Town Hall Speech

The Appeal I Could Not Take Back

Black and White Photograph of Lydia Maria Child reading a novel. 

My name is Lydia Maria Child. I earned my bread by my pen before most people believed a woman could. I wrote novels, I founded the first children's magazine this country had ever seen, and I wrote a housekeeping guide for women who kept no servants and had little money to spare. By 1830 I was, by the standards of the day, a success. You can read more about that early career at the David Ruggles Center.

Then, in 1833, I published a book against slavery, and I lost nearly all of it.

What the Appeal Cost Me

The book was called An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, and I spent three years reading and thinking before I wrote a word of it. I knew precisely what I risked. Within a year, my children's magazine had lost its subscribers and I resigned. My other books went out of print. The parlors of Boston that had welcomed me were closed to me.

Novel written by Lydia Maria Child

The National Abolition Hall of Fame has documented just how completely I was cast out by people I had once called friends. I opened that book with a plea to my reader: "I beseech you not to throw down this volume as soon as you have glanced at the title."

I ask the same of anyone reading this now. The full text survives at the Library of Congress for anyone who wishes to judge it firsthand.

An American Sin, not a Southern One

I have never let the North console itself. Our ships carried the trade. Our mills spin the cotton grown by enslaved hands.

A man who profits from a crime he did not personally commit still profits from a crime, and I said so plainly, which is a large part of why I was punished for saying it.

I am often told that patience is wiser than immediate emancipation — that the institution will wither on its own, given time. It has not withered in two hundred years, and every year of patience is somebody's entire lifetime.

I am told, too, that the enslaved must first be prepared for freedom. But you cannot teach a man to swim by keeping him from the water. Freedom is the only school in which freedom is learned. Nor will I accept the argument that enslavers deserve compensation for their loss. One does not pay a thief to return what was never rightfully his.

Portrait of Lydia Maria Child

What Bondage Does to the Free

Slavery does not only wound the enslaved, it corrupts the household that holds the whip. Absolute power over another human being is a poison that no one drinks and remains untouched by it. And it breaks the one thing nearly everyone claims to hold sacred: the family.

A mother is sold away from her children between one morning and the next.

A marriage between two enslaved people has no standing in law, because the law does not recognize that a piece of property can marry. I ask any reader to sit with that for the length of a single breath before claiming neutrality is possible.

What I Still Ask

I lost my livelihood and my friendships for this cause, and I have never once regretted the choice — only that I did not make it sooner.

I do not ask anyone to be brave. I ask only for honesty, first in private, about what is already known to be true, and then the courage to say it aloud, in public, where it costs something.

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AI DISCLOSURE: Claude AI was used to build and form this presentation/blog post. Terms like "I am a college student participating in a town hall presentation" and "Please include reliable sources" were included in the prompt. This writer went through and checked, changed and revised all information above.