Felix Holbrook - Revolutionary Black Roots

The Revolutionary Black Roots of Slavery's Abolition in Massachusetts
Author(s): CHERNOH M. SESAY JR.

Source: The New England Quarterly , March 2014, Vol. 87, No. 1 (March 2014), pp. 99-
131
Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.
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The Revolutionary Black Roots of Slavery's
Abolition in Massachusetts
CHERNOH M. SESAY JR.
ON edly 6edly
January
aided aided by 1773,
by whites, tookwhites, "Felix," took
a new approach to thepossibly
effort a new approach a slave and to the undoubt- 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.
1 Felix' 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, b-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.
2 Abolitionist petition for the Representative 01 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.
3 Mary 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). © 2014 by The New England
Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:io.n62/TNEQ_a_oo346.
99

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lOO 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
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. See Report of the Record Commissioners of Boston,
Boston Marriages, 1752-1809, vol. 30 (Boston, 1903); Boston Deaths, 1700-179 9, 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, and Essex 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).

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BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 101
January of 1777 .6 London experienced no such a

its Afro-British population until the late 1780
sachusetts petitioners' level of organization and
concerns predated similar efforts in Connectic
shire, New York, and Pennsylvania by almost a
6Of the petitions mentioned here, the March 1774 petition i

Massachusetts Spy, 6 June 1775, but no copy has yet been found.
of black political thought and action during the Revolutionary era, s
and Elizabeth H. Pieck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Coloni
New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1
Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the A
(1983; rev. ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); T. H. B
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 Ainerican 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
Their Global Quest for Liberty (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 H ay nes, 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.
7 For 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).

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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 1720s and
early 1760s, persistent agitation by slaves, and the colonists'
growing conflict with England during the 1770s created
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 be-
yond Massachusetts' judicial emancipation of slaves in 1783 to
confront the definition of citizenship that would be debated
during the nineteenth century.10
8 For 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 Turners Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2006); John Wood Sweet, Rodies 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.
10 Regarding 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, that in 1781 the freedom suit of the slave Elizabeth

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Resistance to Slavery in Eighteenth-Century

Massachusetts
The labor requirements of pre-Revolutionary Massachuse
varied considerably over the almost century and a half af
it was established. Unable to sustain the colony solely by thei
own efforts, freemen depended upon the unrecompensed labo
of others. This unfree free labor ranged from indentures
apprenticeships - labor in exchange for food, housing, and
some cases) training - through penal bondage - labor a crim
nal offered to pay off his debt to his victim - to slavery. Indi
and blacks alone were in the latter category, and the justi
cation for their enslavement was that they had been captu
in a legitimate war - the Pequot and King Philip's Wars,
the case of Indians; the slave trade for Africans - and, thereb
had become a form of property.11 That justification was furth
extended to the children of those hapless Indians and blacks.1
In 1701, a slave named Adam sued his master Saffin, claimin
that Saffin had reneged on a promise to allow Adam to pu
chase his freedom. The suit sparked a pamphlet war betw
Samuel Sewall, a judge of the Massachusetts Superior Cou
who later served as the colony's chief justice, and Saffin,
judicial colleague. In his duly celebrated The Selling of Jos
Freeman served as the first test case for the constitutionality of Massachusetts
ery and therefore marked a pivotal moment in abolitionism arising from princip
rather than pragmatic concerns. In response, Elaine MacEacheren, in "Emancipati
of Slavery in Massachusetts: A Reexamination, 1770-1790," Journal of Negro Hist
55.4 (October 1970): 289-306, maintains that a statistical analysis of manumiss
recorded in Boston wills between 1770 and 1790 suggests that anti-slavery sentim
was already manifesting itself in action and that instead of "leading legal opinion, th
legal actions may have only reflected it" (p. 302). This essay focuses on events occurri
before the postwar freedom suits; however, it presumes that public opinion and
fiat were intertwined in shaping abolition.
11 The colony's first set of laws (1641) legally restricted bondage to those who
been "taken in just warrs, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are
to us" ( The Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony in New England , claus
reprinted in The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, ed. William H. Whitmore (Bo
1889), p. 53, at http://archive.0rg/stream/coloniallawsofmaoomass#page/52/mode/
accessed 23 July 2013.
12On the beginning of African slavery in Massachusetts, see Lorenzo Johns
Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England , 1620-1776 (1942; repr. New Y
Atheneum, 1974), pp. 15-17- See also William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Deve
ment of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amh
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 3-13.

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(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-
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 1720s and early 1730s; thereafter, in the wake of the
economic depression of the 1740s and 1750s, 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 15,52o.16 Between 1764 and
13Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston: Bartholomew Green

and John Allen, 1700), p. 1. See Abner C. Goodell, "J°lin 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.
15 Moore, 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."
16 Boston 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],

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1776, the black population of the colony remained esse

unchanged, increasing by only 14, from 5,235 to 5,249; du
the same period, the white population increased from 2
to 343,845. 17
The labor surplus of the 1760s emboldened slaves to
on with freedom suits. Claiming that three years earlier h
"restrained her of her liberty . . . without any lawful
or authority to do so," mulatto slave Jenny Slew succe
sued her master, John Whipple, an action initiated in
and decided on 4 December 1766. 18 In 1768 James,
African American, attested that Richard Lechmere had
force and arms assaulted the said James . . . imprisone
restrained him of his liberty and held him in servitud
the same eleventh day of April untili the day of the date
writ." Chief Justice Francis Dana of the Massachusetts
rior Court of Judicature (the Massachusetts Supreme C
eventually awarded James his freedom and ordered Lec
to pay £100 in reparations, which James forfeited wh
failed to appear in court. In his ruling, Dana cited Old
law as he resorted to the 1641 definition of bond slave
is ordered by this court and the authority thereof tha
shall never be any bond slavery, or captivity amongst
less it is lawful captives taken in just wars."19 That same
1768, the slave Amos Newport brought a suit against his m
p. 31). Robert E. Desrochers Jr. explains that the 1752 count included all slav
that of 1754 enumerated the slave population only from the age of sixteen ("S
Sale Advertisements in Massachusetts, 1704-1781," William and Mary Quar
[July 2002]: 654). The 1765 census listed 510 male "Negroes and Mulattoes"
female "Negroes and Mulattoes" ( Report of the Record Commissioners of th
Roston, Selectmen's Minutes from 1764 through 1768 , vol. 20 [Boston, 1889],
17Greene, Negro in Colonial New England, p. 81.
l8Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 112-13. F°r an additional des
of this case, see Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unru
of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking Pengu
2005), p. 124.
19James v. Lechmere, 3 October 1769, Superior Court of Judicature in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Dana Family Papers, vol. 97, microfilm P-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-

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io6 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 through-
out the northern colonies. Between 1763 and 1783, at least
twenty slaves in Massachusetts brought suit against their mas-
ters, and three of these plaintiffs argued for emancipation not
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 le-
gal 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 re-
lations, 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. In Considerations 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 sub-
jecthood trumped all other considerations, including race, Otis
declared that "the Sun rises and sets every day in the sight of
2°Moore, Notes on Slavery , p. 22, n. 1. Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pieck

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).
21 Emily 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.
22 For 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.

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five millions of his majesty's American subjects, white, brow

and black."23
Otis's critique was exceptional in its breadth of vision, b
he was not alone in objecting to slavery's reach. In 1765
1766, the citizens of Worcester and Boston, respectively,
structed their legislative representatives to lodge objections t
the slave trade.24 In 1767, Nathaniel Appleton, a promin
Boston merchant, issued an anonymous tract, Consideratio
on Slavery , in a Letter to a Friend , in which he censured th
practice of buying and selling humans. Otis, however, bas
his objections not on moral sympathy but on natural righ
he explicitly acknowledged the political equality of blacks
natural-born subjects of the Crown. In 1764, in his Rights
the Colonies Asserted and Proved , he was even more dir
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 curPd 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
23 J am es 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.
24 Moore, Notes on Slavery , p. 124.

25Quoted in Hartz, "Otis and Anti-Slavery Doctrine," p. 745.

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io8 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 relation-
ship. 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
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 provin-
cial 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 slaveiy 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
decision with regard to Somerset the Negro . . . will occasion
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, the Massachusetts 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.
27 On 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.
28 On Somerset , see Brown, Moral Capital, pp. 96-101, and Sword, "Remembering
Dinah Nevil," pp. 315-43.
29 Essex Gazette, 20 October 1772.

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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
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 slav-
ery 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 af-
ter Mansfield's decision.32 Although she did no more than
move between the colony and the metropole, her political sta-
tus altered significantly: in Boston she was a slave; in London
she was not a slave but a subject.33 She likely recognized the
30 Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter , 23 July 1772.

3iThe 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.
33 See 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, "'Somersets Case' and the British Empire," Law and History Review
24.3 (Fall 2006): 655-57.

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no THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
opportunity the transatlantic trip presented, for on 22 Septe

ber 1772, the Boston Gazette reported events in London
relayed by a correspondent who had observed "that as Bla
are free now in this country, Gentlemen will not be so fond
bringing them here as they used to be, it being computed th
are now about 14,000 blacks in this country." Wheatley m
have stayed in England, but instead, from her new location a
status, she negotiated her manumission, a contract she astute
had bonded in London, thereby guaranteeing that she wo
return to Boston a free woman.34
The Somerset decision exposed the complexities and cont
dictions of imperial power and colonial identity at the sa
time as writers throughout the American provinces, chaf
under the yoke of an oppressive tax policy, were struggl
to define the terms of their relationship with king and P
liament. Speaking in Boston, in December 1772, six mon
after the burning of the British customs ship the Gaspee, Jo
Allen delivered his An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty
the Essential Rights of the Americans. The Massachusetts
of 5 May 1773 advertised the publication of the discours
fourth iteration, noting that this "Edition is carefully corre
by the Author, in which are Additions . . . And Remarks
the Rights and Liberties of the Africans, inserted by part
lar Desire."35 Allen, a High Calvinist English Baptist mini
and radical Whig of bristly temperament who had publis
The Spirit of Liberty: or, Junius's Loyal Address, a theol
cal defense of a believer's baptism, in 1770 displeased Bos
Baptists but rallied ardent patriots attentive to the problem
racial slavery. The Oration became one of the most popu
patriot pamphlets in the pre-Revolutionary period, republish
seven times in four cities between 1773 and 1775, with the f
34 Boston Gazette, 22 September 1772; Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, pp. 136-37.

35John Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty or the Essential Rights of
Americans (Boston, 1773). On Allen see, John M. Bumstead and Charles E. Cl
"New England's Tom Paine: John Allen and the Spirit of Liberty," William and M
Quarterly 21.4 (October 1964): 561-70. Also see James Swan, A dissuasion to G
Britain and the Colonies: from the slave-trade to Africa ; Shewing the injustice there
6 c . . . (Boston, 1773).

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BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION ill
four editions being published in Massachusetts

months of 1773.36
Allen's revisions of the Oration reflected a gr
of the disjunction between colonial critiques
rial power and the enslavement of blacks. In th
the speech, Allen illustrated English oppression
if the English recognized blacks as having leg
colonist could "be confined, and tried for his
cusation of a negro."37 In the third and four
editions, however, Allen responded to the a
closed readers who urged him to append to h
petition of 20 April 1773.38 In doing so, he
ment. No longer were black litigants posing
colonists; instead, African slavery became th
imperial despotism: "Such cruelty and tyrann
be held in the most hateful contempt, the sa
a banditti of slavemakers on the coast of Afric
Slave Petitions of January and April 1

As discomfort with human bondage intensifie
ber of freedom suits increased, black aboliti
the 1770s. In the prior decade, individual sla
dispensable aid of white lawyers and support
court to obtain their personal freedom. Wit
of the petitions by Felix and others, black ag
into the realms of print culture and public
ing contemporary means for appealing direct
authority, bondsmen drafted petitions specif
governing bodies. Although addressed to exec
tive authorities, however, the petitions wer
as broadsides and published as open lette
36Bumstead and Clark, "John Allen," p. 561.

37 Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty , p. 27.
38 Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty or the Essential
icans , 4th ed. (Boston, 1773), pp. 73-80.
39 Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty, 4th ed., p. 61.
Oration comes from Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of

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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 pe-
titions of grace, subjects aired their concerns; in petitions of
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 . . . have pleaded our Cause." Using the first-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
40 For 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.
41 All quotations are from the 1773 publication of Felix's humble Petition.

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good natural Parts, . . . discreet, sober, honest, and industriou

. . . virtuous and religious/' And yet,
How many of that Number have there been, and now are in t
Province, who have had every Day of their Lives embittered with t
most intolerable Reflection, That, let their Behaviour be what it wi
neither they, nor their Children to all Generations, shall ever be ab
to do, or to possess and enjoy any Thing, no, not even Life itself, b
in a Manner as the Beasts that perish.
In such a manner did Felix describe the hereditary scour

of the enslaved, who had nothing - not wives, children,
country - to call their own, and yet they obeyed God and the
masters.
Judging it 4 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 en-
slaved. "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 op-
position thereto," he bluntly stated. Towns were busy debat-
ing the "Infringements that have been lately made upon our

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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
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 argu-
ment 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
42 Massachusetts 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.
^Abolitionist petition for the Representative of Thompson to Boston, 1773.
45 Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty, 4th ed., pp. 78-80.

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had enslaved them, the black men now claimed as their o

a commodity for which they could rightly demand comp
sation. However, they continued, "We are very sensible t
it would be highly detrimental to our present masters, if
were allowed to demand all that of right belongs to us f
past services." And so, in a noble gesture, they dismissed
expectation of reparations. Instead, they sought only "am
relief, which, as men, we have a right to" until such time as
their "joint labours," they might emigrate to the coast of Afr
"where we propose a settlement."46 If colonial leaders could i
voke a universal notion of freedom while also qualifying
contorting it to justify human bondage, then blacks could ar
that their rights as men trumped - indeed, negated - their l
status as property.
Some white colonists agreed. On 17 May 1773, the tow
of Pembroke, located south of Boston and just north of P
mouth, deemed a "Negro Petition Reasonable" and "agreea
to natural Justice and the Precepts of the Gospel"; therefore
instructed its representative to the General Court, John Turn
to "endeavour to find a Way in which they [the slaves] may
freed from Slavery without wrong to their present Masters
Injury to themselves." Ultimately, the townspeople hoped
total abolition of Slavery may in due Time take place."47 T
same year, Medfield commanded its representative to work t
ward ending slave imports and freeing slaves.48 For the
1773 meeting of the General Court, the towns of Salem, M
ford, Leicester, and Sandwich all directed their representativ
to vote to end the importation of slaves, even though t
stopped short of supporting abolition. On "the 24th of Ma
last [1774]," the Massachusetts Spy reported in June 177
"Negroes in the counties of Bristol and Worcester petitio
46 In 1787, blacks, led by Prince Hall, asked the government to support the exp
of their relocation to West Africa. See "Blackman Petition," Boston, 17 October
Ms. Bos. II, Boston Town Records, July-December 1788, Boston Public Library
47 Supplement to the Boston Gazette , 14 June 1773.
48 Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Com
tee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772-1774 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1
PP- 173-74.

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ii6 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
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.

50 Reprinted in Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence in the Era of the American
Revolution, p. 16.
51 Massachusetts 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.
53 For 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.

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Slave Petitions of June 1773 and January 1774

The Petition of June 1773 . - Its Journal recorded that on
June 1773, the House of Representatives heard a petition fro
"Felix Holbrook and others, Negroes, praying that they m
be liberated from a State of Bondage, and made Freemen
this Community.,,54 Whereas blacks directed their April pet
tion to a town representative, they sent their June petition,
reprinted in the Massachusetts Spy of 29 July and the Es
Gazette of 3 August, straightaway to the Massachusetts G
eral Court.55 The published appeal was probably set from
unprinted manuscript only a fragment of which is now exta
collected in the Jeremy Belknap Papers at the Massachuse
Historical Society. Its provenance is less certain than that
the previous two petitions; it is notable not only for its b
declaration of rights but for its impassioned, and seemin
unaltered, speech. I quote it here in its (fragmentary) entiret
To his Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq; Governor of s

Province to the Honourable his Majesty's Council,
Representatives in General Court assembled June
The Petition of us the subscribers in behalf of all th

Permission are held in a state of slavery within the
Country, Humbly sheweth
That your Petitioners apprehend thay have in co

men a natural right be free and without molestation
erty as thay may acquire by their industrys or by an
detrimetal to their fellow men and that no Person c
claim to their services unless [fragment ends] 56
The statement of rights is unequivocal: the pe

natural right to freedom "without molestation.
54Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery , p. 135.

55 Abolitionist Petition, "To his Excellency Thomas Hutchins
said province; to the Honourable his MAJESTY'S COUNCIL
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES in General Court assemble
(hereafter June 1773 petition), Massachusetts Spy , 29 July 1773
August 1773.
56 June 1773 petition, Jeremy Belknap Papers.

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ii8 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
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.5®
The Petition of January 1774. - The House deferred con-
sideration 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.

5 The 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. 1 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.

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BLACK ROOTS OF ABOLITION 1x9
which was eventually published in the Massachusetts Spy o

September.60
That this fourth petition was presented as the House con
tinued its deliberations over the previous appeal highligh
the abolitionists' determination. Referencing the June plea, th
January 1774 petition explained that the colonists' insistence
their rights "gives us who are unhappily, and unjustly depriv
of that blessing, so great expectations of your taking up our la
petition which we laid before Honours the last session." This r
quest for redress did not mention African emigration, but it e
plicitly aligned the colonial and abolitionist causes. The author
concluded with an understated but unyielding urgency, "W
can sincerely hope and pray, that GOD would preserve yo
liberties and privileges as at the beginning, and that peace and
love may again be restored between the mother country and
provinces, and that his MAJESTY would hear your praye
and that you would hear ours, and grant us an answer of peac
All four petitions were adamant about abolition; not one sug
gested that it might be delayed to advance the cause of i
mediately ending the slave trade. Moreover, even though they
regretted the financial harm that might befall former maste
the petitioners demanded rapid, not gradual, emancipatio
The petitions' recurrent themes and syntactical similarities su
gest 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 an
of January 1774 clearly bear marks of editorial intervention; t
manuscript petition of June 1773 was regularized for publi
tion, its misspellings corrected. It is tempting to surmise tha
Felix Holbrook, who seems to have been in the employ of
writing master, had a hand in all four petitions, with the Ju
petition, as it exists in manuscript, betraying the grammar a
spelling of an individual who is literate but not highly educat
60 "To the honourable his Majesty's Council and the honourable House of Represe
tatives of the Province of Massachusetts- Bay, in General Court assembled, at Bost
the 20th day of January 1774." Printed in Massachusetts Spy, 1 September 1774,
text from which I quote in the next paragraph.

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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 cam-
paign as he answered a request from the Reverend Jeremy
Belknap of Boston, author of The History of New Hamphsire
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 num-
ber 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.
61 Although 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.
62 Hon. 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 2gth
Regiment of Foot, for the murder of Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverìck,
James Caldwell, and Patrick Carr, on Monday - evening, the $th of March, 1770
(Boston: J. Fleeming, 1770), tract C77, Boston Athenaeum.

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Referring to the June 1773 petition, he recalled

petition remained undecided upon I was called ou
cil chamber, and very politely presented with t
Newton, who, after making his best bow, said t
had been informed I was against the slave trade,
friend." On a canvassing mission, Newton "ha
[copies] to give to particular members of th
resentatives."64 The circular distributed by New
been some version of the fourth petition, of Ja
Black petitioners also approached Representa
ering Jr. through Samuel Adams. Both Adam
sat on the legislative committee charged with
mendations concerning the June 1773 petitio
Pickering dated 8 January 1774, Adams rem
General Assembly will undoubtedly meet on t
month" and, further, that "the Negroes whose
file, and is referred for consideration, are ve
the Event of it." Adams informed Pickering
"having been informed that you intended to con
leisure Hours in the Recess of the Court, . . .
you would compleat a Plan for their Relief." "In
and if it were "not too much Trouble," Adam
colleague, the petitioners "ask it as a favor that
Letter enable me to communicate to them the g
of your Design."65
It was recorded in the Journal of the House
tives of Massachusetts for 26 January 1774 that
a number of Negro Men, which was entered
of the 25th of June last, and referred for Cons
Session,' was 'read again, together with a Memor
Petitioners and Ordered , that Mr. Speaker, Mr.
Hancock, Mr. Adams, Mr. Phillips, Mr. Paine,
leaf [the aforementioned seven-man committ
64Dexter to Belknap, 26 February 1795, Jeremy Belknap Pa

stated his membership in the House of Representatives in a
February 1795, Belknap Papers , reel 8.
65 Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 135-36.

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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 mea-
sure to ban the slave trade, "An Act to prevent the importation
of negroes, and others, as slaves into this Province."67 The pe-
titions to abolish slavery had simply been folded into this new
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 mili-
tary 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
^Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 135-36.

®7Moore, 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-
^Dexter to Belknap, 26 February 1795, Belknap Papers, reel 8.

^Dexter 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).

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slavery's abolition, was considered once more and accepted

the House and the Council, but lawmakers ended their sess
without Gage having signed the legislation.70 Dexter wondere
"If the negroes petitioned Gage, I know not who could h
advised them to the measure/'71
In fact, blacks had submitted a newly revised petition
Gage only twelve days after he set foot in Massachusetts. Tac
itly referring to Old Colony law, which grouped Africans wit
captives rightfully enslaved in the aftermath of a just war, th
described their race as unfairly "stolen" into slavery.72 Neith
the May nor the June appeal was published, but a copy of eac
is filed in the Jeremy Belknap Papers at the Massachuset
Historical Society. Their provenance is not clear. Betrayin
deepening frustration, perhaps even despair, the May addr
was the first to concede the possibility that emancipation wo
be gradual, not immediate.
The June appeal was clearly a revision of May's, as illustrate
by similarities of language. The May petition begins:
That your Petitioners apprehend we have in common with all ot

men a naturel right to our freedoms without Being deprivd of the
by our fellow men as we are a freeborn Pepel and have never forfe
this Blessing by aney compact or agreement whatever. But we w
unjustly dragged by the cruel hand of power from our dearest frin
and sum of us stolen from the bosoms of our tender Parents and fro
a Populous Pleasant and plentiful country and Brought hither to
made slaves for Life in a Christian land.73
The June statement opens:
That your petitioners apprehend, they have in common with ot

men, a natural right to be free, and without molestation, to enjoy su
property, as they may acquire by their industry, or by any other me
70 Moore, Notes on Slavery , pp. 142-43.

71 Dexter to Belknap, 19 March 1795, Belknap Papers, reel 8.
72 Unpublished petition, "To his Excellency Thomas Gage Esq. Captain General
Governor in Chief in and over this Province. To the Honourable his Majestys Cou
and the Honourable House of Representatives in General Court assembled Ma
1774," Belknap Papers, reel 8.
73Petition, 25 May 1774, Jeremy Belknap Papers.

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not detrimental to their fellow men; and that no person can have any
just claim to their sendees 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
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 state-
ment 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.
75 Petition June 1774, Jeremy Belknap Papers.

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is the greatest, and consequently most to be dreaded, of a

temporal calamities," Sarter claimed, then "its opposite, Lib
erty, is the greatest temporal good, with which you can b
blest!" Capitalizing on the recommendation of the June 177
and 1774 petitions, he noted that, although he did not want "t
trespass too much on" the patience of the General Court, law
makers might want to consider that they would free themselv
"from the trouble of us by making us grants in some back par
of the country."7®
The legislature did not take up the petitions of 1774, but, in
a separate episode, it did address their substance. In the f
of 1776, two black sailors were captured and subsequently a
vertised for sale in Boston. Debating the matter, the House
Representatives initially "Resolved, That the selling and enslav-
ing the human species is a direct violation of the natural right
alike vested in all men by their Creator, and utterly inconsisten
with the avowed principles on which this and the other United
States have carried their struggle for liberty.'77 The statemen
was clear. The Massachusetts legislature had declared itself
in opposition to slavery. But once again, it backed away fro
a broad interpretation and agreed only that "all persons co
cerned with the said Negroes be, and they are hereby forbidde
to sell them . . . and that whenever it shall appear that an
Negroes are taken on the High Seas and brought as Prisone
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 shou
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 petition
76Caesar Sarter, "Address, To Those who are Advocates for holding the Africans i
Slavery," Essex Journal and Merrimack Packet, 17 August 1774.
77 Quoted in Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 149-50.
78 Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 149-53.

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of 1774 to the one that followed in 1777. At least one hun-

dred enslaved and free blacks fought at the first skirmishes at
Battle Road and Bunker Hill in 1775, and in 1778, 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-
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 pe-
tition, and fourteen other black men formed the first African
American Lodge of Freemasonry, African Lodge No. i, in 1775.
Two years later, Bestes attached his name to yet another abo-
litionist petition that was delivered to the Massachusetts leg-
islature. 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 6- 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.
For the approximation of 5,000 black patriot soldiers, see Quarles, Negro in the
American Revolution, p. xxix.
81 As 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
Porten [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], pp. 32-35). Other blacks had heeded
the call of Virginias 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, and Frey, Water from the Rock, pp. 63-67).

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Prince, in 1770, and only in the late 1770s does Hall appe
regularly and prominently in civic and political sources. He w
literate and one of a miniscule number of eighteenth-cent
blacks who owned property. Recognized by Jeremy Belkn
and other whites, Hall corresponded with British Freemaso
and English figures like the Countess of Huntingdon, Phi
Wheatley's patron. He published a sermon by the promine
black Methodist itinerant preacher John Marrant and authore
two other addresses. He led black Bostonians in a number of
campaigns, including protesting the kidnapping of blacks, re-
questing 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
82 For 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, and 1778" ( 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,
1620-1800" and "The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston , 1630-1822," CD-ROM
(Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society and Massachusetts Historical
Society, 2001).

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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 leader-
ship and a forum for fashioning new national identities. These
strivers included artisans like Paul Revere and printers like
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, primaiy 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; by 23 June 1779, he had
attained the degree of Master Freemason and become a lodge
treasurer.86 I have not been able to locate the four other signa-
tories 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 1 777" 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 demon-
strated his literacy as well as a clear authorial link between
this petition and that of April 1773, which also included his
signature.
8sBestes'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.
^Records of African Lodge, No. 1, Minutes and Accounts, 1779-86.

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The statement of rights was likewise similar. The petitioner

claimed that they held the same natural and unalienable right
freedom as all men, a right granted directly by God. Again t
rehearsed how they had been unlawfully captured in Afri
torn from the bosoms of their parents and a beauteous, plenti
land. And yet, despite their persistent efforts, they informed
legislators,
your petitiononers have Long and Patiently waited the Evnt of peti-
tion 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 177 7, they conceded the possibility of gradual emanci-
pation, 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 fun-
damental 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 [Representatives for the State of Mas-
sachusetts Bay in General Court assembled, January 13, 1 777," Massachusetts Archives,
212:132, and reprinted in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society , 5th ser.,
3 (Boston, 1877), pp. 434-35-

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periods," nor were "persons bom 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
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.®9 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 peti-
tion's statement that slaves' "Condition is in itself . . . unfriendly
^Dexter to Belknap, 23 February 1795, Belknap Papers, reel 8.

^Zilversmit, "Quok Walker, Mumbet."
""In 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, and in the
Massachusetts Spy, 24 April 1788. See Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 226-27.

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to . . . every moral Virtue except Patience." "Were we not pos

sessed of a great measure of it," Hall observed of his fell
blacks, "you could not bear up under the daily insults you me
with in the streets of Boston," where they were threaten
and heckled to "such a degree, that you may truly be said
carry your lives in your hands. . . . [T]he arrows of death
flying about your heads," and "helpless old women have th
clothes torn off their backs, even to the exposing of their nak
ness."91 The black men, women, and children of Massachusett
had been freed, but they were not yet free.92 Although ju
cial emancipation had effected a release from slavery, it h
also introduced new questions about the meaning of rights an
of citizenship. Only by examining the black roots of abolition
ism in Revolutionary Massachusetts can we fully appreci
how Massachusetts' blacks moved beyond private antislave
efforts to lead the first public, biracial abolitionist campai
Although the new republic hesitantly emancipated only some
its bondspeople and withheld equality from those newly freed
the petitioners established an activist precedent that informe
and in fact propelled, debate not only about slavery but ab
the very premises of citizenship in the emerging nation.
91 Prince Hall, "A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at Me
tomy. By the Right Worshipful Prince Hall," reprinted in "Face Z ion Forward": F
Writers of the Black Atlantic, 17S5-1798, ed. Joanna Brooks and John Saillant (Bos
Northeastern University Press, 2002), pp. 199-208.
92 For this distinction between emancipation, being released from bondage,
abolition, destroying the institutional structures legitimating lifetime servitude,
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 artic
about early African American Freemasonry. He is current
completing his first book project , "Black Boston and the Mak
ing of African-American Freemasonry: Leadership , Religio
and Community in Early America. "

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Felix Holbrook - Revolutionary Black Roots

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Felix Holbrook - Revolutionary Black Roots

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The Revolutionary Black Roots of Slavery's Abolition in Massachusetts

Author(s): CHERNOH M. SESAY JR.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43285055

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CHERNOH M. SESAY JR.

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Felix argued that slavery stripped black men of the perquisites

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January of 1777 .6 London experienced no such a

6Of the petitions mentioned here, the March 1774 petition i

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Scholars agree that black abolitionists struggled not only to

8 For examples of scholarship that examines emancipation in specific regions or lo-

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Resistance to Slavery in Eighteenth-Century

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(1700), Sewall rejected the notion that simply by virtue of their

13Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston: Bartholomew Green

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1776, the black population of the colony remained esse

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2°Moore, Notes on Slavery , p. 22, n. 1. Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pieck

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five millions of his majesty's American subjects, white, brow

In avowing the rights of "his majesty's American subjects, white,

23 J am es Otis, Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists. In a Letter to a Noble

24 Moore, Notes on Slavery , p. 124.

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bondspeople and sympathetic whites stepped up their efforts

26Thomas Pemberton to St. G. Tucker, 12 March 1795, Jeremy Belknap Papers,

27 On this case and for a comparison between legal emancipation in Massachusetts

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Bench, before Lord Mansfield, and the rest of the Judges of

30 Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter , 23 July 1772.

33 See T. K. Hunter, "Geographies of Liberty: A Brief Look at Two Cases," Prophets

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opportunity the transatlantic trip presented, for on 22 Septe

34 Boston Gazette, 22 September 1772; Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, pp. 136-37.

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four editions being published in Massachusetts

Slave Petitions of January and April 1

36Bumstead and Clark, "John Allen," p. 561.

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involved interracial collaboration, but with each, an African

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good natural Parts, . . . discreet, sober, honest, and industriou

In such a manner did Felix describe the hereditary scour

Judging it 4 presumptuous in us, to suggest to your Excellency

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natural and Charter Rights, and passing Resolves to that Ef-

42 Massachusetts Spy, 28 January 1773.

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had enslaved them, the black men now claimed as their o

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the Committees of Correspondence for the county of Worces-

49Moore, Notes on Slavery, pp. 133-34; Massachusetts Spy, 6 June 1775.

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Slave Petitions of June 1773 and January 1774

To his Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq; Governor of s

Representatives in General Court assembled June

The Petition of us the subscribers in behalf of all th

That your Petitioners apprehend thay have in co

The statement of rights is unequivocal: the pe