In January of 1766, fully ten years before white colonists in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York declared their independence from Britain, African Americans could be heard in the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, chanting, “Liberty! Liberty!” Over the previous century, black men and women had taken up arms against their enslavers (as slaves had done on the island of Manhattan in 1712 and in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739). But as whispers and then open dialogue of freedom filled conversations in the shipyards and docks in response to parliamentary acts to “coerce” the increasingly emboldened British outposts, African Americans, along with their white allies, called on North American assemblies to abolish slavery.10
On April 20, 1773, four African Americans—Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie—submitted a petition to the provincial legislature of Massachusetts “In behalf of our fellow slaves of this province, and by order of their Committee.” They wrote, “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them.”11 Drawing on the ruling white colonial responses to the acts of Parliament, African Americans struck at the contradiction of liberty for some resting on the enslavement of others. That contradiction, however, was not intended for actual slaves to use for their benefit, but only metaphorically among those calling for independence from Britain in response to their being politically “enslaved.” Nevertheless, the language of liberty was quickly appropriated by African Americans. Thus, both Patrick Henry’s rallying cry “Give me liberty or give me death!” in 1775 (while he held over one hundred black men, women, and children enslaved) and Thomas Jefferson’s equally impassioned declaration that “all men are created equal” a year later (when he personally owned over one hundred and fifty slaves) could be (and were) used to advance black liberation.12
Peter Bestes and his fellow petitioners were soon joined by other African Americans in petitioning colonial and newly emerging republican assemblies for their freedom. In 1777, a slave known only as “Prince” handed a petition for emancipation to the Massachusetts Assembly on behalf of “A Great Number of Blacks detained in a State of slavery in the Bowels of a free and Christian Country.” Two years later, a group of African American slaves in Connecticut sent a petition to their General Assembly; the following year, a group of seven free African Americans in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, issued a petition invoking their “privilage [sic] of freemen” to assert their right to vote. Efforts such as these to abolish slavery and extend black voting rights continued and formed the earliest instances of independent black political action.13
Pressure brought to bear in the revolutionary era through petitioning would help erode slavery and help to extend the rights of African Americans in the North. Slavery would be abolished in one of several ways: through constitutions (as in Vermont in 1777), by judicial decision (as in Massachusetts in 1783), and by gradual abolition acts (as in Pennsylvania in 1780 and Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784). Gradual abolition was advocated by Federalists in New York (including Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) and adopted by the state legislature in 1799; New Jersey (the last Northern state to abolish slavery in gradual form) followed in 1804. Legislation for gradual abolition provided for those born into slavery after the act to be freed at a certain age (twenty-one in Pennsylvania and twenty-eight in New York), allowing slavemasters to continue to receive much of their slaves’ work as compensation for their loss of “property.”14
While scores of African Americans petitioned for their freedom during the era, most slaves who took action to liberate themselves tried either to escape from their captors or to buy freedom for themselves or loved ones. Still others decided to take up arms—including those who fought in the American Revolution.15 Thousands of slaves during the war joined the ranks of either the patriots or the British to obtain their freedom. Which side African Americans chose to fight on depended on where they were and what was, or appeared to be, most advantageous to them. Black men fought with the Continental Army in the earliest battles, at Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill. For their part, the British encouraged both male and female runaways to join their ranks. On November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the British governor of the Virginia colony, intending to bolster the ranks of the British military while destabilizing the Southern plantation economy, issued a declaration granting freedom to any slave who joined his “Ethiopian Regiment” (a similar tactic would be used by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation).16 Over eight hundred slaves responded to Dunmore’s call. However, thousands of African Americans who served in the British army and navy were used as cannon fodder or returned to slavery following the war. Thousands more slaves escaped during the war, many securing their freedom by fighting on the patriot side, others fleeing to Canada, where they remained in safe harbor following the war. African Americans would thus make the Revolution their own by employing the language of liberty in their appeals for emancipation, fighting for their freedom, or escaping when possible.17
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Abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic appealed to assemblies and courts of law during the revolutionary era. James Somerset, a slave from Virginia, would successfully sue for his freedom in the British courts in 1772. Somerset had claimed his freedom under British law for having been brought to “free” England proper, where slavery was illegal. Over subsequent decades, the Somerset case was used as a precedent by abolitionists in arguing cases for emancipation. In Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), Justice Lemuel Shaw decided that slaves in transit in Massachusetts became free in accordance with the principal ruling in favor of Somerset.18
Legal pressures would be accompanied by ongoing petitioning of legislatures to act on behalf of the enslaved population. Petitioning had long been used by individuals seeking redress from Parliament or by patrons regarding private commercial transactions, but doing so as part of a broader political campaign emerged as an organizing tactic in the late eighteenth century. In 1788, fifteen years after Bestes and others presented their antislavery petition to the Massachusetts Legislature, the first major antislavery petition was circulated by abolitionists in England. A representative of the Jamaican sugar lobby expressed disbelief. Unlike the black petitioners in North America, those who were circulating the petition in England neither had been privately injured by slavery nor would directly benefit from its end. On what grounds, then, were they petitioning for abolition? The courts were equally perplexed and did what dozens of elected officials and jurists would do in the centuries that followed: rule that those bringing forth the petition or suit “lacked standing.” Nevertheless, between 1770 and 1792, petitioning was transformed from a tool of private interest to a public weapon in the fight to abolish slavery.
Predominantly white abolitionist societies that helped to gather petitions and filed lawsuits on behalf of slaves would appear in Philadelphia in 1775 and New York in 1785. Alongside these societies, free African Americans in Northern cities, including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, joined their enslaved compatriots in petitioning campaigns and filing their own lawsuits. By the 1790s, petitions were being regularly launched at public meetings, accompanied by the pooling of money to purchase newspaper advertisements calling for abolition and other lobbying efforts directed at assemblies, individual politicians, or the larger public.19 Adding to this organizing momentum, black leaders in the North would form an array of mutual aid societies, fraternal orders, churches, and schools, through which African Americans were further mobilized. Results were realized locally, as a combination of prior black military service, individual abolitionist petitions for emancipation, and related actions by abolitionist societies pushed Northern legislatures either to end slavery within their jurisdictions or to provide for its gradual abolition. By 1784, with the exceptions of New York and New Jersey, every Northern state had enacted gradual emancipation laws.20
The institution of slavery remained an integral part of New York’s economy even after the Revolution, as shipbuilding, slave insurance, and slave labor fueled multiple related businesses. Not surprisingly, the government of New York, whose constituency included slaveholding interests with political influence, resisted full emancipation
