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Chloe Spear
Chloe Spear (c. 1750-1815) was an African-American woman and religious figure who lived in Massachusetts.

Life
Born in West Africa, Chloe was kidnapped into slavery along with four other children and was shipped to the British colony of Pennsylvania. She was owned by the Bradford family, who had purchased her upon her arrival in Philadelphia c. 1779. When Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783, Spear and her husband Cesar opened a boarding house and she took in laundry. She was an active member of the Second Baptist Church in Boston, which she had joined while still enslaved. After her husband's death, Spear became an important member of the Baptist community in Boston and was well loved by her neighbors, both black and white. Spear died of rheumatism in 1815 and was buried in the Bradford family vault in Granary Burying Ground.

Biographies
Two biographies of Spear's life were published in the nineteenth century, the first shortly after her death was written by the minister of Second Baptist Church, Dr. Thomas Baldwin. In 1832, James Loring, the largest antislavery publisher in Boston, printed the second biography, entitled “The Memoir of Mrs. Chloe Spear” written by a “woman of Boston.” The memoir tells the story of the life of a woman, brought from Africa to Boston as a slave, whose religious devotion and hard work impressed her owner sufficiently to allow her to be baptized and eventually freed. Despite marrying a man who was not morally strong or a hard worker, Chloe Spear developed a successful business as a laundress and supported her family. In her old age, after her husband’s death, she built a religious community and despite or even because of her own illness and infirmity from her years of work, became a pillar of her church. Her story was moving or useful enough that it came to the attention of Rebecca Warren Brown, a young women engaged in the antislavery movement, seventeen years after Spears died. Brown likely read the first memorial to Spears and realized that her story was not only a useful moralizing tale for the power of Christian belief, but also a story of the evils of slavery and its corrupting influence on American society. Brown lays the root of Spear’s illness on the fact that she dried laundry in her bedroom at night, which she claims left her vulnerable to rheumatism in her old age. As she describes Spear’s late life, she quotes from the original biography that,

"Several of the last years of her life, her mind appeared uncommonly spiritual. As she advanced in life, she seemed to ripen for glory. Few Christians with whom we have been acquainted, have appeared to maintain so near a walk with God, or to enjoy so much of heaven. During her last sickness, which was of several months continuance, she was favoured with an almost uninterrupted peace of Mind."