Interviewees:
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Kate Melchior
- Associate Director of Educator Engagement and Outreach, Massachusetts Historical Society
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Heather Wilson
- Assistant Director for K-12 Learning, Massachusetts Historical Society
Massachusetts's African American community—both free and enslaved—responded to the Declaration through a sustained, strategic campaign of freedom petitions. At least eight petitions reached the legislature between 1773 and 1777, all using the same natural-rights language then shaping colonial resistance. The January 13, 1777 petition, primarily authored by Prince Hall, called for an immediate end to slavery, arguing that every principle upon which America had acted against Britain pleaded stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of the petitioners' own freedom. Signed also by Peter Bestes, Lancaster Hill, Bristol Spencer, and others, it underscored the inconsistency of patriots fighting for liberty while holding people in bondage. The campaign did not achieve immediate emancipation, but it propelled statewide debates about citizenship and contributed to the legal momentum, beginning with Mumbet’s freedom lawsuit in the early 1780s, that eventually ended slavery in Massachusetts.
