"We Expect Great Things": Puritanism, Black Petitioning, and the Origins of American Abolitionism

In January 1773 Massachusetts slaves submitted the first of four petitions during the 1770s to the legislature of the colony requesting their release from bondage. Around the same time writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Caesar Sarter began to attack both slavery and the slave trade in print. While many scholars have discussed these individual writers and the petitioning campaign of Boston’s blacks as an example of the ways in which subordinate groups used the rhetoric of Revolution to advance their own claims, this paper argues that the advent of black petitioning and other forms of antislavery writing in the colony represents the beginning of the organized abolitionist movement in America. Two years before the formation of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society a group of slaves in Boston organized themselves into a committee to achieve their goal of abolishing slavery. The very fact of these slaves being able to organize owed to the greater privileges extended to Africans under the 1646 Body of Liberties, a Puritan legal code heavily influenced by strictures in the Old Testament that spelled out certain rights that slaves enjoyed. And the rhetoric that both individual writers and the petitioners employ throughout their entreaties to the legislature displays the influence of Puritan religious ideology on their political thought. By taking advantage of the greater rights they enjoyed under a Puritan legal system and extending the scope of Puritan theology for the purposes of abolition, African Americans in Massachusetts became central to achieving the abolition of slavery within their own state and spurring the development of the larger northern antislavery movement.