Grew moved to Philadelphia, Anne Warren Weston replaced her as corresponding secretary of the BFAS.²⁰

During this period, Maria Weston Chapman sought to rally Bostonians of means to purchase a membership in the Boston Athenaeum for Lydia Maria Child, whose borrowing privileges had been revoked by the library’s directors after she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Chapman collected the necessary $100 fee to enable Child to finish her feminist work, The History and Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations.²¹

According to Sarah Southwick, who was present at the time,²² Maria Weston Chapman formally declared her desire to join the BFAS in June 1835.²³ In November, when the society undertook its second fund-raising fair,²⁴ Maria greeted participants as Anne worked the tables alongside Maria’s sisters-in-law Ann Greene Chapman and Mary Gray Chapman. The BFAS raised some $300 for the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEAS).²⁵

By midsummer 1835 the campaign against slavery had inspired the destruction of antislavery literature by postal agents and rioting by anti-abolitionist and antiblack mobs. Visiting British “agitator” George Thompson received death threats, and after his 1 August 1835 commemoration of the end to British slavery in the Caribbean, antislavery women covered his retreat to a waiting carriage. Over the next two months, tensions built between abolitionists and Boston’s mercantile elite, who sought to protect their southern trade. The announcement that Thompson would speak to the BFAS the second week in October produced such a public uproar that the women postponed the event for a month before substituting Garrison for the “foreign incendiary.”

Thompson played an important role in the founding of many local antislavery societies, including Weymouth’s. Maria and Anne drove out to Weymouth from Boston to attend Thompson’s September lectures and follow up with an organizational meeting. Some thirty “well-disposed” women signed a call to join the nascent Weymouth and Braintree Female Emancipation Society.²⁶ During the first year of their association these women circulated to every family in town an antislavery appeal aimed at raising abolitionist consciousness. Aunt Mary Weston wrote the annual report, crafting it as an appeal to Weymouth women: “Let every member of this society act in all respects as she would be induced to do, if her father, her mother, her child, her sister, or her brother was in slavery.” These beginnings were slow to catch on, however, and the society held no quarterly meeting in January 1836.²⁷ A second association, the South Weymouth Female Anti-Slavery Society, emerged on 19 November 1835; it was generally more gradualist in practice and ameliorist in ideology, though the two groups occasionally met and worked together. Their difference reflected broader fractures in the movement that would become septic some four to five years later.

Meanwhile in Boston, the merchants of Washington Street sought from Mayor Theodore Lyman an injunction to prevent the women’s society from meeting to hear George Thompson. A group of businessmen operating on Boston’s Central Wharf, alongside the chandlery owned and operated by Maria’s father-in-law and husband, organized an effort “to snake out . . . the infamous foreign scoundrel,” and an anonymous broadsheet offered $100 to the first man to lay “violent hands” on him. Some 500 copies were distributed across the North End wharfs and along State Street, the city’s commercial center. By midafternoon on the October day of the BFAS meeting, the streets around the antislavery offices were crowded with angry men and unruly boys.²⁸ They filled the stairwell and blocked the entryway to the Washington Street building where the women’s meeting was to take place. While Garrison addressed the twenty-five to thirty women gathered for the occasion, another hundred or so found themselves unable to gain entrance. Among these were Caroline Weston and Garrison’s wife Helen Benson Garrison.²⁹

As the crowd grew in noise, numbers, and threat, BFAS president Mary Parker urged Garrison to leave for his own safety. He withdrew to the Liberator office. Pushing his way through the crowd, Mayor Lyman urged the women to disperse for their own safety. Parker questioned the need, and Chapman challenged the mayor to use his influence to subdue and disperse the mob. After all, she charged, his “personal friends” had instigated the crisis. Lyman reiterated that the women endangered themselves if they chose to remain. Parker asked Lyman whether he would guarantee their safet...