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âFor Zionâs Sake ⌠I Will Not Restâ
As the new year opened, a comet streaked across the Philadelphia sky. While scientific observers methodically plotted its âvery swiftâ movement, commoners wondered what omen this cosmic event heralded. A few weeks later, on February 14, 1760, at two oâclock in the morning, an enslaved child was born to a woman in the possession of a prosperous local attorney. Surely, no one could have predicted that the black babe, who later took the name Richard Allen, was what the comet had heralded. And yet, for African Americans over the next two centuries, Richard Allenâs birthday carried all the significance of prophecy. Lines from Isaiah 62:1, which a Philadelphia printer published on that very dayâFebruary 14, 1760âseemed tailor-made for Allenâs future: âFor Zionâs sake, I will not hold my peace, and for Jerusalemâs sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.â1
For the moment, Allenâs birth occurred in what to most contemporary observers would have been mundane circumstances. Philadelphia sat contentedly in the British Empire, colonial trade filled the cityâs merchant shops with the finest goods the world had to offer, and slavery was a normal part of colonial life in the City of Brotherly Love. âTo be sold,â an ad proclaimed in the Pennsylvania Gazette the day Allen came into the world, âa young healthy Negro fellow, country born, about 20 years old, has had the smallpox and measles, was brought up to country work. Enquire at the new printing office.â2 The big news of the day was the progress of what became known as the French and Indian War, which recently turned in favor of British forces. Other than intriguing occurrences (a comet, prophetic lines from the Bible) and news of another war between ancient rivals France and Great Britain, there was nothing auspicious about Allenâs birth year. If the biographer Douglas Egerton could write of Virginia slave rebel âGabrielâsâ nativity, âin the year 1776, a slave child was born to a lie,â the best one can say of Allen is that his birth year revealed a hard truth: servitude remained the lot for most blacks.3
Allen would spend the rest of his life overturning that supposed maxim.
1. âI Was Bornâ
Neither Allen nor any of his biographers have had much to say about his earliest years. âI was born,â Allen matter-of-factly began his autobiography, âa slave to Benjamin Chew, of Philadelphia. My mother and father and four of us children were then sold into Delaware state.â4 Allen said little about childhood slavery, the memory of being sold, or what his parents thought of bondage. But all his life, Allen recalled the constant struggle of bondpeople like himself to live, love, and somehow survive. Even after he secured his own freedom, Allen could not forget how horrible slavery had been. âI address you with an affectionate sympathy,â he wrote as a free man of thirty-four making his first public pronouncement to enslaved African Americans, âhaving been a slave and desirous of freedom as any of you.â Before he gained that freedom, Allen underscored just how âimpatientâ and even âdiscouragedâ slaves might become over their servile status.5 The daily drudgery of bondage tried his patience; separation from family membersâwhich occurred when his second master ran into financial difficulty later onâtried his soul. âSlavery is a bitter pill,â he famously wrote at the end of his life.6 No mere rhetorical flourish, Allen knew precisely the meaning of those words.
Beyond his bitter memory of bondage, Allenâs unwillingness to elaborate on his youth has proved vexing to historians. The simplest details remain obscure. Was Allen born in Philadelphia, as his autobiography suggested, or in Delaware, as new evidence might indicate? Both scenarios seem plausible, though neither is definitive.
Allenâs first master, Benjamin Chew (1722â1810), was a prominent attorney and magistrate who settled in Philadelphia in 1754 after having lived in Maryland and Delaware. Chew eventually became chief justice of colonial Pennsylvania. A gentleman of property and standing, he was what people in colonial society referred to as a âworthy.â Wealthy enough to own several impressive properties in both Delaware and Pennsylvania, Chew called an elegant mansion on Front Street his main Philadelphia home. Located just off the Delaware River, Front Street bustled with shops, merchants, and slaves. The London Coffeehouse, just down the street from Chewâs home and a prominent meeting place, served as an outdoor slave market. Chew and other prominent officials conducted business there, from buying and selling land to buying and selling slaves. If born in Philadelphia, a young Allen would have been familiar with the London Coffeehouseâs slave auction blocks. If he went by them, then like other members of the cityâs black community he probably observed harrowing scenesâpublic slave sales, families being separated, slave shackles protecting masters from slavesâ tendency to run.7
Chewâs slaveholdings varied, but, as one historian has put it, he âbought and sold slavesâ his entire life.8 Like other worthies, he viewed slave labor as a critical part of estate building, no matter the size or locale. In urban areas like Philadelphia, this meant utilizing slaves as porters, butlers, cooks, and laborers in fancy homes. In the Pennsylvania (and Delaware) countryside, this meant using slaves to clear the land, build houses and barns, and tend to crops. Richard Allen and his family were thus bound to a man who viewed bondage as vital to business, society, and culture in a place already known as the City of Brotherly Love.
Because Pennsylvania did not ban bondage until after American independenceâand because Allen claimed to be born âa slave to Benjamin Chew, of Philadelphiaâ and then âsold into Delaware stateâ (emphasis added)âit is not hard to imagine Allenâs enslaved family roots beginning in colonial Philadelphia. Yet a compelling case can also be made for Allenâs Delaware birth. In this scenario, he was born in Kent County, Delaware, on one of Benjamin Chewâs three plantations. All of Chewâs Delaware properties contained sizable numbers of enslaved people, and only a small number of the over three hundred known Chew slaves ever resided (or were born) in the Philadelphia area. Perhaps Whitehall plantation, one of Delawareâs largest, was Allenâs first home. According to Phillip Seitz, curator of history at Cliveden, Benjamin Chewâs one-time summer home in Germantown, Pennsylvania (and now a nicely restored National Trust Historic Site), Allen may have been born of a fieldhand at Whitehall. Indeed, Allenâs autobiography never mentioned his parentsâ or his own domestic service under Chew, a possible sign that he was not born of a house servant in Philadelphia (Chew rarely moved house servants from Philadelphia to Delaware or fieldhands from Delaware to Philadelphia). So Allenâs Delaware birth is possible.9
The major problem with this scenario is documentation. There were a few male slaves born on Chew plantations in 1760âthere was a âCatoâ at Whitehall and another âCatoâ at a nearby plantationâbut no enslaved person named âNegro Richardâ or anyone with Allenâs exact birthday of February 14.10 Was Allen misremembering things and actually born in 1757 or 1762, dates corresponding to other male slave births on Chew properties in Delaware? This is unlikely, for Richard Allenâs second master, Stokeley Sturgis, also claimed that Allen was born on February 14, 1760.11 So perhaps Allen was an anomaly in Chewâs holdings and was born in Philadelphia, beyond the more rigorous plantation documentation of Chewâs Delaware properties.
For the Allen biographer, this is only the first of many such quandaries. Where was the great preacher born? When did he leave a segregated Philadelphia church and inaugurate Bethel? Why did he rename himself âRichard Allenâ upon gaining freedom? Allen never offered insightful answers to any of these queries. Taken together, these gaps underline the problem of deciphering the life of any African American person of that time, even so vaunted a figure as Allen. Lacking control of their own bodies, and denied information about their surroundings, enslaved people like Allen could scarcely be expected to track their own lives with precision. Then, too, there is the matter of Allenâs personality. He was convinced that private details mattered little in oneâs lifeâonly the public man, and good works, could fully measure oneâs worth. Allenâs autobiography, conceived in the early nineteenth century after the former slave became the nationâs first black bishop, focused little on the gaps in his historical record and more on his historic accomplishments beyond bondage.
Despite a paucity of conclusive evidence, we can reconstruct parts of Allenâs youth in colonial and then Revolutionary Philadelphia and Delaware, not to mention the world as it then existed for an enslaved person in both urban and rural bondage. Let us begin by placing Allen with his first master, Benjamin Chew, in Philadelphia during the early 1760s, as Allen himself would have it. Allen lived with Chew until perhaps the age of eight, which means that he may have resided in Philadelphia during the 1760s, a key era for enslaved people in this mid-Atlantic locale. Within the British Empire, Philadelphia stood tall: it was the third-largest city under British rule, not to mention one of colonial North Americaâs financial hubs and an intellectual capital as well. On any day of the week, a person visiting Philadelphiaâs wharves would find ships from around the worldâAntigua and Barbados in the Caribbean, London and Belfast in the British Isles, Charleston and Boston in the colonies. One could purchase fine linens from the mother country; teas from the Dutch East Indies; books, pamphlets, and newspapers from most other parts of the world; and just about anything else one could want.12
For a short period of time in the 1760s, Philadelphians desired African slaves. Philadelphia was not colonial Americaâs central slave-trading portâthat honor went to Charleston, South Carolinaâbut it did serve as a slave depot for the middle-Atlantic region, stretching from southern New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania through Delaware and Maryland. Between 1759 and 1766, Philadelphia merchants and slave owners imported the largest number of slaves in the cityâs historyâover one thousand Africans. This trend, prompted by a shortage of white indentured servants following the Seven Yearsâ War between England and France, did not last. By the 1770s, slave imports trickled to a near halt. Still, by 1767, the city contained roughly fifteen hundred people of African descent, or roughly 7.5 percent of colonial Philadelphia. Fewer then one hundred black persons (just fifty-seven) could call themselves free. So Allen and his family would have been like the majority of Philadelphia blacks: they belonged to someone else.13
Although Pennsylvania had a reputation as a liberal colony, slavery had deep roots. Like colonies southward, Pennsylvania laws clearly defined bondage: only black colonials could be slaves for life. Richard Allen was born a slave because his mother had been enslaved. And so it was for thousands of other enslaved blacks, in the colonial North as well as the colonial South.
Just how many enslaved people existed in the Quaker State? Exact numbers remain difficult to come by, but at the time of Allenâs birth the colony contained perhaps as many as fifteen thousand slaves (a number that fell drastically by the 1780s). In the Pennsylvania countryside, slaves worked wheat fields, cleared land, and labored at countless miscellaneous activities. A visitor from, say, colonial Virginia or South Carolina (or from the British Caribbean) would not have been surprised to find slaves in Pennsylvania; such a visitor would have noticed, however, that few of rural Pennsylvaniaâs slaveholders owned great numbers of bondpeople. Whereas South Carolina rice plantations could hold hundreds of slaves, a large Pennsylvania plantation might contain only seven.14
Richard Allen was born into, and matured in, a world that accepted slavery. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey embraced bondage; so too did Rhode Island and New York, colonies that contained the highest percentages of slaves above the Mason-Dixon line.15 In Allenâs Philadelphia, artisans, not merely wealthy men like Benjamin Chew, owned slaves. In fact, roughly one of every five families had slaves. But per capita slave holdings remained relatively low: urban dwellers owned fewer than five and quite often only one or two slaves. In this regard, slaves were indicators of status. We know that wealthy folks like Chew used slaves in a variety of ways, from launderers to laborers. But what did slaves do for artisans and merchants? They did nearly everythingâloaded wagons, built homes and storefronts, cut wood, served as cooks, cartmen, and cleaners. Absalom Jones, a Delaware slave who journeyed to Philadelphia with his master during the second half of the eighteenth century, worked in a dry-goods store, filling stock, hauling goods, and generally doing as told. Jones was quite lucky, though, for his master allowed him to attain literacy skills and attend Anthony Benezetâs Quaker school.16
Despite slaveryâs legal and cultural standing, some Pennsylvania masters were haunted by a looming idea: bondage was a sin. Pennsylvania Quakers took the first antislavery measures on the North American continent in 1758 by banning slave trading; they subsequently banned slaveholding too. The Society of Friends formed an antislavery vanguard thereafter, providing the foundation of the worldâs first organized antislavery group, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. During Allenâs youth, however, Quakers remained a minority of slaveryâs critics.17
The eighteenth century also witnessed a flowering of black resistance and achievement, as enslaved people ran away in increasing numbers, mastered literacy, and sought to redeem the very word âAfrican.â Phyllis Wheatley, John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, Agrippa Hull, Prince Hallâthis new generation of African-descended people began building a trans-Atlantic freedom struggle centered on the notion of black humanity. Take Venture Smith: born in 1729 in Africa, Smith was captured and sold into New World bondage while just a boy. He purchased his freedom in 1765, having chopped so much wood, threshed so much grain, and labored so hard that he could also set his sights on buying his wife and two sons. But Smith was not content with his own freedom. To prove bondage was thievery, he wrote one of the first American-style slave narratives during the 1790s. âIâve made considerable money,â Smith recalled bitterly, âand paid an enormous sum for my freedom.â18
Allen imbibed strength from nascent black-freedom movements. As a free man, Allen incorporated the term âAfricanâ into a host of fledgling black enterprises: the âFree African Society,â a black mutual-aid group formed in 1787; the âAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church,â an autonomous African American religious organization, formed in the early 1790s; the âAfrican Society for the Education of Youth,â formed in 1804. When Allen discovered in 1807 that white religious leaders had craftily conceived legal documents undermining his own churchâs autonomy, he wrote a rebuttal of their actions entitled simply the âAfrican Supplement.â Like Venture Smith, Allenâs belief in African redemption was fueled at an early age.
Despite the heroic struggles of black activists in Allenâs time, and the humanitarian inroads of antislavery Quakers, bondage was still nasty, brutish, and anything but short for Pennsylvaniaâs enslaved population. For most white colonials, the word âAfricanâ still connoted slavery. And before Allen made it out of his youth, he discovered another of slaveryâs wicked little rules: he was chattelâa movable commodity.
2. Delaware
Around 1768, Allen and his family were sold south to one of Benjamin Chewâs Delaware neighbors, a middling farmer named Stokeley Sturgis. Located in Dover, in the fertile Delaware River Valley, Sturgisâs farm was part of a thriving agricultural economy that included not only the cash crop of tobacco but also a range of staple products like wheat, rye, and corn. Farmers in the Delaware Valley enjoyed ready river access to the principal urban market in the area (Philadelphia), not to mention parts of Maryland and Virginia. Abundant forest products (timber for barrel staves) supplemented Delawareansâ agricultural production.19
The archives are silent on why Benjamin Chew sold the Allens. We know that he ran into financial troubles and, further...