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The Revolutionary Black Roots of Slavery's Abolition in Massachusetts

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The Revolutionary Black Roots of Slavery's Abolition in Massachusetts 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 edito- rial 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 The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXVII, no. 1 (March 2014). C 2014 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ a 00346. 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 con- sidered a third appeal and agreed to form a “Committee on the Petition of Felix Holbrook, and others; praying to be liber- ated 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 an- tislavery 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 atten- tion at the time, many scattered in various newspapers, issued from the pulpit, and circulated in letters. Petitions, my partic- ular 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 free- dom.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.
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