Essay 5-A: Enslaved People and the Freedom Suits And Freedom Petitions

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

Freedom was the word on everyone’s lips in the eighteenth century, including the enslaved people throughout the rebelling colonies and new states formed during the American Revolution.

Establishing legal claims to freedom was a complicated process for enslaved persons bringing lawsuits and petitions to American colonial and early state legislatures. In areas where enslavement was legal, a suit or petition for freedom had to prove a condition and exception of unjust slavery within the larger system. In jurisdictions with bans on enslavement, claims to freedom depended in part on proving that an enslaved person was not a fugitive from a slaveholder in another jurisdiction. Nevertheless, taking legal action for the cause of freedom was a popular practice. Colonial and early state legislatures and courts received thousands of petitions and suits from individuals and groups of enslaved people hoping to leverage the system in their favor. Working within the bounds of legality, enslaved persons sought freedom using legal precedent and the same

philosophical principles that were guiding the colonists’ efforts towards their own independence.

Some scholars make direct, causal linkages between freedom petitions and suits and the Declaration of Independence. A more certain takeaway from all of these documents is the confirmation of a political environment excitable by the ideas and promises of freedom, in all of its manifestations, throughout the eighteenth century. Freedom felt just within grasp of rebelling colonists and enslaved persons alike, and a common language and set of principles united their fights to claim it.

Before, during, and after the American Revolution, enslaved people filed petitions and lawsuits looking to establish a claim to freedom relied upon the philosophical milieu of Enlightenment and religious ideals that colonists also drew upon as their basis for separation from Great Britain. In many cases, the same newspapers circulating the political ideas of liberty in the context of colonial relations also printed claims to freedom from enslaved petitioners.

On July 29, 1773, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy printed the transcript of a freedom petition submitted by a group of enslaved men to Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson. The petition asserted that “no person can have any just claim to their services unless by the laws of the land they have forfeited them, or by voluntary compact become servants.” In doing so, these men declared their right to consent and the injustice of subjugation when that consent was not granted. These petitioners, just like their colonial contemporaries, could not be forced into service, of any sort, without granting permission to such an arrangement.

Directly above this petition on the front page of the Spy, Thomas’s regular masthead declared, “Do thou, Great LIBERTY, inspire our Souls, — and make our Lives in thy Possession happy, – Or, our Deaths glorious in thy just defense.” This profession of dedication to the cause of liberty, coming from British playwright Joseph Addison’s 1713 Cato, A Tragedy, served to unite ideas of classical liberty, the enlightenment philosophies of the eighteenth century, and the causes of colonized and enslaved individuals alike. The great effort of seeking liberty, of thinking and acting without unjust, external restraint, underlaid the common experiences of humanity across time, place, and race.

The printing and circulation of petitions and lawsuits from enslaved people in newspapers both contributed to and reflected the greater cultural psyche of freedom. The principle of consent of the governed, that individuals had a natural and inalienable right to decide for themselves who could rule them, consistently manifested throughout the legal cases brought forward.

Then in 1776, the Declaration of Independence disrupted the culture and politics of the American colonies in endless ways, including its direct impact on the language of liberty: establishing and affirming a common set of phrases and touchpoints for others to draw upon. This cultural orientation and the increasingly consistent language of liberty was similarly manifest in freedom petitions during this period. The same petitioners who appealed in 1773 for “all of the privileges and immunities of…free and natural born subjects,” continued their calls after the Declaration circulated. In January 1777, these same men again asserted their claim “in common with all other men” to “a natural and unalienable right to that freedom, which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind, etc; which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatsoever.”

In 1777, the petitioners paid direct tribute to the American revolutionaries. They asserted that the colonists’ fight and “unhappy difficulties with Great Britain, pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your Petitioners,” and yet they did argue, clearly and consistently, that the same principles applied to conditions of enslavement as they did to unjust colonial governance. Positioning themselves as the acolytes of the revolutionary freedom fighters served both as a rhetorical strategy and evidence of philosophical alignment with the increasingly dominant set of principles, including liberty and consent of the governed as natural rights.

The documentary trail of legal proceedings, print material, and ambient ideology of liberty indicate an emergent and culturally articulated consensus, in language if not always in practice, that all men were in fact created equal and could not be bound in conditions to which they did not consent. The natural right of all men to rule themselves could not be abridged under this principled understanding that spanned time and place and took hold during the Revolutionary Era.

Dr. C.C. Borzilleri is a historian of women and print culture in early America. She is a Content Specialist at the Bill of Rights Institute and teaches university courses on American history and memory.

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