"Petition after Petition": Boston's Black Freemasons Fight for Freedom

In 1641 the Puritan commonwealth voted for the Body of Liberties and, in it, recognized inherent, natural rights for all free white men. Nearly 150 years later, Black Bostonians, members of the Freemasons' African Lodge No. 1 , petitioned the Massachusetts state government. They claimed freedom for those who were denied those same inherent rights, pointing to the contraction of being "detained in a state of slavery in the Bowels of a free Christian Country."

Freedom for whom, of course, is the question. Just as the Puritans men denied women, Black people and Natives the rights they granted themselves, so, in the Revolutionary era, in the midst of talk of freedoms, those rights were still denied.

Join historian Chernoh Sesay Jr. in this vital talk on the Black freemasons whose eloquent, hardhitting petitions for freedom became an essential part of the growing abolitionist movement.

It's a story too rarely told and too little known: the key role played by Black freemasons amongst the earliest formally organized abolitionists in New England’s era of emancipation during the American Revolution. Central to the telling of this story are a series of petitions, circulars, and newspaper announcements wherein people of African descent in Massachusetts asked for slavery’s formal end.

The 1641 Body of Liberties certainly informed the intellectual background of the abolitionist petitions. Yet, these abolitionist appeals also forced a new kind of conversation about “liberties,” where the contradictions of slavery could no longer be so easily presumed to reflect natural conditions or Old Testament exegesis.

Investigating the Black petitions serves as a way of addressing several linked questions. These Black petitions were written by members of Boston’s African Lodge No. 1, the first Black corporate and voluntary institution in North America. What was freemasonry and how did it develop, especially in Boston? How organized were Black Masonic abolitionists? To what degree did Revolutionary era Black abolitionism illustrate prior colonial patterns of antislavery resistance versus novel ideas about rights and equality?

We can also ask, in retrospect: did the fight of the formerly enslaved for freedom expose the naivety of their hope or did it represent the best example of a new nation’s promise? Did Revolutionary era language frame Black abolitionism or did Black resistance redefine rights rhetoric?

Examining the context and content of the Black petitions opens a window into the significance of Black politics and its role in a broader story about the complicated relationship between “tyrannies” and “liberties” in New England’s colonial and Revolutionary eras.
 

Chernoh M. Sesay, Jr. is an associate professor of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. An Americanist historian, he has authored book chapters and articles about Black abolitionism during the American Revolution, about the origins of African American freemasonry, and about the emergence of African American public spheres at the turn of the 19th century. He has published in the New England Quarterly and the Journal of African American Studies. He is currently completing a book examining the origins and development of freemasonry among African Americans from the Revolutionary era to the early republic.