The case of James Sommersett is documented in an 1816 edition of Howell's State Trials, a collection of court proceedings under British law. Source: Courtesy University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law.

James Sommersett, an enslaved African, wins his freedom in England after a judge rules that slavery is not legally sanctioned there.

Sommersett is purchased in Virginia by Charles Stewart, a British customs officer based in Boston, who brings his enslaved servant with him when he returns home to England.

Two years later, Sommersett escapes but is recaptured after evading bounty

hunters hired by Stewart for almost two months. Stewart puts Somersett in chains on a slave ship to be taken to Jamaica and sold. Sommersett’s abolitionist godparents go to court on his behalf to prevent this, and he is released pending a hearing.

His case is taken up by abolitionist lawyer Granville Sharp – one of the first British campaigners against the slave trade – while supporters and sympathisers respond to Sommersett's plight by sending money to pay his lawyers (who actually provide their services for free). Charles Stewart's court costs are met by West Indian planters and merchants.

Sharp and his legal team argue that colonial laws might permit slavery, but neither English common law nor any statute passed by parliament recognizes the existence of slavery; it is thus unlawful and Sommersett should be freed. Stewart’s lawyers maintain that Sommersett is Stewart’s property, property is paramount, and it would be dangerous to free all the approximately 14,000 enslaved Black people in Britain.

Chief Justice Lord Mansfield narrowly rules that the case is not “allowed or approved by the law of England” and orders Somersett released. Abolitionists and Black and White Londoners celebrate the landmark decision, which helps launch a new wave of abolitionism in England.

However, despite popular perception at the time to the contrary, the ruling does not end the enslavement of people in Britain or its overseas colonies including those in North America, which have established their own laws governing slavery. Nor does it affect British participation in the slave trade, which is not banned until 1807. Mansfield’s decision deals only with the forcible sending of someone overseas into bondage; he deliberately avoids answering the broader question about the morality of slavery because of the profound political and economic consequences.

The Sommersett case is reported in detail by the North American colonial press. In Massachusetts, several enslaved people file freedom suits in 1773–1774 based on Mansfield's ruling, which are supported by the colony's General Court (legislature) but vetoed by successive royal governors.

According to some historians, the Sommersett case boosts support for independence among those settlers in British North America who want to maintain slavery in the 13 colonies.

As for James Sommersett himself, he disappears from public view after his trial and there is no written record of what happened to him. It is presumed that he died in Britain.

1773-1779 Black freedom petitions: "For the sake of justice, humanity"

Black freedom petitions help put emancipation on the agenda of the American Revolution. Numerous such petitions from organized groups of enslaved people are presented to state officials and legislatures in New England.

A January 1773 petition of enslaved people in Boston and other Massachusetts towns to the colony’s governor and General Court states that they have “lived every Day of their Lives imbittered [sic] with the most intolerable Reflection, That, let their Behaviour be what it will, nor their Children to all generations shall ever be able to do, or possess or enjoy any Thing, no not even Life itself, but in a Manner as the Beasts that perish. We have no property! We have no Wives! No Children! We have no City! No Country!” The petitioners claim not to want to inflict “the least Wrong and Injury to our Masters” but ask for an abolition law that “to us will be as Life from the dead.”

Another 1773 petition from enslaved people in Massachusetts reads, “Your Petitioners apprehend they have in common with other men a naturel [sic] right to be free.” In 1779, 20 “natives of Africa” from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, petition for freedom “for the sake of justice, humanity, and the right of mankind.”

That same year a group of African Americans in Connecticut declare in their petition that it is a “flagrant Injustice” that those “contending, in the Cause of Liberty” deny what “Reason and Revelation join to declare, that we are the Creatures of that God, who made of one Blood, and Kindred, all the Nations of the Earth.”

Manuscript copy of a petition for freedom to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives, January 13, 1777. Source: Massachusetts Historical Society.

In The Slave’s Cause, her history of the abolitionist movement, historian Manisha Sinha notes that African American petitioners also raise the question of compensation and redress. They propose concrete plans for securing Black freedom, such as adopting the Spanish system of allowing enslaved people to work for themselves one day a week in order to earn money to purchase their freedom.

Two unsuccessful petitions from African Americans in Massachusetts to the General Court propose different forms of redress. The first, in 1774, asks for enslaved people to be granted “some part of unimproved land for a settlement.” The second, in 1777, from Prince Hall, the founder of the Black Freemasons, proposes that all enslaved people in the state be freed at the age of 21. The proposal generates an abolition bill, but it is shelved. A 1773 bill to abolish the slave trade, that also originates in a petition submitted by a committee of enslaved people, suffers a similar fate.

Meanwhile, some enslaved individuals continue to use the courts to gain their freedom. They include Caesar Hendrick, who in 1773 successfully sues his “owner,” Richard Greenleaf of Newburyport, Massachusetts, for “detaining him in slavery.” The jury awards Hendrick £18 in damages and court costs. He later serves in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.

1775 First American abolition society founded

The emblem of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. The organization was originally called The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Source: Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

The first American abolition society, The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, is founded in Pennsylvania. Seventeen of the 24 men who attend its initial meetings are Quakers.

The formation of the organization is prompted in part by the public protest of Dinah Nevil, a woman of Native American and African descent, who has sued for her freedom under a Pennsylvania law prohibiting the enslavement of Native Americans. Her case drags on, and Nevil languishes in the Philadelphia workhouse where she and her four children are interned; tragically, two of her children die there.

After a two-year legal fight, a court reaffirms the enslavement of Dinah Nevil and her children, but they are subsequently emancipated after Thomas Harrison, an abolitionist associated with the Society, personally purchases their freedom.

The Society is reorganized in 1784 as The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race (better known as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society). With both Black and White members and leaders, the Society becomes a model for anti-slavery organizations in other states prior to the Civil War. Prominent African-American members include Robert Purvis, who is admitted as the society’s first Black member in 1842, and serves as its president from 1845 to 1850. He also helps found the American Anti-Slavery Society.

1775 Darby Vassall: A lesson about equality

Darby Vassall, a six-year-old formerly enslaved African American boy, gives General George Washington a lesson about the meaning of freedom and equality – by refusing to work for him unless he is paid.

The encounter takes place three months after the start of the Revolutionary War at the Cambridge, Massachusetts estate of John Vassall, a wealthy sugar baron and enslaver who is loyal to the British. Vassall and his family had fled to the comparative safety of nearby Boston – then still under British military control – and Washington decides to make Vassall’s abandoned mansion the headquarters of his revolutionary forces.

As the story goes, Washington finds a young Black boy swinging on the front gate. After being told that the boy “belongs to the place,” Washington offers to let Darby Vassall work for him. Darby asks what his wage will be, but Washington demurs: He thinks compensation is unreasonable. Later in life, Vassall remarks that Washington was “no gentleman, [wanting a] boy to work without wage.”

This house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, known as the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House, where young Darby Vassall had his encounter with George Washington. It was Washington’s headquarters for 10 months during the Revolutionary War, and later home to noted poet Henry Wadsworth Longellow for nearly 50 years. Source: Longfellow National Historic Site; Wikimedia.

George Washington goes on to conduct the Siege of Boston from his Cambridge headquarters, en route to helping secure independence for the new republic and becoming its first president. Darby Vassall’s childhood sense of justice portends a lifetime of activism in support of abolishing slavery, Black civil and political rights, and equal educational opportunities. He also becomes a valued member of the vibrant free Black community on Boston’s Beacon Hill.

In his early years, like many enslaved people, Darby experiences the anguish of family separation. He is one of six children of his mother, Cuba, who had been born into slavery in the Caribbean island of Antigua, and his father, Tony, a coachman enslaved by John Vassall, Henry Vassall’s uncle. Inter-marriage between members of the Vassall family and the Royall family – the latter amassed a fortune from slave-produced sugar in Antigua and owns a large, sprawling estate in Medford, Massachusetts – means that the two families’ enslaved “property” is periodically relocated according their whims and perceived needs. Cuba, Tony, and their children are divided between several different estates; in some cases separated only by the width of a street.

The departure of their enslavers after the outbreak of war gives the workers nominal freedom and allows them to reunite. Darby's family sets up home in a small dwelling on the Cambridge estate and raises food for their subsistence on three-quarters of an acre of land. But their legal status is in question: they are still legally enslaved.

In 1780, the Massachusetts General Court – which has authorized the seizure of properties abandoned by Loyalists – prepares to sell the John Vassall estate to private buyers. Tony and Cuba ask the General Court to allow them to remain on their small section of the estate, but their petition is denied and the family is evicted. (A second petition – for a pension – is successful: Tony is granted 12 pounds annually. When he dies in 1811 at age 98, the legislature pledges to pay Cuba 40 dollars annually; she passes away the following year.)

After the eviction, the family’s whereabouts for some years is unknown. Records show that eventually, in 1787, Cuba and Tony purchase a home in Cambridge, and later five acres of additional land. Tony works as a paid laborer, yeoman farmer, and farrier to support the family.

Their sons, Darby and Cyrus Vassall, move to Boston and buy a house on May Street (now Revere Street) on Beacon Hill. They become deeply involved in the free Black community there. In 1796, they and 42 others found the African Society, a mutual aid association. Darby is active in promoting African American rights, and joins activist Primus Hall in petitioning for a school for the neighborhood’s Black students. (Two decades later the Abiel Smith School, a segregated public school for African American children, is built on Beacon Hill.) Darby marries Lucy Holland in 1801 and they have eight children together. He works as a caterer for some of Boston’s oldest and wealthiest White families.

In 1844, Darby Vassall attends the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston, voting to advocate for the dissolution of the Union since the U.S. Constitution allows enslavers to “control the policy and character of this nation.” He attends the convention again in 1851. Seven years later, when Vassall is 88, he is invited to an event commemorating Black revolutionary history, including the death of Crispus Attucks, a formerly enslaved man of African and Native American (Nipmuc) descent, who had been killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre and is generally considered the first martyr of the American Revolution. Historians believe Vassall may have told the story of his encounter with George Washington at this event and others like it. He dies in 1861 at the age of 92.

Darby Vassall is not the only member of his family to leave a legacy of activism. His sister, Catherine, and her husband Adam Lewis, form the nucleus of a burgeoning Black community in Cambridge, Massachusetts known as “Lewisville.” Many Lewis family members are active in the abolition and civil rights movements, and Adam Lewis’s brother, Quaku Walker Lewis, is one of the founders of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, the country’s first Black abolitionist organization.

1776-1783 Service for freedom: thousands join British forces

This paint-on-silk flag, probably made in Boston, Massachusetts, was presented to the Bucks of America, an African American militia unit, by Massachusetts governor John Hancock to honor the militia's contribution to the Patriot cause. Source: Massachusetts Historical Society.

During the American Revolutionary War, an estimated 20,000 enslaved people flee bondage and join the British after being promised freedom in exchange for military service.

Meanwhile, between 5,000 and 8,000 African-descended people fight on the side of the colonists against the British. Among them are several pioneering Black abolitionists, including Lemuel Haynes, Prince Hall, his son Primus Hall, Peter Williams, James Forten, and Prince Whipple. Some colonial soldiers are enslaved and are compelled to fight in place of their enslavers.

Historians estimate that 100,000 African Americans escape, die, or are killed during the American Revolution. Native Americans, aware that the Revolution is as much a contest for Indian land as it is for liberty, choose sides accordingly. In New England, most tribes support their settler neighbors and fight with the colonial forces; elsewhere, Native tribes ally with the British or try to steer a neutral course as the best hope of protecting their homelands from the encroachments of American settlers and land speculators.

1776 Activist Black community forms in Boston

African Americans in Boston, Massachusetts begin to form their own small community on the North Slope of Beacon Hill.

One of the first residents is Colonel George Middleton who buys land with another Black man, Louis Glapion, on what is now Pinckney Street and builds a house. The two-family wood frame home – where Middleton and his wife, Elsie Marsh, raise four children – still stands today; it is considered the oldest surviving residence on Beacon Hill.

A skilled horse trainer who works as a coachman, Middleton is also a community leader and anti-slavery activist. He is among more than 5,000 African Americans to serve in the military on the Patriot side of the Revolutionary War. He leads the Boston-based Bucks of America, one of only two all-Black Patriot units, that is tasked with protecting local goods and property.

John Hancock, the first governor of Massachusetts, commemorates the company’s service with a presentation to Middleton of a white silk flag painted with his own initials J.H. and G.W. (for George Washington, a fellow founding father and first U.S. president).

Middleton is an early member of the African Lodge of Freemasons, a socially and politically active fraternal organization founded by activist Prince Hall, and one of the first Black civil institutions in the U.S. Middleton is appointed Grand Master of the lodge in 1809.

The George Middleton house at 5 Pinckney Street, Boston, 2020. Photo: Christle Rawlins-Jackson.

In 1796, Middleton helps organize The African Society, which assists Black widows and orphans through job placement and financial relief. Middleton also fights to secure financial support for Black schools while challenging the notion of segregated schools, and urging city authorities to provide equal educational opportunities for all.

One notable incident involving George Middleton is recorded by the White abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Local White boys armed with clubs are chasing terrified Black women and children through the streets of Beacon Hill, having mocked and disrupted the annual Black community festival on nearby Boston Common that celebrates the legal abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783. Child writes, “...Colonel Middleton opened his door, armed with a loaded musket and, in a loud voice, shrieked death to the first white who should approach.… Colonel Middleton’s voice could be heard above every other, urging his party to turn and resist to the last.” The crisis is defused with the help of two neighbors, one of whom is Lydia Maria Child’s father, David Francis.

George Middleton dies in 1815 at the age of 80. His house on Pinckney Street is featured on Boston’s Black Heritage Trail. Managed by the National Park Service, the Trail honors the historic homes, businesses, schools, and churches of the free Black community on Beacon Hill that was a driving force for abolition and civil rights.

1777 Vermont abolishes slavery; ban largely ignored

The "Freedom and Unity” motto is adopted in 1788 for use on the Great Seal of the Vermont Republic. It is designed by Ira Allen, younger brother of Ethan Allen, one of the founders of Vermont. Another brother, Levi, “owns” at least one enslaved person.

Vermont is the first state to officially abolish slavery, adopting a constitution that outlaws it as a violation of “natural, inherent and inalienable rights.” But imprecise wording and legal loopholes allow the state’s already-established slavery practices to continue for another 30 years.

Notably, the new constitution bans slavery only for adults, allowing any enslaver to continue to exploit Black children and teenagers – for up to 20 years in some cases. According to historian Harvey Amani Whitfield, that means that Black families can “easily be separated, or freed parents could have felt obligated to remain on their masters’ farms as inexpensive labor because they did not want to abandon children or younger relatives.”

Whitfield, author of The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777-1810, writes that the continuing existence of child slavery also provides Vermont enslavers with “ample time” to devise methods to sell those they hold in bondage to New Hampshire, New Jersey, Quebec, the Southern states, the Caribbean islands, and elsewhere.

Slavery continues in Vermont for nearly three decades after the advent of the state constitution. Enslavers – who include judges, military officers, and other leading citizens – brazenly flout the law by purchasing, selling, and “owning” enslaved people. The violators include Vermont Supreme Court Judge Stephen Jacob – who keeps an enslaved woman, Dinah, as a servant for 17 years – and Levi Allen, brother of Ethan Allen, the farmer, land speculator, and military leader who co-founded the state of Vermont.

Ethan Allen himself has two Black “servants” who work on his farm; it is not clear if they are enslaved or not. It is clear that his daughter, Lucy Caroline Hitchcock, brings two enslaved people, Lavinia Parker and her 12-year-old son, Francis, from Alabama to live with her when she returns to Burlington, Vermont in 1835. They continue to work for Hitchcock as enslaved persons for six years before Lavinia’s husband is able to purchase their freedom. (Markers honoring Lavinia and Francis Parker were installed on a Main Street sidewalk in Burlington in 2020.)

Part of the problem with Vermont’s slavery ban is lack of provisions to enforce it. And it is nine years before legislators take action to remedy that by passing An Act to Prevent the Sale and Transportation of Negroes and Mulattoes Out of this State in 1786. But the new law, which is aimed at blocking further out-of-state sales and kidnappings of African Americans, is limited in scope. It does not address the selling of enslaved people within Vermont or the question of enslaved children. Moreover, it fails to explain how suits can be brought to court and prosecuted.

Clearly, the selling and re-enslavement of Black people in the state continues: In 1806 Vermont lawmakers pass yet another measure to address the problem. An Act to Prevent Kidnapping is introduced “because stealing and selling black people became so noticeable and embarrassing that the government felt pressured to initiate action,” according to Whitfield.

In the late 18th century, Vermont has the smallest African American population of all the Northern states. An estimated 65 to 70 Black people are enslaved there in the colonial and early statehood eras, with enslavers – typically, lawyers, doctors, ministers, businessmen, and militia officers – each “owning” one or two African Americans. Like most of their counterparts in other New England states, enslaved people in Vermont often work on farms and in houses alongside their enslavers.

But even the few Black people in the state are more than enough for many White residents. Their racism is implicit in the Vermont Assembly’s strong support for any federal laws that would end the slave trade. “Embedded in [its] denunciation of the slave trade is an explicit wish to ban immigration of ‘people of color,’” writes Whitfield. “Most White Vermonters had limited contact with African Americans and they simply could not imagine how increasing numbers of free blacks could live in their communities and coexist.”

Racism and White supremacy also undergird attacks on Indigenous people in Vermont and the theft or forced dispossession of their ancestral lands. As part of a policy of extermination, colonial officials in New England offer bounties for the scalps of Native American men, women, and children. Between 1675 and 1760, officials issue more than 70 bounty proclamations, and pay cash rewards for the scalping – murder – by White militias and settlers of at least 375 Indigenous people, based on documentary evidence. The actual number is almost certainly much higher.

In the introduction to his study, Harvey Amani Whitfield writes that the end of slavery in Vermont “must be viewed as a long process that occurred over thirty years (1777-1810), during which time emancipation, slavery, freedom, racism, hopes for natural rights, re-enslavement, de facto slavery, and fleeting notions of black citizenship existed simultaneously. This created a remarkable context for race relations whereby Afro-Vermonters could achieve freedom and some aspects of meaningful citizenship, but also faced the persistent threat of slavery, kidnapping, and the bondage of their children.”

1777 Juno Larcom: Wins freedom after 46 years

After being enslaved for 46 years, Juno Larcom unilaterally and successfully “claims” freedom for herself and her children in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Born free in North Carolina to a Native American mother and African American father, Juno is kidnapped and subsequently sold into slavery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She ends up working for many years for a prominent Beverly landowner, David Larcom.

In 1774, in a courageous and unusual move, Juno takes her “owner” to court on charges of “trespass and assault.” She states that she and her family were “seized with Force of Arms & imprisonment, kept in Slavery against her will.” Larcom has already sold three of Juno’s 12 children to other enslavers – her sons, Sesar and Reuben, at aged 17 and 12 respectively, and her daughter, Flora, at about 14 – and Juno fears that Larcom will do likewise with one or more of her other children. She sues to stop him and to win freedom for her family. Juno is represented in court by lawyer and future U.S. president John Adams.

Her rare initiative is fraught with serious risk: If her lawsuit succeeds, Juno and her family may be unable to find work to support themselves as free people. If it fails, she would have to continue working for a man she has charged with attacking her and enslaving her and her family.

The last will and testament of Juno Larcom, dated April 9, 1816. Source: Massachusetts Wills and Probate Records 1635-1991.

For the next several months, Juno Larcom and her children are forced to wait for the court to decide their fate. Then, in April 1775, David Larcom dies. As a result, the court decides to dismiss Juno’s lawsuit without a finding, leaving Juno as the property of the Larcoms. In the aftermath of the court case, Juno unilaterally declares her freedom and that of her children, which is then uncontested by Larcom’s widow, Mary.

Because Juno and her children are now free, they cease to have monetary value as “property”: In David Larcom’s estate documents, their value is listed as zero.

For the rest of her days, Juno lives in a house on a half-acre of land deeded to her family adjacent to the Larcom farm. She and her family earn a living by weaving, doing laundry, and working in the fishing industry. Her husband, Jethro Thistle, who was enslaved on a neighboring farm in Beverly, is killed fighting the British in the Revolutionary War. Shortly before her death in 1816, at age 92, Juno bequeaths the property to her daughter Chloe, and “my long loose gown” to her daughter Flora.

1779 In New Hampshire, 20 enslaved Africans petition for freedom

Plaque honoring Prince Whipple on the Black Heritage Trail in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Prince Whipple, a servant of a New Hampshire Continental Army officer, and 19 other enslaved African-born men send a petition to the state legislature seeking emancipation.

In eloquent prose, they write that slavery is incompatible with "justice, humanity, and the rights of mankind." The petition is ignored but printed in the local newspaper “for [the] amusement” of its readers.

Born in Anomabu, a trading center in what is now Ghana, West Africa that also becomes a major slave-trading port, Prince Whipple and his brother Cuffee are sent by their comparatively wealthy parents to study in the United States.

The sea captain entrusted with escorting the two boys on their journey instead takes them to Baltimore, Maryland and sells them into slavery. They are purchased as house slaves by two men in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; one of the men, William Whipple, buys the 10-year-old he names Prince.

William Whipple is a ship’s captain and merchant, member of the Continental Congress, and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. He has made his fortune through the Triangular Trade – in his case, transporting wood, rum, textiles, enslaved people, and other cargo between West Africa, Britain’s Caribbean and American colonies, and European countries.

When the American Revolution starts, Whipple is assigned as a captain in the Continental Army and takes Prince with him. Initially, Prince serves as a bodyguard to Whipple because military regulations forbid Black people from serving in the army or militia. However, because of an increased need for military manpower, Prince eventually serves as a military aide to Whipple and as a soldier in the New Hampshire Militia.

In 1777, William Whipple is promoted to brigadier general and ordered to go to Vermont. Prince joins him, but challenges his position as a slave. He tells Whipple: "You are going to fight for your Liberty, but I have none to fight for." Whipple offers Prince his freedom if he will continue his military service. Prince agrees.

After the war is over, Prince returns to Portsmouth and Whipple grants him his rights as a freeman on February 22, 1781. On that same date, Prince marries his wife, Dinah, who had been enslaved in New Castle, New Hampshire and is also granted freedmen status by her “owner.”

But William Whipple does not sign Prince’s manumission paper – making him legally free – until 1784, three years later. After Whipple dies the following year, his widow honors his promise to provide a lifetime home for his servants. Prince is given a small plot of land on which he, Dinah, and his brother, Cuffee – with whom he has been reunited – build a house. They later convert the house into the Ladies Charitable African School for young children, and Dinah teaches there until her death.

Why, after being cheated of years of freedom, did Prince choose to live with his family in his former enslaver’s backyard? “The answer lies not in Prince Whipple’s misplaced feelings of loyalty,” writes historian Timothy Messer-Kruse in an article for Commonplace magazine, “but instead reveals the overwhelming danger and oppression that faced “free” black people in supposedly “free” northern states.

“Prince Whipple would have heard of many African American veterans like himself who were taken back into the ownership of a white man after they took off their uniform. The full story of the numbers and experiences of black Revolutionary War veterans forced back into slavery has never been told – quite the opposite – as their experiences don’t fit comfortably with the heroic storyline of the plucky patriots fighting for liberty.”

Messer-Kruse adds: “Free black men and women in the early years of the American republic knew that what little freedom and property they had could be stolen in an instant. Their survival often depended on cultivating the patronage and protection of powerful white men. Prince Whipple was painfully aware that the scope of his freedom did not extend beyond the ability of his namesake to intervene in the courts or with local officials on his behalf.”

Prince Whipple dies in Portsmouth in 1796. His military service is memorialized in two paintings by American artists. Both Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing The Delaware and Thomas Sully’s The Passage of The Delaware depict a Black soldier – purportedly Prince Whipple – beside General George Washington. The historical record indicates that Prince Whipple was elsewhere when the events visualized in the paintings took place. Leutz made his work 75 years later, and it appears unlikely that he knew about Whipple. Sully apparently did, and decided to incorporate him in his picture.

1779 Pompey Brakkee: Wins compensation from Vermont enslaver

In one of the earliest cases of reparations, an enslaved man named Pompey Brakkee successfully sues his Vermont enslaver and is awarded 412 pounds sterling – about $90,000 today.

Two years earlier Vermont had become the first state to officially abolish slavery as a violation of “natural, inherent and inalienable rights.” It is not clear when and how Brakkee learns about the abolition provision in the new state constitution. And surviving records do not document the exact nature of his civil complaint against his enslaver, Elijah Lovell (or Lovel), who is summoned to court three times without appearing.

But according to historian Harvey Amani Whitfield, author of The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777-1810, the complaint might have related to compensation for unpaid labor performed by Brakkee since slavery was outlawed.

Despite the official ban, slavery persists in Vermont for the next 30 years and abolition is a gradual process. Whitfield – who calls the award to Brakkee “astronomical” – says that his case demonstrates that Black people could challenge slavery if they knew it was illegal to enslave adults “and found a friendly court.”

He notes: “Pompey’s brave resistance to his owner might have encouraged other slaves to find ways to escape from bondage.”

Photograph of the vellum manuscript for the Constitution of Vermont, 1777. Source: Collection of the Vermont Historical Society.

1780-1787 Thousands starve after food imports cut

The Virgin Valley sugar plantation in Jamaica, circa 1780. Outbuildings depicted include the overseer's house, hospital or hot house, mill, and stables.

Source: “Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” by Barry W. Higman, National Library of Jamaica; slaveryimages.org.

Famine sweeps Caribbean sugar colonies because conditions created by the American Revolutionary War hamper delivery of food and other essentials. In Jamaica alone, an estimated 15,000 enslaved people starve to death.

The colonies have come to rely on food imports because planters devote virtually all their land to the highly lucrative production of sugar. This manufactured dependence is an economic boon to New England merchants, manufacturers, and farmers. On the eve of the American Revolution, almost 80 percent of the region’s overseas exports had gone to Britain's West Indies colonies, including Barbados, Jamaica, and Antigua.

In their book, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, journalists Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank describe how the Caribbean market “literally shaped New England.”

Huge quantities of flour, dried fish, corn, potatoes, fruit, onions, livestock, and timber from Northern forests are shipped to the islands. “And one needn’t be a rich landowner or merchant to join the trade,” they write. “Even a small farmer could sling a few bags of garden crops or bundles of winter-cut wood onto a dock and become part of this global venture.” Residents of the small Connecticut town of Wethersfield thrive on the cultivation of one backyard crop: Onions. As late as 1800, Wethersfield’s “red onion maidens” produce 100,000 five-pound ropes of onions, most destined for the West Indies.

In the Narragansett area of Rhode Island, landowners used enslaved labor on at least 10 plantations of 1,000 to 5,000 acres each to raise horses, cattle, and dairy cows for export to the West Indies market. Similar plantations are established in Connecticut. Further south, enslaved workers also toil to produce food that will feed their enslaved sisters and brothers more than 1,500 miles away in the Caribbean, whether on the 1,900-acre plantation of Lewis Morris, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, in what is now the Bronx, New York or on small plots and farms in rural New York and New Jersey.

1780 Black residents help win first abolition law

In Pennsylvania, the Gradual Abolition Act – the first extensive abolition legislation in the western hemisphere – becomes law.

To appease enslavers, the measure emancipates enslaved people gradually rather than freeing them immediately. Indeed, it allows the institution of slavery to survive, in various guises, for decades. The last enslaved Pennsylvanians are not legally freed until 1847.

The Act is supported and defended with petitions from free Black residents and by record numbers of enslaved people who vote with their feet by escaping from bondage. White Quaker abolitionists help shape and lobby for the new law.

Among its provisions, the Gradual Abolition Act changes the legal status of future children born to enslaved Pennsylvania mothers from "slave" to "indentured servant.” But it requires those children to work for the mother's “master” until age 28 before they can be free.

Indenture – unpaid labor for a set time by contract — blurs the boundaries between servitude and slavery. Its incorporation in the new law is a compromise to cushion the financial losses of enslavers. Historians estimate that some 2,000 people, mostly African Americans, are indentured in Philadelphia by 1800. Enslaved people born even one day before March 1, 1780, the date of the law’s passage, can still be kept in bondage for life.

The first page of Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act. Source: Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission.

In addition, the Act prohibits further importation of enslaved people into Pennsylvania, and creates a registry of all enslaved residents of the state to enforce the ban. Those who are not registered annually by November 1 automatically become free. Enslavers refuse to comply and counter by not registering their slaves, selling them to buyers in other states, and demanding a new law to re-enslave those who have been freed by their masters’ failure to register them.

In 1788, the Pennsylvania legislature amends the law in an effort to close loopholes that are being exploited by enslavers. The amendment prohibits transporting a pregnant enslaved woman to a slave state so that her child will be born enslaved, and from separating husbands from wives, and children from parents. It requires a Pennsylvania enslaver to register within six months the birth of a child to an enslaved mother. And all Pennsylvanians are prohibited from participating in, building or equipping ships for, or providing material support to, the slave trade.

However, even after passage of the 1788 amendment, some powerful enslavers, including President George Washington, continue to practice slavery in Philadelphia. They rotate their enslaved workers to and from out-of-state locations to avoid any of them being in Pennsylvania more than six months at a time – which would establish them as residents with a claim to freedom. These enslavers also make sure to never become primary residents of the state themselves, and thus be bound by Pennsylvania law regarding slavery. Philadelphia continues to be a popular second home for prominent Southern enslavers such as the Sargent family from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the Duncans of Pennsylvania, both originally from the North.

One of the nine enslaved workers in the Washingtons’ household in Philadelphia – then the nation’s capital – is Ona "Oney" Judge Staines, a woman of mixed race. In 1796, at the age of 23, Ona Judge Staines flees to New Hampshire after learning that the president’s wife, Martha Washington, plans to give her as a wedding present to a niece with a fierce temper.

The Washington family goes to considerable lengths to get Ona Judge Staines back – posting runaway advertisements in Philadelphia newspapers and even planning to kidnap her in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. But eventually they abandon these efforts because of the risk of public backlash. Although never freed by law, Ona Judge Staines lives the rest of her life in New Hampshire. She meets and marries Jack Staines, a free Black sailor, and they have three children.

Her story is told in detail by historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar in her bestselling book, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.

1781-1783 Massachusetts freedom suits are turning point

Miniature portrait of Elizabeth Freeman, a watercolor on ivory by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick, 1811. The painter was a descendant of Theodore Sedgwick, the lawyer who represented Elizabeth Freeman in her freedom suit.

Source: Massachusetts Historical Society.

Two historic and successful freedom suits by two enslaved African Americans, Quock (Kwaku) Walker and Mum Bett, mark a turning point in efforts to legally end slavery in Massachusetts.

In Walker’s case, his anti-slavery lawyer, Levi Lincoln, argues before the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, that slavery violates “the law of nature,” “the law of God,” and the Declaration of Independence.

Mum Bett’s lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick, himself an enslaver, makes the case that Massachusetts has never instituted slavery by law and the 1780 state constitution – which becomes a model for the U.S. constitution – in effect nullifies the practice in Massachusetts.

After gaining her freedom, Mum Bett renames herself Elizabeth Freeman and becomes a widely respected nurse. Before her death in 1829, she says: “Any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it – just to stand one minute on God’s airth a free woman – I would.”

Elizabeth Freeman, who had been enslaved by a lawyer and wealthy landowner in western Massachusetts, converts the influential Sedgwick family to abolition. In an abolitionist lecture in 1831, Theodore Sedgwick II – son of the lawyer who had represented her – says: “Having known this woman as familiarly as I knew either of my parents, I cannot believe in the moral or physical inferiority of the race to which she belonged.” His son, Theodore Sedgwick III, will defend the kidnapped Africans who rebel aboard the slave ship, La Amistad, in 1839 in a case that becomes a symbol of the abolitionist movement.

Elizabeth Freeman was the great-great-grandmother of W.E.B. Du Bois, the sociologist, author, and civil rights activist who co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

Some scholars dispute the significance commonly attached to the Mum Bett and Quock Walker cases. Neither case, observes researcher Edward L. Bell, instantly abolishes slavery in Massachusetts. Slavery, slavery-like arrangements, and the slave trade persist in Massachusetts for decades after the 1780 state Supreme Court ruling that slavery is inconsistent with the state constitution. It is not until 1836 that statewide judicial abolition of slavery is articulated in a judicial decision of record that has immediate and statewide legal effect.

Judicial emancipation progressively arrives in Massachusetts after more than a century of prior legal and political challenges to enslavement and slavery-like situations. These come in the form of petitions and lawsuits for freedom by Native American and African American people. Bell and another researcher, Emily Blanck, have compiled an extensive list of Massachusetts freedom suits from 1660 to 1784. Bell believes many more remain undiscovered in the archives.

In 2022, a bronze statue honoring Elizabeth Freeman is erected at the First Congregational Church in Sheffield, Massachusetts, not far from the Sedgwick home where she had worked as a servant and children’s governess after gaining her freedom. Local residents donate money to finance the statue and a scholarship fund in her name for area high school students.

1781 New Hampshire bans slavery, but full rights denied

New Hampshire adopts a state constitution that is construed as having abolished slavery, but abolition is not fully implemented until passage of an 1857 law that gives African Americans full citizenship rights.

Portsmouth, New Hampshire is a slave trading center in the early decades of the 18th century; slave ships built there carry enslaved Africans between Africa, Portsmouth, Virginia, and the West Indies. As elsewhere in the North, attrition during the Revolutionary War destroys slavery as a viable economic institution in New Hampshire.

Between 1773 and 1786, the recorded number of enslaved people in the state falls from 674 to 46. Many enslaved people are sold to states where slavery still flourishes. Others obtain freedom by escaping to Boston – where the occupying British have promised emancipation to any enslaved person who reaches their lines – or by serving in the colonists' Continental Army fighting the British. Bounties are paid to New Hampshire enslavers to free their enslaved workers for military service.

Flora Stewart was once enslaved by the Wilson family in Londonderry, New Hampshire. Although there are conflicting accounts of her actual age, Wilson’s grandson, Samuel Wilson Simpson, confirms that in 1867 Flora Stewart was at least 117 years old.

Source: New York Public Library.

1783 Belinda Sutton: Fights to be paid for 50 years in bondage

The Royall House in Medford, Massachusetts where Belinda Sutton was enslaved. Photographed on November 2, 1920. Source: Leon Abdalian Collection, Digital Commonwealth.

In what some scholars regard as the first call for reparations for U.S. slavery, Belinda Sutton, a formerly enslaved woman, petitions the Massachusetts legislature for a pension.

Her “master” is the wealthy landowner and slave trader Isaac Royall, Jr. who owns a 500-acre estate in Medford, Massachusetts and a sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of Antigua. After the American Revolution begins, Royall, who is loyal to Britain, flees to Nova Scotia and later to England, abandoning those he has enslaved who become free by default. Belinda Sutton is about 63 years old at the time.

In her petition, she asserts her right to compensation for her 50 years of unpaid service to her former “master.” Possibly drafted by Black community leader and activist Prince Hall, the eloquent petition contains few legal arguments; instead, Belinda Sutton uses it to describe her happy childhood and loving parents in her home village in what is now Ghana, West Africa; she contrasts that life-affirming experience with the trauma of her slave ship journey at the age of 12, and her subsequent lack of freedom and legal rights as an enslaved person.

In response, the Massachusetts legislature approves an annual pension of fifteen pounds and twelve shillings, to be paid from Royall’s estate. However, just one payment is made, and Sutton is compelled to renew her claim no less than five times over 10 years to secure missed payments. Her 1793 petition for a payment is the last known documentation of her life. The records indicate that, over the years, she receives only a portion of her agreed pension.

According to historian Margot Minardi, a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Royall House and Slave Quarters Museum, legislators who approved Sutton’s petition may have viewed it favorably because her pension would be paid out of the Royall estate rather than state coffers; they may also have felt genuine sympathy for her. But it is unlikely that they accepted her “reparationist reasoning.”

“Belinda presented herself as a ‘free moral agent,’ whose autonomy and independence had been unfairly compromised by Isaac Royall’s greed,” writes Minardi. “The legislators saw her not as an independent agent but as a profoundly dependent person: someone who relied on either her master or the state to ensure her own well-being. Their ideas of economic independence and free moral agency simply did not extend to an aging woman of color.”

Belinda Sutton is one of more than 60 enslaved Africans who work on the Royall estate during its history. There are no known records of others filing for pensions or other financial compensation from the estate. When they, like Belinda Sutton, become free by default, they have few resources with which to create a new life – no property, no wealthy kin to inherit from, and limited opportunities to make a living, in part because of racism. Nonetheless, history shows that African Americans exhibit great resilience and creativity in using their knowledge and skills to support and sustain themselves and their families in the most challenging circumstances.

1784 Black Freemasons spur activism, advance abolitionist cause

Abolitionist Prince Hall and 14 other free Black citizens establish the first lodge of African American Freemasons in Boston, Massachusetts and North America.

The new African Lodge No. 45 is also one of the first Black civil institutions in the U.S. These and other community-based organizations – such as African societies – form the foundation of an activist, advocacy, and mutual support network among free Black communities in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and other northern states.

Freemasonry preaches universal brotherhood and the unity of men regardless of beliefs, race, class, and skills. Many influential White people in Boston, and throughout the colonies, are deeply involved in Freemasonry, and Prince Hall likely sees it as a pathway to securing influence, leverage, and legitimacy as well as a web of supporters. In addition, being a freemason offers a degree of self-protection: In a world without stable passports or identification documents, participation in the order can provide proof of status as a free person.

Source: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

But White Masonic lodges refuse to admit Hall and his fellow African Americans as members. Undaunted by this racist treatment, they turn to British Masons stationed in the U.S. and join a British Army lodge before winning approval to establish their own lodge, named African Lodge No. 45. In addition to Hall, the founders are: Peter Best, Duff Buform, John Canton, Peter Freeman, Fortin Howard, Cyrus Johnbus, Prince Payden, Prince Rees, Thomas Sanderson, Bueston Slinger, Cato Speain, Boston Smith, Benjamin Tiber, and Richard Tilley.

By the time of Hall’s death in 1807, Black Freemasonry, or Prince Hall Lodges, have spread to Newport, Philadelphia, Providence, and New York. (Today, with over 300,000 initiated members, Prince Hall Freemasonry is the oldest and largest predominantly African-American fraternity in the nation.)

A prominent community leader, Hall helps forge an activist Black community in Boston while elevating the cause of abolition to new prominence. He writes and organizes a number of petitions to the Massachusetts legislature urging the abolition of slavery and the promotion of civil rights for African Americans. Indeed, he is believed to be the first American to publicly use the language of the Declaration of Independence for a political purpose other than justifying war against Britain.

In January 1777, just six months after the promulgation of the Declaration and nearly three years before the drafting of the state constitution, Hall submits a petition to the legislature, requesting emancipation. It is the first of many.

Over the years, he also protests the lack of schools for Black children and finally establishes one in his own home. He and other members of African Lodge No. 45 are also active in efforts to repatriate free and enslaved Africans back to Africa. In 1787, he writes an emigration petition, signed by 73 Black men, that proposes forming a “civil society, united by a political constitution,” to implement an emigration and resettlement plan.

Little is known about Prince Hall’s early years in Boston. His place of birth and his family heritage are contested. Historians variously claim that he was likely born in Boston; in Barbados of a free “colored” woman and an Englishman; or in England.

Documentary evidence indicates that Prince Hall was enslaved by William Hall, a Boston leather craftsman, during the late 1740s; it is known that Prince Hall also worked in the leather trade. But it is possible that he may have lived for a period as a freeman before being formally emancipated. In granting Prince Hall his freedom on April 9, 1770, William Hall and his family state that Prince Hall “has always been accounted as a freeman by us.” His 1807 death certificate states his age as 72, which would mean he was born in 1735. In 1756, Hall fathers a son named Primus; the child's mother, Delia, works as a servant in another household.

Prince Hall and Primus Hall, as well many of the original members of the African Masonic Lodge, serve in the colonial forces in the Revolutionary War, and he encourages other Black Americans to do likewise.

1784 Suicides as protest revive abolitionist group

Advertisement by Thomas Jaques, an enslaver and former school teacher in Gloucester, Massachusetts, offering a reward for the return of Titus, an escaped enslaved man. Source: Essex Gazette, October 31, 1769.

Two dramatic instances of Black protest re-energize the abolitionist movement in Pennsylvania. Two free Black men who are accused of being runaway slaves commit suicide rather than submit to enslavement.

The tragedies revive the moribund Society for the Relief of Free Negroes. Reorganized as the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, it provides legal representation to over 100 African Americans in a three-year period.

In 1787, the group is reconstituted yet again, this time as The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race. Members include Benjamin Franklin and other leading White citizens, as well as numerous lawyers, who are crucial in representing African Americans in the state’s courts and in implementing its emancipation laws.

The group also promotes Black education, and campaigns successfully for another law preventing enslavers from sending enslaved pregnant women out of state, selling enslaved people who are about to be freed to the South, and separating families. It also fights to restrict the slave trade.

1784 Rhode Island, Connecticut embrace gradual abolition

Rhode Island and Connecticut, two New England states with substantial investments in slavery, follow Pennsylvania’s road to abolition with similar gradual emancipation laws of their own.

They pass measures that free children of enslaved people born after March 1 of that year. In Connecticut, the children must serve their “masters” until the age of 25; in Rhode Island, until 21 for males and 18 for females.

Both states have earlier freed enslaved African Americans who have fought for American independence in the Continental Army, often as substitutes for their “masters.”

African Americans hasten the process of gradual emancipation by escaping, striking deals with their masters, and launching legal challenges.

It is 1843 before Rhode Island’s state constitution legally frees all remaining enslaved people; Connecticut (the northern state with the most enslaved people, over 5,000 before the Revolutionary War) does not completely abolish slavery by law until 1848.

“Remember Your Weekly Pledge” appears on a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society donation collection box, circa 1850. Source: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University; Wikimedia Commons.

1785 Racist persecution, Black resilience in famed forest

Brister Freeman’s burial site is neither marked nor known. This commemorative stone was installed at the Freeman family home site in 2011. Even in this public tribute, Brister Freeman is overshadowed by Henry David Thoreau, whose name appears in capital letters in larger type.

Source: The Robbins House, a nonprofit organization based in Concord, Massachusetts.

Brister Freeman and a fellow Black Revolutionary War veteran purchase land on which to build a home in a forested area of Concord, Massachusetts known as Walden Woods. Sixty years later the naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau goes to live in those same woods in an experiment in purported self-sufficiency – and sows the seeds of the modern conservation movement.

Born into slavery around 1744, Brister Freeman is separated from his mother at aged nine when his “owner” gives him to his son-in-law, John Cuming, as a wedding gift.

He works for Cuming, a Harvard-educated doctor, for 25 years and manages his estate before gaining his freedom through military service and changing his last name from Cuming to Freeman.

The land made available to formerly enslaved people in Massachusetts is generally marginal for farming, and Walden Woods at the time is no exception. Brister Freeman and his family – along with his sister, Zilpah White, with whom he is reunited – are among about 15 Black people who build small cabins there and eke out a meager existence as best they can.

In his book Walden, Thoreau makes reference to Brister Freeman and his family: “Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill lived Brister Freeman, ‘a handy Negro,’ slave of Squire Cummings once…. With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly – large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since.”

This patronizing and derogatory description belies the harsh reality of the Freemans and other Black families in Walden Woods who struggle to survive in the face of racist persecution and violence. By contrast, during his supposed spartan retreat – located just a mile from Concord town center – Thoreau has the luxury of taking a break from his contemplations at any time; for example, by dining with friends or family.

“We have a picture of Thoreau as a hermit in the deep woods,” writes Gregory McNamee, a contributing editor to the Encyclopedia Britannica, in a blog post, “but he lived … within close proximity [to] his mother, who did his laundry for him.”

In 1790, Concord town leaders confiscate Freeman’s one acre of land for his alleged failure to pay poll taxes; Thoreau later notes that the town took such action because Freeman was a “foreigner,” meaning a Black non-citizen. He is allowed to stay on the land but excluded from the town’s civic life. Soon after, the man with whom Freeman had bought the property dies of scurvy; Freeman’s daughter-in-law and two of his grandchildren also perish. Finally, in 1811, his wife, Fenda, dies of malnutrition, possibly due to a long-term lack of protein.

Freeman is determined to recover his land. He finds another romantic partner, Rachel Le Grosse, a White woman, whom he cannot legally marry. She buys back Freeman’s lost acre. But the hostility of some local White people towards this staunchly independent Black man continues. In one instance, they lock Freeman in a barn with a raging bull which he slays with an ax to save himself. Arsonists burn his sister Zilpah’s home to the ground.

In 1822, Brister Freeman dies in his 70s. Within a decade, few traces of Walden Woods’ historic Black community remain.

“Walden was a Black space before it was a green space,” says Elise Lemire, a professor of literature at Purchase College, State University of New York, and author of Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts, which chronicles the lives of the formerly enslaved people of Walden Woods. According to Lemire, who grew up in nearby Lincoln, Massachusetts, Freeman demonstrated “tenacity, persistence and creativity” in managing independently, with his wife, to raise his children and grandchildren on their small plot in Walden Woods and ward off starvation for decades. “What is more heroic than that?”

In 2011, The Robbins House, a Concord, Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization focused on raising awareness of Concord’s African American and anti-slavery history, installed a commemorative stone at the Freeman family home site.

In 2013, the Walden Woods Society and the Toni Morrison Society placed and dedicated a “Bench by the Road” on Brister’s Hill – the homesite of Brister Freeman – for visitors to ponder the lives of Freeman and the other Black people who had lived in the now-famous Walden Woods.

1787 Pact boosts power of slave states

The “three-fifths” compromise agreed by state delegates at the U.S. Constitutional Convention amplifies the political power of enslavers and their allies.

The agreement means that three-fifths of the enslaved population of the country is counted for the purposes of determining direct taxation and representation in the House of Representatives.

The compromise – and others regarding slavery – helps hold the new fragile union of states together, but many on both sides of the issue are opposed. Some Southern delegates argue that enslaved people should be fully counted, one for one, (even though they cannot vote). Northern opponents point out that the deal ensures that slave states have substantially more Congressional representatives – it will be 14 more in 1793 – than if the free White population alone is counted.

George Washington at the signing of the U.S. Constitution during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Painting by Janius Brutus Stearns, 1856. Source: Collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art.

Northern fears of unwarranted Southern power prove justified. Prior to the Civil War, slave states wield disproportionate influence on the Presidency, the Speakership of the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Supreme Court. By the 1830s, abolitionists are arguing that the compromise is a major reason for enslavers’ dominance of the federal government.

The three-fifths rule remains in force until passage of the post-Civil War 13th Amendment to the Constitution that frees all enslaved people in the United States; the 14th amendment that gives them full citizenship; and the 15th Amendment that grants Black men the right to vote (but not Black women or Native Americans.) Three-quarters of the states ratify the 13th Amendment in 1865, and the others eventually follow suit. Mississippi takes until 1995 to ratify the amendment and only makes it official in 2013 – 148 years after its passage.

The three-fifths deal is one of a series enacted by the Constitutional Convention. Notable among the others is a ban on slavery in the Northwest Territories, and an end to U.S. participation in the international slave trade, starting in 1807. The agreements reflect the overarching reality of the division between Northern and Southern states over slavery. Virginia Constitutional Convention delegate – and future U.S. President – James Madison observes that “…the States were divided into different interests not by their … size … but principally from their having or not having slaves.”

Slavery is widespread in the states at the time of the convention. At least a third of the 55 delegates are enslavers, including all those from Virginia and South Carolina. While enslaved people comprise about one-fifth of the population of the states, more than 90% of them live in the South, where approximately one in three families are enslavers. (In the largest and wealthiest state, Virginia, it is nearly one in two.) The entire agrarian economy of the South is based on enslaved labor, and the Southern delegates to the convention are unwilling to accept any proposal they believe will threaten the institution.

1787 Flawed ordinance bans slavery, ignites land grab

An ordinance map for governing U.S. territory northwest of the Ohio river. Source: Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

The Northwest Ordinance, the first national law to incorporate a ban on slavery, is enacted by the new Congress of the Confederation of the United States.

The ordinance, and two others passed in 1781 and 1785, are designed to politically organize and regulate White settlement in the area known today as the American Midwest, and to resolve the existing states’ competing claims to western lands.

The legislation creates the Northwest Territory out of some 260,000 square miles, comprising about one third of what is claimed as U.S. territory at the time. The states eventually formed from this area include Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota.

The lands in question are occupied by some 45,000 Native Americans, including the Delaware, Miami, Potawatomi, and Shawnee peoples, and a few thousand White settlers. The push by the U.S. government to gain control over these territories – despite assurances in the ordinance that the Indians’ “land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent” – leads to the 10-year Northwest Indian War that ultimately results in tribes ceding extensive swathes of land to the U.S. and a surge of land-hungry White settlers.

Under Article VI of the ordinance, slavery is prohibited in the Northwest Territory. Many historians contend that the ban, a last-minute addition that is adopted without congressional debate, is ambiguous, weak, and flawed. It lacks any enforcement provision, does not specify which organ of government would take action to end slavery, and provides no funds to do so.

According to historian Paul Finkelman in an article in The Journal of the Early Republic, Southern enslavers who dominate Congress support the measure because it tacitly implies that the Southwest will remain open to slavery – and without enslaved labor, Northwesterners won’t be able to compete with Southern planters in producing tobacco and indigo, among the most lucrative agricultural cash crops at the time. Enslavers also back the new law because it contains a fugitive slave clause requiring the return of enslaved workers who escape to free states.

But the final impetus for passage of the ordinance, for both northern and southern congressmen, is the potential for personal enrichment through the federal sale of five million acres of the Northwest Territory to a land company called Ohio and Associates.

The company’s Massachusetts-born founders and investors include Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tuppe, and James Mitchell Varney, all senior military officers in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and Winthrop Sargent, first governor of the Mississippi Territory. Congress desperately needs revenue to pay off the country’s war debts, and Manasseh Cutler, a lobbyist for Ohio and Associates and also a company co-founder, wins the votes of key congressmen by making them partners in the enterprise.

Three months after the Northwest Ordinance passes, the company finalizes the purchase from the government of an initial 1.5 million acres of land near present-day Marietta, Ohio for $1 million. Although the ordinance is designed to sell farmland to individual settlers, Congress is soon selling large tracts to land speculation companies to generate quicker and larger profits. Politicians and other government insiders help the companies secure favorable deals in return for a piece of the action.

The ordinance has little immediate impact on the legal status of enslaved people in the region. It is not until 1848 – 60 years after its passage – that slavery in the Northwest finally ends. In the interim, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 people remain in bondage.

According to Finkelman, the Northwest Ordinance has over the years become a symbol of the American revolution's supposed liberalism towards race, in part because it was the only important act by the national government under the Articles of Confederation that indicated disapproval of the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

Finkelman cites renowned British writer and critic Samuel Johnson, who famously chides the rebellious colonists during the American Revolution by asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Unfortunately, Finkelman writes, there were no comfortable answers to that question. “The American revolutionaries were trapped in an ideology of private property that made it almost impossible for them collectively to give up their own pursuit of happiness for the liberty of others. In the ordinance, the ideals of liberty came into conflict with the selfish happiness of the ruling race. Thus, the Congress could easily declare there would be no slavery in the Northwest Territory. It was quite another to eliminate the institution there.”

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