Freedom's Prophet
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Freedom's Prophet

Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

Richard S. Newman

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eBook - ePub

Freedom's Prophet

Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

Richard S. Newman

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About This Book

An Interview with the Author on the History News Network

A Founding Father with a Vision of Equality: Richard Newman's op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer

Author Spotlight in The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

"Gold" Winner of the 2008 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, Biography Category

Freedom's Prophet is a long-overdue biography of Richard Allen, founder of the first major African-American church and the leading black activist of the early American republic. A tireless minister, abolitionist, and reformer, Allen inaugurated some of the most important institutions in African-American history and influenced nearly every black leader of the nineteenth century, from Douglass to Du Bois.

Allen (1760–1831) was born a slave in colonial Philadelphia, secured his freedom during the American Revolution, and became one of the nations leading black activists before the Civil War. Among his many achievements, Allen helped form the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, co-authored the first copyrighted pamphlet by an African American writer, published the first African American eulogy of George Washington, and convened the first national convention of black reformers. In a time when most black men and women were categorized as slave property, Allen was championed as a black hero. As Richard S. Newman writes, Allen must be considered one of America's black Founding Fathers.

In this thoroughly engaging and beautifully written book, Newman describes Allen's continually evolving life and thought, setting both in the context of his times. From Allen's early antislavery struggles and belief in interracial harmony to his later reflections on black democracy and black emigration, Newman traces Allen's impact on American reform and reformers, on racial attitudes during the years of the early republic, and on the black struggle for justice in the age of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington. Whether serving as Americas first black bishop, challenging slaveholding statesmen in a nation devoted to liberty, or visiting the President's House (the first black activist to do so), this important book makes it clear that Allen belongs in the pantheon of Americas great founding figures. Freedom's Prophet reintroduces Allen to today's readers and restores him to his rightful place in our nation's history.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2008
ISBN
9780814758526

1

“For Zion’s Sake … I Will Not Rest”

As the new year opened, a comet streaked across the Philadelphia sky. While scientific observers methodically plotted its “very swift” movement, commoners wondered what omen this cosmic event heralded. A few weeks later, on February 14, 1760, at two o’clock 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 Allen’s birthday carried all the significance of prophecy. Lines from Isaiah 62:1, which a Philadelphia printer published on that very day—February 14, 1760—seemed tailor-made for Allen’s future: “For Zion’s sake, I will not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.”1
For the moment, Allen’s birth occurred in what to most contemporary observers would have been mundane circumstances. Philadelphia sat contentedly in the British Empire, colonial trade filled the city’s 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. “To be sold,” an ad proclaimed in the Pennsylvania Gazette the day Allen came into the world, “a 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.”2 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 Allen’s birth year. If the biographer Douglas Egerton could write of Virginia slave rebel “Gabriel’s” nativity, “in the year 1776, a slave child was born to a lie,” 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. “I Was Born”

Neither Allen nor any of his biographers have had much to say about his earliest years. “I was born,” Allen matter-of-factly began his autobiography, “a slave to Benjamin Chew, of Philadelphia. My mother and father and four of us children were then sold into Delaware state.”4 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. “I address you with an affectionate sympathy,” he wrote as a free man of thirty-four making his first public pronouncement to enslaved African Americans, “having been a slave and desirous of freedom as any of you.” Before he gained that freedom, Allen underscored just how “impatient” and even “discouraged” slaves might become over their servile status.5 The daily drudgery of bondage tried his patience; separation from family members—which occurred when his second master ran into financial difficulty later on—tried his soul. “Slavery is a bitter pill,” 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, Allen’s 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.
Allen’s first master, Benjamin Chew (1722–1810), 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 “worthy.” 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 Chew’s 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 Coffeehouse’s slave auction blocks. If he went by them, then like other members of the city’s black community he probably observed harrowing scenes—public slave sales, families being separated, slave shackles protecting masters from slaves’ tendency to run.7
Chew’s slaveholdings varied, but, as one historian has put it, he “bought and sold slaves” 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 independence—and because Allen claimed to be born “a slave to Benjamin Chew, of Philadelphia” and then “sold into Delaware state” (emphasis added)—it is not hard to imagine Allen’s enslaved family roots beginning in colonial Philadelphia. Yet a compelling case can also be made for Allen’s Delaware birth. In this scenario, he was born in Kent County, Delaware, on one of Benjamin Chew’s three plantations. All of Chew’s 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 Delaware’s largest, was Allen’s first home. According to Phillip Seitz, curator of history at Cliveden, Benjamin Chew’s 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, Allen’s autobiography never mentioned his parents’ 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 Allen’s Delaware birth is possible.9
The major problem with this scenario is documentation. There were a few male slaves born on Chew plantations in 1760—there was a “Cato” at Whitehall and another “Cato” at a nearby plantation—but no enslaved person named “Negro Richard” or anyone with Allen’s 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 Allen’s second master, Stokeley Sturgis, also claimed that Allen was born on February 14, 1760.11 So perhaps Allen was an anomaly in Chew’s holdings and was born in Philadelphia, beyond the more rigorous plantation documentation of Chew’s 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 “Richard Allen” 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 Allen’s personality. He was convinced that private details mattered little in one’s life—only the public man, and good works, could fully measure one’s worth. Allen’s autobiography, conceived in the early nineteenth century after the former slave became the nation’s 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 Allen’s 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 America’s financial hubs and an intellectual capital as well. On any day of the week, a person visiting Philadelphia’s wharves would find ships from around the world—Antigua 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 America’s central slave-trading port—that honor went to Charleston, South Carolina—but 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 city’s history—over one thousand Africans. This trend, prompted by a shortage of white indentured servants following the Seven Years’ 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 Allen’s 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 Pennsylvania’s 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 Allen’s 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 everything—loaded 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 Benezet’s Quaker school.16
Despite slavery’s 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 world’s first organized antislavery group, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. During Allen’s youth, however, Quakers remained a minority of slavery’s 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 “African.” Phyllis Wheatley, John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, Agrippa Hull, Prince Hall—this 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. “I’ve made considerable money,” Smith recalled bitterly, “and paid an enormous sum for my freedom.”18
Allen imbibed strength from nascent black-freedom movements. As a free man, Allen incorporated the term “African” into a host of fledgling black enterprises: the “Free African Society,” a black mutual-aid group formed in 1787; the “African Methodist Episcopal Church,” an autonomous African American religious organization, formed in the early 1790s; the “African Society for the Education of Youth,” formed in 1804. When Allen discovered in 1807 that white religious leaders had craftily conceived legal documents undermining his own church’s autonomy, he wrote a rebuttal of their actions entitled simply the “African Supplement.” Like Venture Smith, Allen’s belief in African redemption was fueled at an early age.
Despite the heroic struggles of black activists in Allen’s time, and the humanitarian inroads of antislavery Quakers, bondage was still nasty, brutish, and anything but short for Pennsylvania’s enslaved population. For most white colonials, the word “African” still connoted slavery. And before Allen made it out of his youth, he discovered another of slavery’s wicked little rules: he was chattel—a movable commodity.

2. Delaware

Around 1768, Allen and his family were sold south to one of Benjamin Chew’s Delaware neighbors, a middling farmer named Stokeley Sturgis. Located in Dover, in the fertile Delaware River Valley, Sturgis’s 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 Delawareans’ agricultural production.19
The archives are silent on why Benjamin Chew sold the Allens. We know that he ran into financial troubles and, further...

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