Stewart's public-speaking career lasted three years. She delivered her farewell lectures on September 21, 1833, in the schoolroom of the African Meeting House, known then as the Belknap Street Church, and as of 2019 part of Boston's Black Heritage Trail. Upon leaving Boston, she first moved to New York, where she published her collected works in 1835. She taught school and participated in the abolitionist movement, as well as literary organization. Stewart then moved to Baltimore and eventually to Washington, D.C., where she also taught school before becoming head matron (nurse) of the Freedmen's Hospital and Asylum in Washington, later the medical school of Howard University. She ultimately died at that hospital.