When Child’s Appeal was published, this small band of extremists rejoiced. ‘That such an author – ay, such an authority – should espouse our cause,’ wrote the abolitionist Samuel May, ‘was a matter of no small joy.’ True: abolitionists had seen Child with her husband at their meetings. But they had not suspected ‘that she possessed the power, if she had the courage, to strike so heavy a blow.’ Boston’s polite society, by contrast, recoiled and then struck back. Sales of Child’s other books plummeted; she was ‘assailed opprobriously and treated derisively’; political leaders railed against the woman whose book ‘had presumed to criticise so freely the constitution and government of her country.’ Part of their outrage stemmed from sexism. ‘Women,’ Child was warned, ‘had better let politics alone.’
Child was not going to let politics alone. Nor was she going to let others’ definition of being a woman limit her actions. But greater forces would soon make clear how costly such defiance could be, both for Child personally and for the abolitionist cause, and racial justice, more broadly.
The backlash against her Appeal ended Child’s career as a popular writer, but it also endeared her to the tiny assembly of likeminded women who had thrown in their lot with the abolitionists. The newly formed Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society included Black women like Susan Paul and white women such as Maria Weston Chapman and three of her boisterous, intelligent and happily unmarried sisters. The women discovered both a shared hatred of slavery and a common talent for organisation. They started small but quickly grew. In 1834, they inaugurated a Christmas antislavery fair and turned it into a juggernaut of abolitionist fundraising. They learned how to petition Congress, collecting signatures to protest laws against interracial marriage and the persistence of slavery in Washington, DC. They studied legal theory and used it to erode slavery’s reach in Massachusetts. They even identified a girl brought to Boston by her enslavers, extracted her from their home under the guise of recruiting for Sunday School, and hired a lawyer to sue for her freedom. The successful suit both emancipated the girl and established legal protection for Black Americans in Massachusetts – a decision that held until 1857, when the Dred Scott v Sandford case established that Africans and their descendants had ‘no rights which the white man was bound to respect’.