Anti-slavery petitions project

Beacon Hill Scholars participated in a initiative to create a digitized collection of petitions relating to anti-slavery and anti-segregation efforts in Massachusetts.

In colonial and early independent America, enslaved people had a few ways to gain their freedom. The most straightforward -- and  the most dangerous -- was simply to run away. Alternatively, they could be granted their freedom by their enslaver through a writ of manumission. 

A third possibility was to submit a legal petition to a colonial or state legislature. In the early 1770s, groups of Massachusetts enslaved people and freemen did just that, claiming that freedom was a right belonging to all men and women. 

Petitions were also used to push for changes in public policy, including de-segregating schools and public transportation.  

In 2015, Harvard University launched an effort to preserve and make publicly accessible thousands of these documents by developing the Digital Archive of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions. 

The project was led by Daniel Carpenter, the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Director of Social Sciences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

BHS member Nicole Topich, an archivist at Harvard's Center for American Political Studies, tracked down and individually scanned hundreds of fragile petition documents housed in state records. She and fellow-researchers compiled a searchable online database that includes almost 4,500 petitions with nearly 282,000 signatures sent to the Massachusetts colonial and state legislatures from the years 1649 to 1870. 

Petition signatories included many prominent Black abolitionists who lived in, or were connected to, the African American community on Boston's Beacon Hill. 

You can search the database here.