Memorial For] Anne Greene Chapman of Boston. Offprint from "The Liberator".
[Child, Lydia Maria]. [Memorial for] Ann Greene Chapman of Boston. Offprint from "The Liberator":[Boston, March, 1837].
One page printed verso and recto, 9-1/2 x7-3/4”.
A fine copy containing a tribute to the memory of Miss Chapman by Lydia Maria Child, in which she cites Miss Chapman's work in the Female Anti-Slavery Society and reprints one of Miss Chapman's hymns which was printed in the anti-slavery publication, Songs of the Free. Also included is the obituary from "The Liberator", including the terms of Miss Chapman’s will which leaves $1,000 to the American Anti-Slavery Society and $100 to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (not unsubstantial sums in 1837). There is also an original poem by Ann Warren Weston, "To the Memory of Ann Greene Chapman," her obituary from "The Reformer," and resolutions passed by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society as outlined by Mary Parker, President and Martha Ball, Secretary, expressing sympathy to the family of Miss Chapman. Miss Chapman died at the age of 35; she was a member of the well-known Abolitionist family, which included Maria Weston Chapman, Garrison's principal lieutenant. "The Liberator" was, of course, William Lloyd Garrison's Abolitionist newspaper.
The founding of the Female Anti-Slavery Society by 13 Boston women was an important event in the Abolitionist movement. Miss Chapman was known to be an active member of the Society and to have attended the famous meeting on October 21, 1835—the occasion of a near riot—and involved in Maria Weston Chapman's bazaars (which raised over $500 in its first year alone). Apthetker in Abolitionism tells us that,
Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society was formed in October 1833. The BFASS leaders and assorted members met every week and undertook as central tasks with specific agreed upon assignments: getting subscriptions for the LIBERATOR, helping distribute the paper, drawing up and soliciting signatures for the kid of petition (the termination of the slave trade in DC) described above. (Abolitionism, by Herbert Aptheker, Twayne Publishers, 1989, p. 52)
BFASS immediately provoked controversy by inviting African-Americans to their meetings, "and soon they were labeled fanatics and denounced for stepping out of women’s sphere" (Crusade for Freedom: Women of the Anti-Slavery Movement, by Alma Lutz, Boston: Beacon Press, 1968, p. 22). At the famous October 1835 meeting, the BFASS members let the besieged hall with black and white women walking in pairs. This action engendered open criticism by the Boston intellectual and social establishment and it took many years of efforts by Child, Chapman and others to gain support for the cause. Maria Chapman remarked in the Report of BFASS for 1835 that the struggle had, "occasioned our sons to be expelled from colleges and theological seminaries—our friends from professorships and ourselves from literary and social privileges..." Although other offprints by Mrs. Child from the Liberator are known, this is not located in BAL or in the NUC.
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