The Revolutionary Black Roots of Slavery's Abolition in Massachusetts

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The Revolutionary Black Roots of Slavery’s Abolition in Massachusetts

chernoh m. sesay jr. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

N 6 January 1773, “Felix,” possibly a slave and undoubt- O edly aided by whites, took a new approach to the effort to abolish slavery in Massachusetts: he submitted a petition to the General Court of the province.1 Felix gave his last name, Holbrook, in a second appeal delivered four months later.2 His identity is not ﬁrmly established, but given his surname, he may have worked for Mary and Abia Holbrook, former master of the Boston South Writing School who had died in 1769.3

I am extremely grateful to the anonymous readers and the editor and editorial staff of the New England Quarterly, the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Newberry Library Early American History and Culture Seminar, and the following for their support and their critical insights: Timothy H. Breen, Eric Slaughter, Christopher Mount, Amor Kohli, John Karam, Mark Hauser, and Kalyani Menon. 1Felix’ humble Petition of many Slaves, living in the Town of Boston, and other Towns (Boston, 1773) was printed in the pamphlet The Appendix; Or, Some Ob- servations on the Expediency of the Petition of the Africans, living in Boston, &c. lately presented to the General Assembly of this Province. To which is annexed the Petition referred to. Likewise, Thoughts on Slavery. With a Useful Extract from the Massachusetts Spy of January 28, 1773, by way of an Address to the Members of the Assembly (Boston, 1773). It is reprinted in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, ed. Herbert Aptheker, 7 vols. (New York: Citadel Press, 1951), 1:6–7. 2Abolitionist petition for the Representative of Thompson to Boston, April 20th, 1773 (Boston: n.p., 1773), New York Historical Society Broadsides (SY1773 no. 22). The petition is reprinted in Documentary History of the Negro People, 1:7–8. 3Mary Needham and Abia Holbrook were married by John Webb, a Presbyterian minister, on 3 October 1717. The couple had a son, Abia, on 14 July 1718.Records do not indicate when Felix entered the service of the Holbrook family. Abia, the

99 100 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Felix argued that slavery stripped black men of the perquisites necessary to exercise citizenship. “We have no Property! We have no wives! No children! We have no City! No Country!” he lamented. On 25 June 1773, the Massachusetts legislature considered a third appeal and agreed to form a “Committee on the Petition of Felix Holbrook, and others; praying to be liberated from a State of Slavery.”4 For the ﬁrst time in American Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 history, people of African descent had successfully lobbied a governing body to take up the slavery question as it related to an entire enslaved population.5 In the four years following Felix’s January protest, blacks and whites in Massachusetts devoted increasing attention to the antislavery cause. The essays, addresses, legal cases, and petitions I will discuss here—I think we can safely assume—are but a fraction of the pronouncements that commanded public attention at the time, many scattered in various newspapers, issued from the pulpit, and circulated in letters. Petitions, my particular focus, appeared in Massachusetts in January, April, and June of 1773; January, March, May, and June of 1774;and

elder, died on 28 January 1769.SeeReport of the Record Commissioners of Boston, Boston Marriages, 1752–1809, vol. 30 (Boston, 1903); Boston Deaths, 1700–1799, ed. Robert J. Dunkle and Ann S. Lainhart (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1999); and “Felix, reference code 35589,” The Records of the Churches of Boston and the First Church, Second Parish, and Third Parish of Roxbury: Including Baptisms, Marriages, Deaths, Admissions, and Dismissals, transcribed by Robert J. Dunkle and Ann S. Lainhart, CD-ROM (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2001). 4“To his Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq; Governor of said province; to the Honourable his MAJESTY’S COUNCIL, and the Honourable HOUSE OF REPRE- SENTATIVES in General Court assembled, June, A.D. 1773,” Jeremy Belknap Pa- pers, microﬁlm ed., 11 reels (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1977), reel 8; printed in the Massachusetts Spy, 29 July 1773,andEssex Gazette, 3 August 1773,and reprinted in Insights and Parallels: Problems and Issues of American Social History, ed. William L. O’Neill (Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Company, 1973), pp. 45–48. For mention of the committee, see George H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (New York: D. Appleton, 1866), p. 135. 5Christopher L. Brown (Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006]) notes that the New England petitions are the earliest examples of black abolitionism that did not simply respond to the evils of slavery but that attempted to engage public opinion and inﬂuence the colonial legislature (p. 289). BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 101

January of 1777.6 London experienced no such activity among its Afro-British population until the late 1780s, and the Mas- sachusetts petitioners’ level of organization and articulation of concerns predated similar efforts in Connecticut, New Hamp- shire, New York, and Pennsylvania by almost a decade.7

6Of the petitions mentioned here, the March 1774 petition is described in the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Massachusetts Spy, 6 June 1775, but no copy has yet been found. For specific readings of black political thought and action during the Revolutionary era, see Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 127–65; Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (1983; rev. ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History 84.1 (June 1997): 13–40; Thomas J. Davis, “Emancipation Rhetoric, Natural Rights, and Revolutionary New England: A Note on Four Black Petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–1777,” New England Quarterly 62.2 (June 1989): 248–63; Roy E. Finkenbine, “Belinda’s Petition: Reparations for Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 64.1 (January 2007): 95–104; Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 54–57; Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the American Revolution, 1770–1800 (1973; rev. ed., Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1993), pp. 25–31; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and TheirGlobalQuestforLiberty(Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961; rev. ed., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Rita Roberts, “Patriotism and Political Criticism: The Evolution of Political Consciousness in the Mind of a Black Revolutionary Soldier,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 27.4 (Summer 1994): 569–88; John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (London: BBC, 2005); Manisha Sinha, “‘To Cast Just Obliquy’ on Oppressors: Black Radicalism in the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 64.1 (January 2007): 149–60; and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 309–23. 7For descriptions of the petitions from Connecticut and New Hampshire, see Kaplan and Kaplan, The Black Presence in the American Revolution, pp. 24–30.For an example of a Connecticut petition, see Bristol Lambee, “To the Sons of Liberty in Connecticut. The humble Petition of a Number of poor Africans,” Providence-Gazette and Country Journal, 22 October 1774. For the argument that prior to the 1780s, Quaker abolitionists in Philadelphia encouraged protest through private rather than public transatlantic channels, see Kirsten Sword, “Remembering Dinah Nevil: Strate- gic Deceptions in Eighteenth-Century Antislavery,” Journal of American History 97.2 (September 2010): 325–28. Also see Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 59; and Richard Newman and James Mueller, eds., Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011). 102 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Scholars agree that black abolitionists struggled not only to end slavery but to define the meanings and conditions of freedom.8 Yet, most historians have interpreted the Massachusetts movement simply in terms of its immediate successes and failures, thus neglecting to account for the timing, character, and complexity of Revolutionary-era black politics.9 The ex- pansion of slavery in Massachusetts between the late 1720sand Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 early 1760s, persistent agitation by slaves, and the colonists’ growing conflict with England during the 1770screated novel circumstances conducive to social and political change. Enslaved and free blacks, assisted by sympathetic whites, took advantage of this situation to formulate a structured campaign that spurred the press, the courts, and the government to come to terms with the issues they raised. This emerging black activism represented more than a strate- gic shift; it embodied the voices of the enslaved to ensure that abolition would be a movement not only about but also of black people. In so doing, the movement extended its usefulness beyond Massachusetts’ judicial emancipation of slaves in 1783 to confront the definition of citizenship that would be debated during the nineteenth century.10

8For examples of scholarship that examines emancipation in speciﬁc regions or lo- cations, see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); David Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Free- dom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Richard Newman, The Transformation of American Abolition- ism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); and Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770– 1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991). 9For an example of this failure versus success debate, compare Melish, Disowning Slavery, pp. 81–82, to Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 1–41,esp.13–16. 10Regarding the relationship between legal decision, public sentiment, and the for- mal end to Massachusetts slavery, Arthur Zilversmit argues, in “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 25.4 (October 1968): 614–24,thatin1781 the freedom suit of the slave Elizabeth BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 103 Resistance to Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts The labor requirements of pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts varied considerably over the almost century and a half after it was established. Unable to sustain the colony solely by their

own efforts, freemen depended upon the unrecompensed labor Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 of others. This unfree free labor ranged from indentures and apprenticeships—labor in exchange for food, housing, and (in some cases) training—through penal bondage—labor a criminal offered to pay off his debt to his victim—to slavery. Indians and blacks alone were in the latter category, and the justification for their enslavement was that they had been captured in a legitimate war—the Pequot and King Philip’s Wars, in the case of Indians; the slave trade for Africans—and, thereby, had become a form of property.11 That justification was further extended to the children of those hapless Indians and blacks.12 In 1701, a slave named Adam sued his master Saffin, claiming that Saffin had reneged on a promise to allow Adam to pur- chase his freedom. The suit sparked a pamphlet war between Samuel Sewall, a judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court who later served as the colony’s chief justice, and Saffin, his judicial colleague. In his duly celebrated The Selling of Joseph

Freeman served as the first test case for the constitutionality of Massachusetts slavery and therefore marked a pivotal moment in abolitionism arising from principled rather than pragmatic concerns. In response, Elaine MacEacheren, in “Emancipation of Slavery in Massachusetts: A Reexamination, 1770–1790,” Journal of Negro History 55.4 (October 1970): 289–306, maintains that a statistical analysis of manumissions recorded in Boston wills between 1770 and 1790 suggests that anti-slavery sentiment was already manifesting itself in action and that instead of “leading legal opinion, these legal actions may have only reflected it” (p. 302). This essay focuses on events occurring before the postwar freedom suits; however, it presumes that public opinion and legal fiat were intertwined in shaping abolition. 11The colony’s first set of laws (1641) legally restricted bondage to those who had been “taken in just warrs, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are solde to us” (The Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony in New England, clause 91, reprinted in The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, ed. William H. Whitmore (Boston, 1889), p. 53, at http://archive.org/stream/coloniallawsofma00mass#page/52/mode/2up, accessed 23 July 2013. 12On the beginning of African slavery in Massachusetts, see Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (1942; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1974), pp. 15–17. See also William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Develop- ment of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 3–13. 104 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY (1700), Sewall rejected the notion that simply by virtue of their race or place of birth, some individuals could be rightfully enslaved. His focus, however, was on the institution’s social effects more so than on its ethics. As he stated at the outset, “The Numerousness of Slaves at this day in the Province, and the Uneasiness of them under their Slavery” burdened, and might even endanger, the general population.13 Four addi- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 tional freedom suits were brought in the first decade of the eighteenth century; none challenged the legality of slavery but, instead, sought relief based on contractual obligations.14 The number of slaves imported into Boston peaked during the late 1720sandearly1730s; thereafter, in the wake of the economic depression of the 1740sand1750s, the demand for slave labor plummeted. Some masters negotiated the terms of slaves’ freedom, thus avoiding the expense of providing for the frail, elderly, or idle; others sold their slaves in an expanding interregional commerce.15 In 1752 Boston, the hub of the Mas- sachusetts slave trade, the census of free and enslaved blacks reached an eighteenth-century record of 1,541, one third of all the slaves in the colony. By 1765, after a number of slaves had been traded away, the number dipped to approximately 811, out of a total Boston population of 15,520.16 Between 1764 and

13Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston: Bartholomew Green andJohnAllen,1700), p. 1. See Abner C. Goodell, “John Saffin and His Slave Adam,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 1 (Boston: The Society, 1895), pp. 85–112; Albert J. von Frank, “John Saffin: Slavery and Racism in Colonial Massachusetts,” Early American Literature 29. 3 (1994): 254–72; and Mark A. Peterson, “‘The Selling of Joseph’: Bostonians, Antislavery, and the Protestant International, 1689–1733,” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 1–22. 14Peterson, “‘Selling of Joseph,’” pp. 3–4. Venture Smith, for example, a slave living in the Connecticut River Valley, found ways to influence his own sale so that he could take advantage of New England’s flexible bondage system, which in some cases allowed slaves to work for individuals other than their masters and to retain some of the wages thus earned. See John Wood Sweet, “Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery,” in Venture Smith and the Business of Freedom, ed. James Brewer Stewart (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2010), pp. 83–129. 15Moore, Notes on Slavery, p. 120. For examinations of the factors that shaped manumission and reparations in Massachusetts, see MacEacheren, “Emancipation of Slavery,” and Finkenbine, “Belinda’s Petition.” 16Boston pegged its black inhabitants in 1752 at 1,541 and in 1754 at 989 (Greene, Negro in Colonial New England, p. 842; George A. Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750–1860 [New York: Garland, 1994], BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 105 1776, the black population of the colony remained essentially unchanged, increasing by only 14, from 5,235 to 5,249; during the same period, the white population increased from 218,950 to 343,845.17 The labor surplus of the 1760s emboldened slaves to press on with freedom suits. Claiming that three years earlier he had “restrained her of her liberty . . . without any lawfull right Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 or authority to do so,” mulatto slave Jenny Slew successfully sued her master, John Whipple, an action initiated in 1765 and decided on 4 December 1766.18 In 1768 James, a free African American, attested that Richard Lechmere had “with force and arms assaulted the said James . . . imprisoned and restrained him of his liberty and held him in servitude from the same eleventh day of April untill the day of the date of the writ.” Chief Justice Francis Dana of the Massachusetts Supe- rior Court of Judicature (the Massachusetts Supreme Court) eventually awarded James his freedom and ordered Lechmere to pay £100 in reparations, which James forfeited when he failed to appear in court. In his ruling, Dana cited Old Colony law as he resorted to the 1641 definition of bond slavery: “It is ordered by this court and the authority thereof that there shall never be any bond slavery, or captivity amongst us, unless it is lawful captives taken in just wars.”19 That same year, 1768, the slave Amos Newport brought a suit against his master,

p. 31). Robert E. Desrochers Jr. explains that the 1752 count included all slaves, while that of 1754 enumerated the slave population only from the age of sixteen (“Slave-for- Sale Advertisements in Massachusetts, 1704–1781,” William and Mary Quarterly 5.3 [July 2002]: 654). The 1765 census listed 510 male “Negroes and Mulattoes” and 301 female “Negroes and Mulattoes” (Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Selectmen’s Minutes from 1764 through 1768, vol. 20 [Boston, 1889], p. 170). 17Greene, Negro in Colonial New England, p. 81. 18Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 112–13. For an additional description of this case, see Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking Penguin Books, 2005), p. 124. 19James v. Lechmere, 3 October 1769, Superior Court of Judicature in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dana Family Papers, vol. 97,microfilmP-646 (Boston: MHS), reel 6. For a digitized copy of the summons issued to Lechmere, see http://www.nps.gov/ long/historyculture/upload/Lechmere-Judgment.jpg, accessed 29 January 2013,and Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 4th ser., vol. 4 (Boston, 1863), pp. 334–35. 106 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Joseph Billing, but the court decided that Newport was, legally, a slave.20 During the course of the decade, the number of slave litigants gradually increased, not just in Massachusetts but throughout the northern colonies. Between 1763 and 1783, at least twenty slaves in Massachusetts brought suit against their masters, and three of these plaintiffs argued for emancipation not Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 because their owners broke promises of release or because they claimed free parentage but because they defined slavery itself as illegal.21 Even though they lacked substantial knowledge of legal subtleties, then, African Americans were increasingly push- ing against the boundaries of their bondage. Concurrent shifts in demography, activism, and ideology were raising important questions about social order, economic interest, imperial relations, and moral principle, and some individuals, both black and white, were viewing slavery as an essential element of the overarching discussion.22 One of the most influential among them was James Otis. In 1761, Otis folded a denunciation of slavery into an at- tack on the Writs of Assistance, which had been in force since at least 1696.InConsiderations on Behalf of the Colonists, he argued that the writs, which gave royal customs agents the legal authority to search for smuggled cargo in Ameri- can ports, denied colonists rights guaranteed by the English constitution; among the Crown’s deserving colonial subjects, he included people of African descent. Presuming that subjecthood trumped all other considerations, including race, Otis declared that “the Sun rises and sets every day in the sight of

20Moore, Notes on Slavery, p. 22,n.1. Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck suggest that because Newport had been a slave for forty years and was aged, authorities may have decided not to emancipate him for fear of his becoming a public charge (see their Love of Freedom, p. 242,n.35). 21Emily Blanck, “The Legal Emancipations of Leander and Caesar: Manumission and the Law in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts,” Slavery and Aboli- tion 28.2 (August 2007): 245. 22For a similar description of the evolution of antislavery sentiment, see James J. Allegro, “‘Increasing and Strengthening the Country’: Law, Politics, and the Antislavery Movement in Early-Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts Bay,” New England Quarterly 75.1 (March 2002): 5–23. BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 107 ﬁve millions of his majesty’s American subjects, white, brown, and black.”23 Otis’s critique was exceptional in its breadth of vision, but he was not alone in objecting to slavery’s reach. In 1765 and 1766, the citizens of Worcester and Boston, respectively, instructed their legislative representatives to lodge objections to the slave trade.24 In 1767, Nathaniel Appleton, a prominent Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Boston merchant, issued an anonymous tract, Considerations on Slavery, in a Letter to a Friend, in which he censured the practice of buying and selling humans. Otis, however, based his objections not on moral sympathy but on natural rights; he explicitly acknowledged the political equality of blacks as natural-born subjects of the Crown. In 1764,inhisRights of the Colonies Asserted and Proved, he was even more direct than he had been in Considerations: The colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white and black. . . . Does it follow that tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curl’d hair like wool, instead of christian hair, as tis called by those, whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone, help the argument?25 In avowing the rights of “his majesty’s American subjects, white, brown, and black,” Otis made it clear that enslaved Americans of color should not be arbitrarily denied the natural rights that were properly theirs. Slavery, then, was becoming a pressing social issue just as debates between Great Britain and the colonists and between elites and commoners over matters of governance, taxation, and colonial identity were becoming ever more fractious. Slaves, of course, were not unaware of the arguments colonists were ad- vancing about their rights. A mounting number of determined

23James Otis, Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists. In a Letter to a Noble Lord (London, 1765), p. 30. On Otis’s views on race and slavery, see T. H. Breen, “Subjecthood and Citizenship: The Context of James Otis’s Radical Critique of John Locke,” New England Quarterly 71.3 (September 1998): 378–403, and Louis Hartz, “Otis and Anti-Slavery Doctrine,” New England Quarterly 12.4 (December 1939): 745–47. 24Moore, Notes on Slavery, p. 124. 25Quoted in Hartz, “Otis and Anti-Slavery Doctrine,” p. 745. 108 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY bondspeople and sympathetic whites stepped up their efforts not only to find loopholes in legal contracts binding slave to master but also to define slavery as an unethical social relationship. Thomas Pemberton, a contemporary historian of Boston, recalled the 1770 case of Dolton Stockbridge as the “first in- stance I have heard of a negro, requesting his freedom as his right.” At first, Stockbridge’s plea for his release from slavery Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 was refused, but eventually “by the assistance of lawyers he obtained it.”26 In 1771, a Massachusetts slave, Caesar, won his freedom after a nearly decade-long legal odyssey.27 Not only were the ethics of slavery becoming ever more dif- ficult to ignore in the context of mounting colonial frustration, but the British case Steuart vs. Somerset demonstrated that the problem of bondage was an imperial and, thus, also a provincial issue. After arriving in London from Boston in autumn 1771, the slave James Somerset fled from his master Charles Steuart. In determining the case, Lord Mansfield, chief justice of the King’s Bench, famously declared on 22 June 1772 that Somerset was free because the institution of slavery was not supported in English law. Because the judgment was based on notions of English identity and justice more so than on those concerning human bondage, it clarified that the motherland’s soil was free, but it failed to account for the slave trade and colonial slavery.28 Yet, as one correspondent reported, the “late decisionwithregardtoSomersettheNegro...willoccasion a greater ferment in America (particularly in the islands) than the Stamp Act itself.”29 News of the 1772 decision spread quickly. As early as 23 July 1772,theMassachusetts Gazette ran a piece announcing that “A remarkable Cause is pending in the Court of the King’s

26Thomas Pemberton to St. G. Tucker, 12 March 1795, Jeremy Belknap Papers, reel 8. 27On this case and for a comparison between legal emancipation in Massachusetts and South Carolina, see Blanck, “Legal Emancipations of Leander and Caesar,” pp. 235–54. 28On Somerset, see Brown, Moral Capital, pp. 96–101, and Sword, “Remembering Dinah Nevil,” pp. 315–43. 29Essex Gazette, 20 October 1772. BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 109 Bench, before Lord Mansfield, and the rest of the Judges of that Court, between a Negro named Somerset, against Capt. Stuart, his Master. Somerset having been baptized prosecutes for his Freedom.” Not only did the article explain that Mans- field had dismissed the argument that “the relation between a negro and his owner might be well maintained on the ground of a contract between master and servant,” it also referenced Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 a correspondent who acknowledged that “This cause seems pregnant with consequences extremely detrimental to those Gentlemen, whose estates chiefly consist in Slaves.”30 Newspa- pers in the northern colonies reported on the case throughout 1772, and it soon entered into the American debate. That fall, the Boston Evening-Post published an essay by an anonymous writer, who identified himself as Cato, who capitalized on the Somerset case to discredit a previous essay that defended slavery by describing Africans as biblically cursed.31 Urban slaves, like Phillis Wheatley, were certainly aware of Somerset’s victory. Wheatley accompanied her master Nathaniel Wheatley to London in 1773, less than a year after Mansfield’s decision.32 Although she did no more than move between the colony and the metropole, her political status altered significantly: in Boston she was a slave; in London she was not a slave but a subject.33 She likely recognized the

30Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter, 23 July 1772. 31The Boston Evening-Post, 28 September 1772. On the use of Genesis 9:20–27 to justify African enslavement, see Sylvester A. Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth- Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 1–51. 32On Wheatley and the Revolutionary era, see Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheat- ley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), pp. 115–16, 120–24, 129–42; Peter Dorsey, Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), pp. 151– 85; David Waldstreicher, “The Wheatleyan Moment,” Early American Studies 9.3 (Fall 2011): 549–51; and Eric Thomas Slauter, “Neoclassical Culture in a Society with Slaves: Race and Rights in the Age of Wheatley,” Early American Studies 2.1 (Spring 2004): 81–122. 33See T. K. Hunter, “Geographies of Liberty: A Brief Look at Two Cases,” Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: New Press, 2006), pp. 41–58, and Daniel J. Hulsebosch, “‘Somerset’s Case’ and the British Empire,” Law and History Review 24.3 (Fall 2006): 655–57. 110 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY opportunity the transatlantic trip presented, for on 22 Septem- ber 1772,theBoston Gazette reported events in London as relayed by a correspondent who had observed “that as Blacks are free now in this country, Gentlemen will not be so fond of bringing them here as they used to be, it being computed there are now about 14,000 blacks in this country.” Wheatley might have stayed in England, but instead, from her new location and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 status, she negotiated her manumission, a contract she astutely had bonded in London, thereby guaranteeing that she would return to Boston a free woman.34 The Somerset decision exposed the complexities and contra- dictions of imperial power and colonial identity at the same time as writers throughout the American provinces, chafing under the yoke of an oppressive tax policy, were struggling to define the terms of their relationship with king and Par- liament. Speaking in Boston, in December 1772, six months after the burning of the British customs ship the Gaspee, John Allen delivered his An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty or the Essential Rights of the Americans.TheMassachusetts Spy of 5 May 1773 advertised the publication of the discourse’s fourth iteration, noting that this “Edition is carefully corrected bytheAuthor,inwhichareAdditions...AndRemarkson the Rights and Liberties of the Africans, inserted by particular Desire.”35 Allen, a High Calvinist English Baptist minister and radical Whig of bristly temperament who had published The Spirit of Liberty: or, Junius’s Loyal Address, a theologi- cal defense of a believer’s baptism, in 1770 displeased Boston Baptists but rallied ardent patriots attentive to the problem of racial slavery. The Oration became one of the most popular patriot pamphlets in the pre-Revolutionary period, republished seven times in four cities between 1773 and 1775, with the first

34Boston Gazette, 22 September 1772; Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, pp. 136–37. 35John Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty or the Essential Rights of the Americans (Boston, 1773). On Allen see, John M. Bumstead and Charles E. Clark, “New England’s Tom Paine: John Allen and the Spirit of Liberty,” William and Mary Quarterly 21.4 (October 1964): 561–70. Also see James Swan, A dissuasion to Great- Britain and the Colonies: from the slave-trade to Africa; Shewing the injustice thereof, &c . . . (Boston, 1773). BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 111 four editions being published in Massachusetts in the first five months of 1773.36 Allen’s revisions of the Oration reflected a growing realization of the disjunction between colonial critiques of British imperial power and the enslavement of blacks. In the first edition of the speech, Allen illustrated English oppression by arguing that if the English recognized blacks as having legal rights, then a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 colonist could “be confined, and tried for his life, by the ac- cusation of a negro.”37 In the third and fourth Massachusetts editions, however, Allen responded to the appeals of undis- closed readers who urged him to append to his text the black petition of 20 April 1773.38 In doing so, he revised his argument. No longer were black litigants posing a threat to white colonists; instead, African slavery became the benchmark of imperial despotism: “Such cruelty and tyranny ought ever to be held in the most hateful contempt, the same as you would a banditti of slavemakers on the coast of Africa.”39

Slave Petitions of January and April 1773 As discomfort with human bondage intensiﬁed and the number of freedom suits increased, black abolitionism shifted in the 1770s. In the prior decade, individual slaves, with the in- dispensable aid of white lawyers and supporters, had sued in court to obtain their personal freedom. With the publication of the petitions by Felix and others, black agitation expanded into the realms of print culture and public debate. Adopt- ing contemporary means for appealing directly to magisterial authority, bondsmen drafted petitions speciﬁcally directed to governing bodies. Although addressed to executive and legislative authorities, however, the petitions were also distributed as broadsides and published as open letters. Each effort

36Bumstead and Clark, “John Allen,” p. 561. 37Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty, p. 27. 38Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty or the Essential Rights of the Amer- icans, 4th ed. (Boston, 1773), pp. 73–80. 39Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty, 4th ed., p. 61. This discussion of the Oration comes from Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, pp. 276–77. 112 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY involved interracial collaboration, but with each, an African American voice rose above the general din of revolutionary rhetoric. The Petition of 6 January 1773.—In preparing his first appeal, Felix drew upon a long-established English tradition whereby he who is ruled communicates with those who govern. In petitions of grace, subjects aired their concerns; in petitions of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 right, they called upon their heads of state to redress injus- tices.40 While the petition of grace emphasized, in deferential fashion, the suffering of its supplicants, the petition of right advanced claims, claims derived from the assumption that obe- dient subjects retained certain privileges. Felix framed his first plea as a “humble PETITION,” a petition of grace.41 Addressing both executive and legislative authorities—the governor, Governor’s Council, and House of Representatives— Felix submitted his petition on behalf of “many slaves, living in the Town of Boston, and other Towns in the Province.” In both England and the colonies, he reported, “Men of great Note and Influence ...havepleadedourCause.”Usingthefirst-person plural to encompass all enslaved persons, he (“we”) hoped that their combined “Arguments” would “have their weight with this Honorable Court,” that is, the General Court of Massachusetts, its legislature. Maintaining a respectful posture, Felix conceded that “some of the Negroes are vicious,” but these outliers could, like their disreputable white counterparts, be dealt with by the law. The vast majority of slaves were “of a quite different Character”: “of

40For a history of the petition in English history, see Elizabeth Read Foster, “Pe- titions and the Petition of Right,” Journal of British Studies 14.1 (November 1974): 21–45. See also Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 46–54; Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York:W.W.Norton,1988), p. 224; and Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 50. Petitions were also a means of addressing a variety of mundane concerns or problems, from the mainte- nance of streets and docks to the opening of schools. See, e.g., Report of the Record Commissioners of Boston, Boston Town Records, 1770–1777, vol. 18 (Boston, 1887), pp. 38, 90. 41All quotations are from the 1773 publication of Felix’s humble Petition. BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 113 good natural Parts, . . . discreet, sober, honest, and industrious; ...virtuous and religious.” And yet,

How many of that Number have there been, and now are in this Province, who have had every Day of their Lives embittered with this most intolerable Reﬂection, That, let their Behaviour be what it will,

neither they, nor their Children to all Generations, shall ever be able Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 to do, or to possess and enjoy any Thing, no, not even Life itself, but in a Manner as the Beasts that perish.

In such a manner did Felix describe the hereditary scourge of the enslaved, who had nothing—not wives, children, or country—to call their own, and yet they obeyed God and their masters. Judging it “presumptuous in us, to suggest to your Excellency and Honors any Law or Laws proper to be made, in relation to our unhappy State,” Felix stressed that he and his fellow slaves “pray for such Relief only, which by no Possibility can ever be productive of the least Wrong or Injury to our Masters; but to us will be as Life from the dead.” The language and tone of the petition clearly demonstrate that whites were involved in its framing, and other evidence indicates that the petition was not an isolated event but part of a concerted, biracial campaign. An author writing under the pseudonym “Hume,” in an open letter to the “Gentlemen” to whom Felix had submitted his petition and on the same day (6 January 1773), announced that he was “led to make a few Observations on the Subject, which I hope may not be unuseful, previous to your taking it up.” Hume objected to slavery on moral and religious grounds, but he also pressed a point Felix had not or could not raise or that he had been advised to avoid: Hume articulated the contradiction between the colonists’ insistence on their own rights and their denial of those same rights to the men, women, and children they enslaved. “We have been for a Number of years contending and struggling for the recovery of our natural and Charter Rights, and yet never appeared to consider that we act in direct opposition thereto,” he bluntly stated. Towns were busy debating the “Infringements that have been lately made upon our 114 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY natural and Charter Rights, and passing Resolves to that Ef- fect,” and yet “there is hardly a head of a Family but has one or more Examples of Bondage in his House,” Hume lamented.42 That the General Court received Felix’s petition the same day Hume’s open letter was published suggests the beginnings of an organized, multifaceted, multiracial abolitionist campaign. The Petition of 20 April 1773.—Likely emboldened by the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 support they had received in the press and continuing to re- ceive the assistance of whites sympathetic to their cause, Felix Holbrook and three of his compatriots—Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, and Chester Joie—submitted a second petition on 20 April 1773, this an instruction for the representative of the town of Thompson.43 Whereas Holbrook’s first effort took the form of a petition of grace, the second was quite emphatically a petition of right.44 This second petition was the one printed as an appendix to the fourth edition of John Allen’s An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty. Hence, it entered public debate as a direct appeal to the Massachusetts legislature as well as one available to a broad readership. Despite his initial distrust of Britons’ judicial emancipation of blacks and its ramifications in the colonies, Allen later followed the logic of his own argument to define the problem of slavery unequivocally, thereby legitimating the black campaign.45 Referring to themselves as a “Committee” constituted “by order” of their “fellow slaves in this province,” the signatories observed that in its recent sessions, the provincial legislature had taken a “noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them.” Turning the colonists’ oppositionist rhetoric against them, the petition’s authors used it to redefine the terms of their own bondage. Their labor, that benefit for which whites

42Massachusetts Spy, 28 January 1773. 43Thompson, or Thompon’s Island, lies south of Boston and was annexed by the city on 25 March 1834. See William Francis Galvin (Massachusetts Secretary of State), Historical Data Relating to Counties, Cities, and Towns in Massachusetts, 5th ed. (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1997), p. 31. 44Abolitionist petition for the Representative of Thompson to Boston, 1773. 45Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty, 4th ed., pp. 78–80. BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 115 had enslaved them, the black men now claimed as their own, a commodity for which they could rightly demand compen- sation. However, they continued, “We are very sensible that it would be highly detrimental to our present masters, if we were allowed to demand all that of right belongs to us for past services.” And so, in a noble gesture, they dismissed any expectation of reparations. Instead, they sought only “ample Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 relief, which, as men, we have a right to” until such time as, by their “joint labours,” they might emigrate to the coast of Africa, “where we propose a settlement.”46 If colonial leaders could in- voke a universal notion of freedom while also qualifying and contorting it to justify human bondage, then blacks could argue that their rights as men trumped—indeed, negated—their legal status as property. Some white colonists agreed. On 17 May 1773,thetown of Pembroke, located south of Boston and just north of Ply- mouth, deemed a “Negro Petition Reasonable” and “agreeable to natural Justice and the Precepts of the Gospel”; therefore, it instructed its representative to the General Court, John Turner, to “endeavour to ﬁnd a Way in which they [the slaves] may be freed from Slavery without wrong to their present Masters or Injury to themselves.” Ultimately, the townspeople hoped, “a total abolition of Slavery may in due Time take place.”47 That same year, Medﬁeld commanded its representative to work to- ward ending slave imports and freeing slaves.48 For the May 1773 meeting of the General Court, the towns of Salem, Med- ford, Leicester, and Sandwich all directed their representatives to vote to end the importation of slaves, even though they stopped short of supporting abolition. On “the 24th of March last [1774],” the Massachusetts Spy reported in June 1775, “Negroes in the counties of Bristol and Worcester petitioned

46In 1787, blacks, led by Prince Hall, asked the government to support the expense of their relocation to West Africa. See “Blackman Petition,” Boston, 17 October 1787, Ms. Bos. II, Boston Town Records, July–December 1788, Boston Public Library. 47Supplement to the Boston Gazette, 14 June 1773. 48Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Commit- tee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), pp. 173–74. 116 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the Committees of Correspondence for the county of Worces- ter (then convened in Worcester) to assist them in obtaining their freedom.”49 Not until 14 June 1775, however, would the Worcester county convention resolve, “we abhor the enslaving of any of the human race, and particularly of the Negroes in this country.”50 Despite this lag time, blacks in Worcester were probably inspired by an earlier set of instructions the town had Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 issued. In June 1767, Worcester, in the second of six orders, asked its representative to “use your Inﬂuence to obtain a Law to put an End to that unchristian and impolitick Practice of making Slaves of the human Species in this Province; and that you give your Vote for none to serve in his Majesty’s Coun- cil, who . . . will use their Inﬂuence against such a Law.”51 Although words did not connote action, slaves recognized that the social and political winds were shifting. The Worcester instructions also heartened James Otis, who led the spring 1767 effort to introduce a bill “to prevent the unnatural and unwarrantable Custom of enslaving Mankind in this Province, and the Importation of slaves into the same.”52 Dissuasion took the form of a duty; however, the bill lan- guished, eventually disappearing from view. Four years later, a new bill passed both the House of Representatives and the Council only to be vetoed by Governor Thomas Hutchinson.53 These dismissals initiated a pattern that continued through the 1770s. The public’s discomfort with the slave trade grew along with arguments to abolish slavery. However, the Massachusetts House and Council debated only the importation of slaves, not the institution of slavery itself, and none of the bills that were considered passed. The petitions had not had their desired effect.

49Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 133–34; Massachusetts Spy, 6 June 1775. 50Reprinted in Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, p. 16. 51Massachusetts Spy, 4 June 1767. 52Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery, p. 127. On Otis’s antislavery leadership, see Allegro, “Law, Politics, and the Antislavery Movement,” p. 20. 53For a detailed explanation of Hutchinson’s decision, see Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 131–32, and Allegro, “Law, Politics, and the Antislavery Movement,” p. 22. BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 117 Slave Petitions of June 1773 and January 1774 The Petition of June 1773.—Its Journal recorded that on 25 June 1773, the House of Representatives heard a petition from “Felix Holbrook and others, Negroes, praying that they may be liberated from a State of Bondage, and made Freemen of 54

this Community.” Whereas blacks directed their April peti- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 tion to a town representative, they sent their June petition, later reprinted in the Massachusetts Spy of 29 July and the Essex Gazette of 3 August, straightaway to the Massachusetts Gen- eral Court.55 The published appeal was probably set from an unprinted manuscript only a fragment of which is now extant, collected in the Jeremy Belknap Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Its provenance is less certain than that of the previous two petitions; it is notable not only for its bold declaration of rights but for its impassioned, and seemingly unaltered, speech. I quote it here in its (fragmentary) entirety: To his Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq; Governor of said Province to the Honourable his Majesty’s Council, Honourable Representatives in General Court assembled June 1773 The Petition of us the subscribers in behalf of all thous who by divine Permission are held in a state of slavery within the bowels of a free Country, Humbly sheweth

That your Petitioners apprehend thay have in common with other men a natural right be free and without molestation injoy such Prop- erty as thay may acquire by their industrys or by any other means not detrimetal to their fellow men and that no Person can have any just claim to their services unless [fragment ends] 56 The statement of rights is unequivocal: the petitioners claim a natural right to freedom “without molestation.” In its published

54Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery, p. 135. 55Abolitionist Petition, “To his Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq; Governor of said province; to the Honourable his MAJESTY’S COUNCIL, and the Honourable HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES in General Court assembled, June, A.D. 1773” (hereafter June 1773 petition), Massachusetts Spy, 29 July 1773,andEssex Gazette, 3 August 1773. 56June 1773 petition, Jeremy Belknap Papers. 118 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY form, the petition goes on to reiterate the lament of Felix’s first petition: the petitioners have been deprived not just of their freedom but of country and family. Again redefining the very meaning of slavery, they insist that its fundamental grounding in heritability is unlawful, and they demand their emancipation. In their April petition, the slaves had announced their intent Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 to emigrate to the coast of Africa once they were emancipated and could gather the necessary funds through their newly com- pensated labor. The June petition restated that plan, but if it were to fail, the black men asked, would officials “give and grant us some part of the unimproved land, belonging to the province, for a settlement, that each of us may there quietly sit down under his own fig-tree, and enjoy the fruits of his own labour”?57 For decades, underemployed free black men had been warned out of one town after another as they moved about seeking labor. Given that unfortunate reality, those sub- mitting petitions on behalf of enslaved people hoped to find a way to protect them against an uncertain future. Securing a freehold offered that promise.58 The Petition of January 1774.—The House deferred consideration of the June petition to the following January. On 26 January 1774, the House Journal noted that “a Petition of a number of Negro Men, which was entered on the Journal of the 25th of June last, and referred for Consideration to this Session,” was “read again, together with a Memorial of the same Petitioners.”59 In fact, this “Memorial” was a new petition,

57June 1773 petition, Massachusetts Spy, 29 July 1773. 58The practice of warning out was intended to keep nonresidents from beneﬁting from town services. See Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island, in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985); Sharon Salinger and Cornelia Dayton, “Mapping Migration into Pre-Revolutionary Boston: An Analysis of Robert Love’s Warning Out Book,” paper presented at a workshop at the University of California–Riverside, 4 March 2000. I thank Cornelia Dayton for sharing her unpublished work with me. See also Josiah H. Benton, Warning Out in New England (Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1911). 59Quoted from the Journal of the House of Representatives in Moore, Notes on Slavery, p. 137. Former representative Samuel Dexter corroborates the account in a letter to Jeremy Belknap, 26 February 1795, Jeremy Belknap Papers. BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 119 which was eventually published in the Massachusetts Spy on 1 September.60 That this fourth petition was presented as the House continued its deliberations over the previous appeal highlights the abolitionists’ determination. Referencing the June plea, the January 1774 petition explained that the colonists’ insistence on their rights “gives us who are unhappily, and unjustly deprived Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 of that blessing, so great expectations of your taking up our last petition which we laid before Honours the last session.” This request for redress did not mention African emigration, but it explicitly aligned the colonial and abolitionist causes. The authors concluded with an understated but unyielding urgency, “We can sincerely hope and pray, that GOD would preserve your liberties and privileges as at the beginning, and that peace and love may again be restored between the mother country and the provinces, and that his MAJESTY would hear your prayers, and that you would hear ours, and grant us an answer of peace.” All four petitions were adamant about abolition; not one sug- gested that it might be delayed to advance the cause of im- mediately ending the slave trade. Moreover, even though they regretted the ﬁnancial harm that might befall former masters, the petitioners demanded rapid, not gradual, emancipation. The petitions’ recurrent themes and syntactical similarities suggest that one or a few authors had composed all four texts or, at least, that subsequent authors had modeled their efforts on previous petitions. The petitions of January and April 1773 and of January 1774 clearly bear marks of editorial intervention; the manuscript petition of June 1773 was regularized for publication, its misspellings corrected. It is tempting to surmise that Felix Holbrook, who seems to have been in the employ of a writing master, had a hand in all four petitions, with the June petition, as it exists in manuscript, betraying the grammar and spelling of an individual who is literate but not highly educated.

60“To the honourable his Majesty’s Council and the honourable House of Represen- tatives of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay, in General Court assembled, at Boston, the 20th day of January 1774.” Printed in Massachusetts Spy, 1 September 1774,the text from which I quote in the next paragraph. 120 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

We cannot know.61 We can, however, note a rising, increasingly intensifying participation of blacks in the matter of their own rights, an observation supported by a contemporary eyewitness. In 1795, Samuel Dexter, formerly a member of the Mas- sachusetts House of Representatives, recalled blacks’ 1773 campaign as he answered a request from the Reverend Jeremy Belknap of Boston, author of The History of New Hamphsire Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 and a founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Virginia jurist St. George Tucker, who referred to an unprecedented wave of manumissions in his own state, had written to Belknap in the early 1790s asking for advice on how Massachusetts, by then a free state, had emancipated and accommodated its black population. Drawing “from the example of our sister State,” Tucker hoped to “learn what methods are most likely to succeed in removing the same evil from among ourselves.”62 Tucker had prepared a questionnaire, and Belknap distributed it to a number of leading lights in Massachusetts, Dexter among them. To refresh his memory, Dexter sifted through his personal papers, where he located a relevant document. Writing to Bel- knap, he explained that he had “noted upon the outside leaf 5, that it was given to me by Newton Prince, lemon merchant, in the name, and at the desire of a number of negroes, then petitioners to the General Court.”63 At “the head of these,” Dexter went on, “was Felix Holbrook.” His memory prompted by the Journal of the House of Representatives, Dexter rec- ollected his own involvement in the events of January 1774.

61Although Phillis Wheatley began her publishing career in 1773 and although part of her antislavery letter of 11 February 1774 to the Reverend Samson Occam was widely published, there is no evidence that Wheatley helped draft any of the petitions. For an extract of the letter, see “The following is an extract of a letter from Phillis, a Negro Girl of Mr. Wheatley’s of this town, to the Reverend Sampson Occom,” Essex Journal and Merimack Packet, 30 March 1774. 62Hon. Judge Tucker of Virginia to Jeremy Belknap, 24 January 1795, Slavery in Massachusetts: Negro Petitions, Judge Tucker’s Queries, Dr. Belknap’s Correspon- dence, Jeremy Belknap Papers, reel 8. 63This Prince was probably the same who testiﬁed during the trial of British soldiers indicted for the Boston Massacre. See The Trial of . . . soldiers in His Majesty’s 29th Regiment of Foot, for the murder of Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, and Patrick Carr, on Monday – evening, the 5th of March, 1770 (Boston: J. Fleeming, 1770), tract C77, Boston Athenæum. BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 121 Referring to the June 1773 petition, he recalled that while “the petition remained undecided upon I was called out of the council chamber, and very politely presented with the pamphlet by Newton, who, after making his best bow, said that the negroes had been informed I was against the slave trade, and was their friend.” On a canvassing mission, Newton “had several more [copies] to give to particular members of the house of Rep- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 resentatives.”64 The circular distributed by Newton must have been some version of the fourth petition, of January 1774. Black petitioners also approached Representative John Pick- ering Jr. through Samuel Adams. Both Adams and Pickering sat on the legislative committee charged with making recom- mendations concerning the June 1773 petition. In a letter to Pickering dated 8 January 1774, Adams remarked that “the General Assembly will undoubtedly meet on the 26th of this month” and, further, that “the Negroes whose petition lies on ﬁle, and is referred for consideration, are very solicitous for the Event of it.” Adams informed Pickering that the blacks, “having been informed that you intended to consider it at your leisureHoursintheRecessoftheCourt,...earnestlywish you would compleat a Plan for their Relief.” “In the meantime,” and if it were “not too much Trouble,” Adams encouraged his colleague, the petitioners “ask it as a favor that you would by a Letter enable me to communicate to them the general outlines of your Design.”65 It was recorded in the Journal of the House of Representa- tives of Massachusetts for 26 January 1774 that “‘a Petition of a number of Negro Men, which was entered on the Journal of the 25th of June last, and referred for Consideration to this Session,’ was ‘read again, together with a Memorial of the same Petitioners and Ordered, that Mr. Speaker, Mr. Pickering, Mr. Hancock, Mr. Adams, Mr. Phillips, Mr. Paine, and Mr. Green- leaf [the aforementioned seven-man committee] consider the

64Dexter to Belknap, 26 February 1795, Jeremy Belknap Papers, reel 8. Dexter stated his membership in the House of Representatives in a letter to Belknap, 23 February 1795, Belknap Papers, reel 8. 65Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 135–36. 122 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY same and report.’”66 This passage conﬁrms Dexter’s observation that, in January 1774, a previous petition and a new memorial were read and given to a committee for discussion. Out of this process, on 2 March 1774, the House issued yet another measure to ban the slave trade, “An Act to prevent the importation of negroes, and others, as slaves into this Province.”67 The petitions to abolish slavery had simply been folded into this new Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 version of the failed anti–slave trade bills of 1767 and 1771.By 4 March 1774, the House and the Council had accepted the new bill, and four days later, Dexter recorded that the measure “was read [again], and passed to be enacted.”68 The bill stopped there. Dexter explained that even though the bill was “probably, laid before Gov. Hutchinson, for his consent . . . on the next day the court was unexpectedly pro- rogued.” Dexter also remembered, however, that between the two houses of colonial government, “there had been no good agreement.”69 In the wake of the Boston Massacre, the Stamp Act riots, and the burning of Hutchinson’s house, the Mas- sachusetts government was falling into disarray. The question of emancipation was tabled and would not be decisively settled for another decade. Yet blacks had made themselves heard among those House and Council members who led the charge to abolish the slave trade act.

Slave Petitions of May and June 1774 On 13 May 1774, eight days after the anti–slave trade bill was tabled, General Thomas Gage, the royally appointed military governor of Massachusetts, arrived in Boston. The General Court met brieﬂy in June, after which it removed to Salem. The bill banning the slave trade, still lacking any mention of

66Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 135–36. 67Moore, Notes on Slavery, p. 137. The act is reprinted on pp. 138–39. The original copy of the act is found in the Massachusetts Archives, Domestic Relations, 1643–1774, 9:457. 68Dexter to Belknap, 26 February 1795, Belknap Papers, reel 8. 69Dexter to Belknap, 26 February 1795. Dexter also doubted that Hutchinson would have signed the bill. “He could not sign an act against the slave-trade, Bernard had said, in 1767” (Dexter to Belknap, 19 March 1795, Belknap Papers, reel 8). BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 123 slavery’s abolition, was considered once more and accepted by the House and the Council, but lawmakers ended their session without Gage having signed the legislation.70 Dexter wondered, “If the negroes petitioned Gage, I know not who could have advised them to the measure.”71 In fact, blacks had submitted a newly revised petition to Gage only twelve days after he set foot in Massachusetts. Tac- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 itly referring to Old Colony law, which grouped Africans with captives rightfully enslaved in the aftermath of a just war, they described their race as unfairly “stolen” into slavery.72 Neither the May nor the June appeal was published, but a copy of each is ﬁled in the Jeremy Belknap Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Their provenance is not clear. Betraying a deepening frustration, perhaps even despair, the May address was the ﬁrst to concede the possibility that emancipation would be gradual, not immediate. The June appeal was clearly a revision of May’s, as illustrated by similarities of language. The May petition begins:

That your Petitioners apprehend we have in common with all other men a naturel right to our freedoms without Being depriv’d of them by our fellow men as we are a freeborn Pepel and have never forfeited this Blessing by aney compact or agreement whatever. But we were unjustly dragged by the cruel hand of power from our dearest frinds and sum of us stolen from the bosoms of our tender Parents and from a Populous Pleasant and plentiful country and Brought hither to be made slaves for Life in a Christian land.73 The June statement opens:

That your petitioners apprehend, they have in common with other men, a natural right to be free, and without molestation, to enjoy such property, as they may acquire by their industry, or by any other means

70Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 142–43. 71Dexter to Belknap, 19 March 1795, Belknap Papers, reel 8. 72Unpublished petition, “To his Excellency Thomas Gage Esq. Captain General and Governor in Chief in and over this Province. To the Honourable his Majestys Council and the Honourable House of Representatives in General Court assembled May 25 1774,” Belknap Papers, reel 8. 73Petition, 25 May 1774, Jeremy Belknap Papers. 124 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY not detrimental to their fellow men; and that no person can have any just claim to their services unless by the laws of the land they have forfeited them, or by voluntary compact become servants; neither of which is our case; but were dragged by the cruel hand of power, some of us from our dearest connections, and others stolen from the bosoms of tender parents and brought hither to be enslaved.74 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 The June 1774 manuscript is incomplete, but its extant frag- ments express the appellants’ pragmatism and incisiveness. Dif- fering from the May missive, the remaining portions of the June statement do not allow for gradual emancipation. Indeed, the petitioners charge whites with the responsibility of caring for the destitute and elderly; they should remain under the pro- tection of their masters, while all able-bodied men, women, and children should “be liberated and made free men of this community.” Like those of April and June of the previous year, this petition also requested “some part of the unimproved land, belonging to the province, for a settlement, that each of us may there quietly sit down under his own fig tree.” The June statement also observed that “mere custom is the tyrant that keeps us in bondage” and insisted that “there is no Law whatever for keeping us in Bondage,” an argument that reflected an under- standing of the terms of Mansfield’s decision in the Somerset case.75 Having not been published, the May and June abolitionist statements received no published response. The petition of the previous January was reprinted in the Massachusetts Spy on 1 September 1774, however, which kept the petition writers and their cause before the public. Other black abolitionists were also entering the fray. On 17 August, the Essex Journal and Merrimack Packet ran an essay that asserted that the all- encompassing logic of natural rights exposed the essential and incontrovertible incompatibility between perpetual subordina- tion and liberty. The author, a man named Caesar Sarter, was a former slave from Newburyport, Massachusetts. As “Slavery

74Unpublished petition, “To the Honourable His Majesty’s Council, and the Hon- ourable House of Representatives of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay in General Court assembled, June – Anno Domini 1774,” Jeremy Belknap Papers, reel 8. 75Petition June 1774, Jeremy Belknap Papers. BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 125 is the greatest, and consequently most to be dreaded, of all temporal calamities,” Sarter claimed, then “its opposite, Lib- erty, is the greatest temporal good, with which you can be blest!” Capitalizing on the recommendation of the June 1773 and 1774 petitions, he noted that, although he did not want “to trespass too much on” the patience of the General Court, lawmakers might want to consider that they would free themselves Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 “from the trouble of us by making us grants in some back part of the country.”76 The legislature did not take up the petitions of 1774, but, in a separate episode, it did address their substance. In the fall of 1776, two black sailors were captured and subsequently advertised for sale in Boston. Debating the matter, the House of Representatives initially “Resolved, That the selling and enslaving the human species is a direct violation of the natural rights alike vested in all men by their Creator, and utterly inconsistent with the avowed principles on which this and the other United States have carried their struggle for liberty.”77 The statement was clear. The Massachusetts legislature had declared itself in opposition to slavery. But once again, it backed away from a broad interpretation and agreed only that “all persons con- cerned with the said Negroes be, and they are hereby forbidden tosellthem...andthatwheneveritshallappearthatany Negroes are taken on the High Seas and brought as Prisoners into this State, they shall not be allowed to be Sold.” Not devi- ating from the pattern established in the 1760s, the legislature essentially resolved yet again that only the slave trade should be abolished.78 As time passed, the deepening crisis with Great Britain distracted leaders from the issue of emancipation while simultaneously making it increasingly difﬁcult to ignore.

A Revolutionary War–Era Slave Petition Black military service illustrated a commitment to Revolu- tionary principles and abolitionism that connected the petitions

76Caesar Sarter, “Address, To Those who are Advocates for holding the Africans in Slavery,” Essex Journal and Merrimack Packet, 17 August 1774. 77Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 149–50. 78Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 149–53. 126 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of 1774 to the one that followed in 1777. At least one hundred enslaved and free blacks fought at the first skirmishes at Battle Road and Bunker Hill in 1775,andin1778, Rhode Island’s Black Regiment, the first and only of its kind in New England, formed.79 Approximately five thousand African Americans fought against British forces during the course of the American Revolution.80 Others determined that their self- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 interest was better served by aligning with the opposition.81 As African Americans chose sides, the actions of those who aligned themselves with the patriot cause and decided to fight alongside their white compatriots complimented the continuing emancipatory efforts of the petition campaign. The Petition of 1777.—Appreciating that voluntary associa- tions were a training ground for republican consensus building, Peter Bestes, one of the subscribers to the 20 April 1773 petition, and fourteen other black men formed the first African American Lodge of Freemasonry, African Lodge No. 1,in1775. Two years later, Bestes attached his name to yet another abolitionist petition that was delivered to the Massachusetts legislature. An additional signatory was Prince Hall. Hall, who made leather drum covers for the patriot cause, led several activist efforts at the turn of the eighteenth century. Despite Hall’s stature, there are significant gaps in his biography, as there are for all eighteenth-century African Americans. He was probably the former slave of William Hall, a leather-dresser, and his wife Margarett. The couple manumitted their slave,

79George Quintal Jr., Patriots of Color, “A Peculiar Beauty and Merit”: African Americans and Native Americans at Battle Road & Bunker Hill (Boston: Boston Na- tional Historical Park, 2004), and Lorenzo J. Greene, “Some Observations on the Black Regiment of Rhode Island in the American Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 37.2 (April 1952): 142–72. 80For the approximation of 5,000 black patriot soldiers, see Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, p. xxix. 81As the British reinforced their control of Philadelphia in 1776, they formed a “Company of Black Pioneers,” which included approximately one hundred men, women, and children (see Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], pp. 32–35). Other blacks had heeded the call of Virginia’s royal governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, who on 7 Novem- ber 1775 promised freedom to all slaves who joined His Majesty’s Troops and took up arms against colonial rebels (see Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, pp. 19–33,andFrey,Water from the Rock, pp. 63–67). BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 127 Prince, in 1770, and only in the late 1770s does Hall appear regularly and prominently in civic and political sources. He was literate and one of a miniscule number of eighteenth-century blacks who owned property. Recognized by Jeremy Belknap and other whites, Hall corresponded with British Freemasons and English ﬁgures like the Countess of Huntingdon, Phillis Wheatley’s patron. He published a sermon by the prominent Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 black Methodist itinerant preacher John Marrant and authored two other addresses. He led black Bostonians in a number of campaigns, including protesting the kidnapping of blacks, requesting support for black schools, and inquiring about ﬁnan- cial support for African emigration. Founder of African Lodge No. 1, Prince Hall was at the time Boston’s preeminent African American organizer.82 If Felix Holbrook had in fact directed the 1773 entreaties to Dexter, Pickering, and Adams, it seems that the leadership of Boston’s black abolition movement devolved to Hall in the late 1770s.83 After 1773, Holbrook is largely absent from the public record. A person named Felix, recorded only once in sixteen years in the records of Boston’s tax assessors, was living in Ward 11 in 1789. The erstwhile champion of his people had apparently fallen on hard times. On 16 August 1792, the Boston Overseers of the Poor admitted one “Felix Holbrook a Black” to the Boston almshouse.84

82For a more detailed biographical description of Hall, see my “Freemasons of Color: Prince Hall, Revolutionary Black Boston, and the Origins of Black Freemasonry, 1770–1807” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2006), pp. 1–12. 83Charles H. Wesley argued that Hall was “a leader in four petitions in 1773, 1774, 1777,and1778”(Prince Hall: Life and Legacy [Washington D.C.: United Supreme Council, Southern Jurisdiction, Prince Hall Afﬁliation and the Afro-America Historical and Cultural Museum, 1977], p. 4). Wesley also wrote that Hall “was the author of nearly all the petitions that the Negroes of the colony sent to the General Court” (p. 10). However, Wesley only examined the text of the printed petition dated 13 January 1777. While it is possible that Hall had some hand in petitions written prior to 1777, I can identify him as an author of the 13 January 1777 petition only; I have not located a 1778 petition. 84Boston Taking Books, vols. 1780–1801, Rare Books Department, Boston Pub- lic Library, reference code 51256: “Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630–1800” and “The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, 1630–1822,” CD-ROM (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society and Massachusetts Historical Society, 2001). 128 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Of the eight signers of the new petition, sent to the governing triumvirate in 1777, four, including Hall, were Freemasons of color. Masonic membership, which swelled during the Revolu- tionary era in black and white lodges alike, offered ambitious middling men a platform to enhance their talent and leadership and a forum for fashioning new national identities. These strivers included artisans like Paul Revere and printers like Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Isaiah Thomas, whose widely read newspaper, The Mas- sachusetts Spy, had printed several of the abolitionist petitions. In addition to Hall and Peter Bess (Bestes), Lancaster Hill, Brister Slensen (Slenser), Jack (his mark) Pierpont, Nero (his mark) Sunelo, Newport (his mark) Sumner, and Job Lock also signed the 1777 petition. Bestes, primary signatory of the April 1773 petition, died on 20 June 1778.85 Brister Slenser was a founding initiate of the African Lodge. Lancaster Hill became a Freemason sometime after 1775;by23 June 1779,hehad attained the degree of Master Freemason and become a lodge treasurer.86 I have not been able to locate the four other signatories of the 1777 antislavery letter—Peirpont, Sunelo, Sumner, and Lock—in Boston public records. Addressed to the “Honorable Council and House of Repre- sentatives for the State of Massachusetts-Bay in General Court assembled January 13th 1777” and written after the Declara- tion of Independence was issued, the petition betrayed more frustration and disappointment than had its predecessors. The continuity between petitions is, however, patently obvious. As had the signatories of the oft-revised 1773/74 petition, the 1777 petitioners identiﬁed themselves as men who were trapped “in a state of Slavery in the Bowels of a free and Christian Country.” That Bestes signed his name to the 1777 document demonstrated his literacy as well as a clear authorial link between this petition and that of April 1773, which also included his signature.

85Bestes’s death date is listed in the Records of African Lodge, No. 1, Minutes and Accounts, 1779–1786, Records of African Lodge microfilm, Samuel Crocker Lawrence Library at the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, Boston. 86Records of African Lodge, No. 1, Minutes and Accounts, 1779–86. BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 129 The statement of rights was likewise similar. The petitioners claimed that they held the same natural and unalienable right to freedom as all men, a right granted directly by God. Again they rehearsed how they had been unlawfully captured in Africa, torn from the bosoms of their parents and a beauteous, plentiful land. And yet, despite their persistent efforts, they informed the legislators, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 your petitiononers have Long and Patiently waited the Evnt of petition after petition by them presented to the Legislative Body of this state and cannot but with Grief Reflect that their Success hath ben but too similar they Cannot but express their Astonishment that It have Never Bin Consirdered that Every Principle from which Amer- ica has Acted in the Cours of their unhappy Dificultes with Great Briton Pleads Stronger than A thousand arguments in favours of your petioners.

The petitioners were speciﬁc about the remedies they sought, more so than earlier supplicants had been, who largely left the matter to the discretion of their ofﬁcials. The 1777 writers were also, however, politic, carefully balancing a clear claim to “the freedom which is the natural right of all Men” and the property rights of their masters. In the May 1774 petition and now in 1777, they conceded the possibility of gradual emancipation, insisting, however, that “their Children (who were born in the Land of Liberty) may not be held as Slaves after they arrive at the age of twenty one years.”87

The Aftermath Black petitioners in the 1770s failed to achieve their fundamental goal. As Dexter attested in response to Belknap’s queries about the end of slavery in Massachusetts,

It never was formally and expressly abolished. There was neither a “general and simultaneous emancipation,” nor one “at different

87“To the Honorable Counsel & House of [Representa]tives for the State of Mas- sachusetts Bay in General Court assembled, January 13, 1777,” Massachusetts Archives, 212:132, and reprinted in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 5th ser., 3 (Boston, 1877), pp. 434–35. 130 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY periods,” nor were “persons born after a particular period declared free.”88

The Massachusetts state constitution, adopted in 1780,side- stepped issues of race but stated that “men are born free and equal.” In essence, then, it tacitly abolished slavery within the framework of a tentative representative republic in which state Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 inhabitants were citizens, not subjects. Three years later, Chief Justice William Cushing explicitly ruled slavery unconstitutional in the criminal freedom case brought by the slave Quok Walker against his owner, Nathaniel Jennison.89 The next year, the Boston tax lists ceased to include a column for enumerating “negro” slaves, yet it was not until 1788 that Massachusetts at last affirmed that the slave trade was illegal.90 Two years later, the 1790 federal census recorded no bondspeople living in Mas- sachusetts. But despite slaves’ de facto judicial emancipation, the state legislature did not specifically declare their freedom a right until the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1865. The government represented all people, and yet the question of who deserved the rights of citizenship remained unresolved in the early republic. Highlighting the era’s imperfect definition of freedom a full twenty-four years after Felix had exclaimed “We have no City! No Country,” Prince Hall lamented in 1797 that “all things here are frail and changeable and nothing here to be depended upon.” Free African Americans were being harassed in Boston, and in an address to the African Lodge, Hall urged blacks to brace themselves against an onslaught of violence. “Patience I say,” began Hall, an entreaty that recalls the January 1773 petition’s statement that slaves’ “Condition is in itself . . . unfriendly

88Dexter to Belknap, 23 February 1795, Belknap Papers, reel 8. 89Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet.” 90In 1788, before the 26 March 1788 passage of An Act to prevent the Slave-Trade, and for granting Relief to the Families of such unhappy Persons as may be Kidnapped or decoyed from this Commonwealth, Hall successfully pled for the return of three free black men kidnapped from Boston early in 1788, one of whom was a Masonic brother. This protest helped finally produce an anti–slave trade act. Hall’s complaint was printed in the New York Packet, 26 February and 29 August 1788,andinthe Massachusetts Spy, 24 April 1788. See Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 226–27. BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 131 to . . . every moral Virtue except Patience.” “Were we not pos- sessed of a great measure of it,” Hall observed of his fellow blacks, “you could not bear up under the daily insults you meet with in the streets of Boston,” where they were threatened and heckled to “such a degree, that you may truly be said to carryyourlivesinyourhands....[T]hearrowsofdeathare flying about your heads,” and “helpless old women have their Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/99/1792322/tneq_a_00346.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 clothes torn off their backs, even to the exposing of their naked- ness.”91 The black men, women, and children of Massachusetts had been freed, but they were not yet free.92 Although judicial emancipation had effected a release from slavery, it had also introduced new questions about the meaning of rights and of citizenship. Only by examining the black roots of abolitionism in Revolutionary Massachusetts can we fully appreciate how Massachusetts’ blacks moved beyond private antislavery efforts to lead the first public, biracial abolitionist campaign. Although the new republic hesitantly emancipated only some of its bondspeople and withheld equality from those newly freed, the petitioners established an activist precedent that informed, and in fact propelled, debate not only about slavery but about the very premises of citizenship in the emerging nation.

91Prince Hall, “A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797,atMeno- tomy. By the Right Worshipful Prince Hall,” reprinted in “Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798, ed. Joanna Brooks and John Saillant (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), pp. 199–208. 92For this distinction between emancipation, being released from bondage, and abolition, destroying the institutional structures legitimating lifetime servitude, see Melish, Disowning Slavery, p. 81, and Brown, Moral Capital, p. 29.

Chernoh M. Sesay Jr. is Assistant Professor of Religious Stud- ies at DePaul University. He is the author of several articles about early African American Freemasonry. He is currently completing his ﬁrst book project, “Black Boston and the Mak- ing of African-American Freemasonry: Leadership, Religion, and Community in Early America.”