Chez Lopez
Neo-Abolitionist
Excellent, whole post. Come to find out that everything, absolutely everything, this coutry does has us at the center.
Disputed 1619 project was CORRECT, Slavery WAS key to US Revolution; Gerald Horne proved in 2014
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
Excellent, whole post. Come to find out that everything, absolutely everything, this coutry does has us at the center.
A Forgotten Black Founding Father
A Forgotten Black Founding Father
Why I’ve made it my mission to teach others about Prince Hall
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Massachusetts abolished enslavement before the Treaty of Paris brought an end to the American Revolution, in 1783. The state constitution, adopted in 1780 and drafted by John Adams, follows the Declaration of Independence in proclaiming that all “men are born free and equal.” In this statement Adams followed not only the Declaration but also a 1764 pamphlet by the Boston lawyer James Otis, who theorized about and popularized the familiar idea of “no taxation without representation” and also unequivocally asserted human equality. “The Colonists,” he wrote, “are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.” In 1783, on the basis of the “free and equal” clause in the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, the state’s chief justice, William Cushing, ruled enslavement unconstitutional in a case that one Quock Walker had brought against his enslaver, Nathaniel Jennison.
Many of us who live in Massachusetts know the basic outlines of this story and the early role the state played in standing against enslavement. But told in this traditional way, the story leaves out another transformative figure: Prince Hall, a free African American and a contemporary of John Adams. From his formal acquisition of freedom, in 1770, until his death, in 1807, Hall helped forge an activist Black community in Boston while elevating the cause of abolition to new prominence. Hall was 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 Adams drafted the state constitution, Hall submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature (or General Court, as it is styled) requesting emancipation, invoking the resonant phrases and founding truths of the Declaration itself.
Here is what he wrote (I’ve put the echoes of the Declaration of Independence in italics):
In this passage, Hall invokes the core concepts of social-contract theory, which grounded the American Revolution, to argue for an extension of the claim to equal rights to those who were enslaved. He acknowledged and adopted the intellectual framework of the new political arrangements, but also pointedly called out the original sin of enslavement itself.
Hall’s memory was vigorously kept alive by members and archivists of the Masonic lodge he founded, and his name can be found in historical references. But his life has attracted fresh attention in recent years from scholars and community leaders, both because he deserves to be widely known and celebrated and because inserting his story into the tale of the country’s founding exemplifies the promise of an integrated way of studying and teaching history. It’s hard enough to shine new light on an African American figure who has been long in the shadows, one who in important ways should be considered an American Founder. It can prove far more difficult to trace an individual’s “relationship tree” and come to understand that person, in a granular and even cinematic way, in the full context of his or her own society: family, school, church, civic organizations, commerce, government. Doing so—especially for figures and communities that have been overlooked—gives us a chance to tell a whole story, to weave together multiple perspectives on the events of our political founding into a single, joined tale. It also provides an opportunity to draw out and emphasize the agency of people who experienced oppression and domination. In the case of Prince Hall, the process of historical reconstruction is still under way.
When I was a girl, I used to ask what there was to know about the experience of being enslaved—and was told by kind and well-meaning teachers that, sadly, the lack of records made the question impossible to answer. In fact, the records were there; we just hadn’t found them yet. Historical evidence often turns up only when one starts to look for it. And history won’t answer questions until one thinks to ask them.
John Adams and Prince Hall would have passed each other on the streets of Boston. They almost certainly were aware of each other. Hall was no minor figure, though his early days and family life are shrouded in some mystery. Probably he was born in Boston in 1735 (not in England or Barbados, as some have suggested). It is possible that he lived for a period as a freeman before he was formally emancipated. He may have been one of the thousands of African Americans who fought in the Continental Army; his son, Primus, certainly was. As a freeman, Hall became for a time a leatherworker, passed through a period of poverty, and then ultimately ran a shop, from which he sold, among other things, his own writings advocating for African American causes. Probably he was not married to every one of the five women in Boston who were married to someone named Prince Hall in the years between 1763 and 1804, but he may have been. Whether he was married to Primus’s mother, a woman named Delia, is also unclear. Between 1780 and 1801, the city’s tax collectors found their way to some 1,184 different Black taxpayers. Prince Hall and his son appear in those tax records for 15 of those 21 years, giving them the longest period of recorded residence in the city of any Black person we know about in that era. The DePaul University historian Chernoh M. Sesay Jr.’s excellent dissertation, completed in 2006, provides the most thorough and rigorously analyzed academic review of Hall’s biography that is currently available. (The dissertation, which I have drawn on here, has not yet been published in full, but I hope it will be.)
Hall was a relentless petitioner, undaunted by setbacks. When Hall submitted his 1777 petition, co-signed by seven other free Black men, to the Massachusetts legislature, he was building on the efforts of other African Americans in the state to abolish enslavement. In 1773 and 1774, African Americans from Bristol and Worcester Counties as well as Boston and its neighboring towns put forward six known petitions and likely more to this end. Hall led the formation of the first Black Masonic lodge in the Americas, and possibly in the world. The purpose of forming the lodge was to provide mutual aid and support and to create an infrastructure for advocacy. Fourteen men joined Hall’s lodge almost surely in 1775, and in the years from then until 1784, records reveal that 51 Black men participated in the lodge. Through the lodge’s history, one can trace a fascinating story of the life of Boston’s free Black community in the final decades of the 18th century.
Why did Hall choose Freemasonry as one of his life’s passions? Alonza Tehuti Evans, a former historian and archivist of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia, took up that question in a 2017 lecture. Hall and his fellow lodge members, he explained, recognized that many of the influential people in Boston—and throughout the colonies—were deeply involved in Freemasonry. George Washington is a prominent example, and symbolism that resonates with Masonic meaning adorns the $1 bill to this day. Hall saw entrance into Freemasonry as a pathway to securing influence and a network of supporters.
Hall submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature requesting emancipation, invoking the resonant phrases and founding truths of the Declaration of Independence.
In a world without stable passports or identification documents, participation in the order could provide proof of status as a free person. It offered both leverage and legitimacy—as when Prince Hall and members of his lodge, in 1786, offered to raise troops to support the commonwealth in putting down Shays’s Rebellion.
In the winter and spring of 1788, Hall was leading a charge in Boston against enslavers who made a practice of using deception or other means to kidnap free Black people, take them shipboard, and remove them to distant locations, where they would be sold into enslavement. He submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature seeking aid—asking legislators to “do us that justice that our present condition requires”—and publicized his petition in newspapers in Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.
In the summer of that year, a newspaper circulated an extract of a letter from a prominent white Bostonian who had assisted Hall on this very matter. The unnamed author of the letter reports that he had been visited by a group of free Black men who had been kidnapped in Boston and had recently been emancipated and returned to the city. They were escorted to his house by Hall, and they told the story of their emancipation. One of the men who had been kidnapped was a member of Hall’s Masonic lodge. Carried off to the Caribbean and put on the auction block, the kidnapped men found that the merchant to whom they were being offered was himself a Mason. Mutual recognition of a shared participation in Freemasonry put an end to the transaction and gave them the chance to recover their freedom.
A Forgotten Black Founding Father
Why I’ve made it my mission to teach others about Prince Hall
Massachusetts abolished enslavement before the Treaty of Paris brought an end to the American Revolution, in 1783. The state constitution, adopted in 1780 and drafted by John Adams, follows the Declaration of Independence in proclaiming that all “men are born free and equal.” In this statement Adams followed not only the Declaration but also a 1764 pamphlet by the Boston lawyer James Otis, who theorized about and popularized the familiar idea of “no taxation without representation” and also unequivocally asserted human equality. “The Colonists,” he wrote, “are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.” In 1783, on the basis of the “free and equal” clause in the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, the state’s chief justice, William Cushing, ruled enslavement unconstitutional in a case that one Quock Walker had brought against his enslaver, Nathaniel Jennison.
Many of us who live in Massachusetts know the basic outlines of this story and the early role the state played in standing against enslavement. But told in this traditional way, the story leaves out another transformative figure: Prince Hall, a free African American and a contemporary of John Adams. From his formal acquisition of freedom, in 1770, until his death, in 1807, Hall helped forge an activist Black community in Boston while elevating the cause of abolition to new prominence. Hall was 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 Adams drafted the state constitution, Hall submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature (or General Court, as it is styled) requesting emancipation, invoking the resonant phrases and founding truths of the Declaration itself.
Here is what he wrote (I’ve put the echoes of the Declaration of Independence in italics):
The petition of A Great Number of Blackes detained in a State of Slavery in the Bowels of a free & christian Country Humbly shuwith that your Petitioners Apprehend that Thay have in Common with all other men a Natural and Unaliable Right to that freedom which the Grat — Parent of the Unavese hath Bestowed equalley on all menkind and which they have Never forfuted by Any Compact or Agreement whatever — but thay wher Unjustly Dragged by the hand of cruel Power from their Derest frinds and sum of them Even torn from the Embraces of their tender Parents — from A popolous Plasant And plentiful c*ntry And in Violation of Laws of Nature and off Nations And in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity Brough hear Either to Be sold Like Beast of Burthen & Like them Condemnd to Slavery for Life.
Hall’s memory was vigorously kept alive by members and archivists of the Masonic lodge he founded, and his name can be found in historical references. But his life has attracted fresh attention in recent years from scholars and community leaders, both because he deserves to be widely known and celebrated and because inserting his story into the tale of the country’s founding exemplifies the promise of an integrated way of studying and teaching history. It’s hard enough to shine new light on an African American figure who has been long in the shadows, one who in important ways should be considered an American Founder. It can prove far more difficult to trace an individual’s “relationship tree” and come to understand that person, in a granular and even cinematic way, in the full context of his or her own society: family, school, church, civic organizations, commerce, government. Doing so—especially for figures and communities that have been overlooked—gives us a chance to tell a whole story, to weave together multiple perspectives on the events of our political founding into a single, joined tale. It also provides an opportunity to draw out and emphasize the agency of people who experienced oppression and domination. In the case of Prince Hall, the process of historical reconstruction is still under way.
When I was a girl, I used to ask what there was to know about the experience of being enslaved—and was told by kind and well-meaning teachers that, sadly, the lack of records made the question impossible to answer. In fact, the records were there; we just hadn’t found them yet. Historical evidence often turns up only when one starts to look for it. And history won’t answer questions until one thinks to ask them.
John Adams and Prince Hall would have passed each other on the streets of Boston. They almost certainly were aware of each other. Hall was no minor figure, though his early days and family life are shrouded in some mystery. Probably he was born in Boston in 1735 (not in England or Barbados, as some have suggested). It is possible that he lived for a period as a freeman before he was formally emancipated. He may have been one of the thousands of African Americans who fought in the Continental Army; his son, Primus, certainly was. As a freeman, Hall became for a time a leatherworker, passed through a period of poverty, and then ultimately ran a shop, from which he sold, among other things, his own writings advocating for African American causes. Probably he was not married to every one of the five women in Boston who were married to someone named Prince Hall in the years between 1763 and 1804, but he may have been. Whether he was married to Primus’s mother, a woman named Delia, is also unclear. Between 1780 and 1801, the city’s tax collectors found their way to some 1,184 different Black taxpayers. Prince Hall and his son appear in those tax records for 15 of those 21 years, giving them the longest period of recorded residence in the city of any Black person we know about in that era. The DePaul University historian Chernoh M. Sesay Jr.’s excellent dissertation, completed in 2006, provides the most thorough and rigorously analyzed academic review of Hall’s biography that is currently available. (The dissertation, which I have drawn on here, has not yet been published in full, but I hope it will be.)
Hall was a relentless petitioner, undaunted by setbacks. When Hall submitted his 1777 petition, co-signed by seven other free Black men, to the Massachusetts legislature, he was building on the efforts of other African Americans in the state to abolish enslavement. In 1773 and 1774, African Americans from Bristol and Worcester Counties as well as Boston and its neighboring towns put forward six known petitions and likely more to this end. Hall led the formation of the first Black Masonic lodge in the Americas, and possibly in the world. The purpose of forming the lodge was to provide mutual aid and support and to create an infrastructure for advocacy. Fourteen men joined Hall’s lodge almost surely in 1775, and in the years from then until 1784, records reveal that 51 Black men participated in the lodge. Through the lodge’s history, one can trace a fascinating story of the life of Boston’s free Black community in the final decades of the 18th century.
Why did Hall choose Freemasonry as one of his life’s passions? Alonza Tehuti Evans, a former historian and archivist of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia, took up that question in a 2017 lecture. Hall and his fellow lodge members, he explained, recognized that many of the influential people in Boston—and throughout the colonies—were deeply involved in Freemasonry. George Washington is a prominent example, and symbolism that resonates with Masonic meaning adorns the $1 bill to this day. Hall saw entrance into Freemasonry as a pathway to securing influence and a network of supporters.
Hall submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature requesting emancipation, invoking the resonant phrases and founding truths of the Declaration of Independence.
In a world without stable passports or identification documents, participation in the order could provide proof of status as a free person. It offered both leverage and legitimacy—as when Prince Hall and members of his lodge, in 1786, offered to raise troops to support the commonwealth in putting down Shays’s Rebellion.
In the winter and spring of 1788, Hall was leading a charge in Boston against enslavers who made a practice of using deception or other means to kidnap free Black people, take them shipboard, and remove them to distant locations, where they would be sold into enslavement. He submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature seeking aid—asking legislators to “do us that justice that our present condition requires”—and publicized his petition in newspapers in Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.
In the summer of that year, a newspaper circulated an extract of a letter from a prominent white Bostonian who had assisted Hall on this very matter. The unnamed author of the letter reports that he had been visited by a group of free Black men who had been kidnapped in Boston and had recently been emancipated and returned to the city. They were escorted to his house by Hall, and they told the story of their emancipation. One of the men who had been kidnapped was a member of Hall’s Masonic lodge. Carried off to the Caribbean and put on the auction block, the kidnapped men found that the merchant to whom they were being offered was himself a Mason. Mutual recognition of a shared participation in Freemasonry put an end to the transaction and gave them the chance to recover their freedom.
part 2:
Prince Hall’s work on abolition and its enforcement was just the beginning of a lifetime of advocacy. Disillusioned by how hard it was to secure equal rights for free Black men and women in Boston, he submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature seeking funds to assist him and other free Blacks in emigrating to Africa. That same year, he also turned his energies to advocating for resources for public education. Through it all, his Masonic membership proved both instrumental and spiritually valuable.
Founding the lodge had not been easy. Although Hall and his fellows were most likely inducted into Freemasonry in 1775, they were never able to secure a formal charter for their lodge from the other lodges in Massachusetts: Prejudice ran strong. Hall and his fellows had in fact probably been inducted by members of an Irish military lodge, planted in Boston with the British army, who had proved willing to introduce them to the mysteries of the order. Hall’s lodge functioned as an unofficial Masonic society—African Lodge No. 1—but received a formal charter only after a request was sent to England for a warrant. The granting of a charter by the Grand Lodge of England finally arrived in 1787.
In seeking this charter, Hall had written to Masons in England, lamenting that lodges in Boston had not permitted him and his fellows a full charter but had granted a permit only to “walk on St John’s Day and Bury our dead in form which we now enjoy.” Hall wanted full privileges, not momentary sufferance. In this small detail, though, we gain a window into just how important even the first steps toward Masonic privileges were. In the years before 1783 and full abolition of enslavement in Massachusetts, Black people in the state were subjected to intensive surveillance and policing, as enslavers sought to keep their human property from slipping away into the world of free Blacks. Membership in the Masons was like a hall pass—an opportunity to have a parade as a community, to come out and step high, without harassment. That’s what it meant to walk on Saint John’s Day—June 24—and to hold funeral parades for the dead.
Whether that stepping-out day remained June 24 is unclear. As Sesay writes, “Boston blacks, including Prince Hall, first applied to use Faneuil Hall in 1789 to hear an ‘African preacher.’ On February 25, 1789, the Selectmen accepted the application of blacks to use Faneuil Hall for ‘public worship.’ ” By 1820, the walk on Saint John’s Day appears to have become African Independence Day and was celebrated on July 14, Bastille Day, much to the displeasure of at least one newspaper. An unattributed column in the New-England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine complained about the annual parade in recognizably racist tones (the mention of “Wilberforce” at the end is a reference to William Wilberforce, the British campaigner against enslavement):
For all of what we now know to be Prince Hall’s importance, I learned of him only recently. In 2015 the National Archives held a conference about the Declaration of Independence, inspired by my own research on the document. At the conference, another colleague presented a paper on how abolitionists had been the first people to make use of the Declaration for political projects other than the Revolution itself. A few months earlier I had come across the passage from Hall’s 1777 petition that I shared above, and that so beautifully resonates with the Declaration; at that conference, I suddenly learned the important political context in which it fit. I had published a book on the Declaration of Independence—Our Declaration—in 2014, but until the spring of 2015, I had never heard of Hall.
Yet I have been studying African American history since childhood. When I was in high school, my school didn’t do anything to celebrate Black History Month. My father encouraged me to take matters into my own hands and propose to the school that I might curate a weekly exhibit on one of the school’s bulletin boards. The school was obliging. It offered me the one available bulletin board—in a dark corner in the farthest remove of the school’s quads. This was not the result of malice, just of a lack of attention to the stakes. But I was glad to have access to that bulletin board, and I dutifully filled it with pictures of people like Carter G. Woodson and Mary McLeod Bethune and Thurgood Marshall, and with excerpts from their writings.
I am deeply aware of how much historical treasure about Black America is hidden, and have been actively trying to seek it out. While I was on the faculty of the University of Chicago, I helped found the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, a network of archival organizations in Chicago dedicated to connecting “all who seek to document, share, understand and preserve Black experiences.” And while I was at Chicago—somewhat in the spirit of that old bulletin board—I curated an exhibit for the special-collections department of the campus library on the 45 African Americans who’d earned a doctorate at the university prior to 1940—the largest number of doctorates awarded to African Americans up to that time by any institution in the world. Even so, I had not known about Prince Hall.
Having discovered Hall at the ridiculous age of 43, I have since made it a mission to teach others about him. At Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, we have undertaken a major initiative to develop civic-education curricula and resources. Among the largest projects is a year-long eighth-grade course called “Civic Engagement in Our Democracy.” One of the units in that course is centered on Hall’s life. Through him and his exploration of the meaning of social contracts and natural rights, and of opportunity and equality, we teach the philosophical foundations of democracy, reaching through Hall to texts that he also drew on, and whose authors are required reading for eighth graders in Massachusetts—for instance, Aristotle, Locke, and Montesquieu. These writers and thinkers were important figures to Freemasons in Hall’s time.
Too much treasure remains buried, living mainly in oral histories, not yet integrated into our full shared history of record. That history can strike home in unexpected ways. Not long ago, I was talking with my father about Prince Hall and the curriculum we were developing. His ears pricked up. Only then did I learn that my grandfather, too, had been a member of the Prince Hall Freemasons.
Prince Hall’s work on abolition and its enforcement was just the beginning of a lifetime of advocacy. Disillusioned by how hard it was to secure equal rights for free Black men and women in Boston, he submitted a petition to the Massachusetts legislature seeking funds to assist him and other free Blacks in emigrating to Africa. That same year, he also turned his energies to advocating for resources for public education. Through it all, his Masonic membership proved both instrumental and spiritually valuable.
Founding the lodge had not been easy. Although Hall and his fellows were most likely inducted into Freemasonry in 1775, they were never able to secure a formal charter for their lodge from the other lodges in Massachusetts: Prejudice ran strong. Hall and his fellows had in fact probably been inducted by members of an Irish military lodge, planted in Boston with the British army, who had proved willing to introduce them to the mysteries of the order. Hall’s lodge functioned as an unofficial Masonic society—African Lodge No. 1—but received a formal charter only after a request was sent to England for a warrant. The granting of a charter by the Grand Lodge of England finally arrived in 1787.
In seeking this charter, Hall had written to Masons in England, lamenting that lodges in Boston had not permitted him and his fellows a full charter but had granted a permit only to “walk on St John’s Day and Bury our dead in form which we now enjoy.” Hall wanted full privileges, not momentary sufferance. In this small detail, though, we gain a window into just how important even the first steps toward Masonic privileges were. In the years before 1783 and full abolition of enslavement in Massachusetts, Black people in the state were subjected to intensive surveillance and policing, as enslavers sought to keep their human property from slipping away into the world of free Blacks. Membership in the Masons was like a hall pass—an opportunity to have a parade as a community, to come out and step high, without harassment. That’s what it meant to walk on Saint John’s Day—June 24—and to hold funeral parades for the dead.
Whether that stepping-out day remained June 24 is unclear. As Sesay writes, “Boston blacks, including Prince Hall, first applied to use Faneuil Hall in 1789 to hear an ‘African preacher.’ On February 25, 1789, the Selectmen accepted the application of blacks to use Faneuil Hall for ‘public worship.’ ” By 1820, the walk on Saint John’s Day appears to have become African Independence Day and was celebrated on July 14, Bastille Day, much to the displeasure of at least one newspaper. An unattributed column in the New-England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine complained about the annual parade in recognizably racist tones (the mention of “Wilberforce” at the end is a reference to William Wilberforce, the British campaigner against enslavement):
This is the day on which, for unaccountable reasons or for no reasons at all, the Selectmen of Boston, permit the town to be annually disturbed by a mob of negroes … The streets through which this sable procession passes are a scene of noise and confusion, and always will be as long as the thing is tolerated. Quietness and order can hardly be expected, when five or six hundred negroes, with a band of music, pikes, swords, epaulettes, sashes, cocked hats, and standards, are marching through the principal streets. To crown this scene of farce and mummery, a clergyman is mounted in their pulpit to harangue them on the blessings of independence, and to hold up for their admiration the characters of “Masser Wilberforce and Prince Hall.”
Well after Hall’s death, the days for stepping out continued in Boston—an expression of freedom and the claiming of a rightful place in the polity. The lodge that Hall founded continued too. It is the oldest continuously active African American association in the U.S., with chapters now spread around the country. Its work in support of public education has endured. In the 20th century the Prince Hall Freemasons made significant contributions to the NAACP, in many places hosting the first branches of the organization. In the 1950s alone, the group donated more than $400,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (equivalent to millions of dollars today). Thurgood Marshall was a member.
For all of what we now know to be Prince Hall’s importance, I learned of him only recently. In 2015 the National Archives held a conference about the Declaration of Independence, inspired by my own research on the document. At the conference, another colleague presented a paper on how abolitionists had been the first people to make use of the Declaration for political projects other than the Revolution itself. A few months earlier I had come across the passage from Hall’s 1777 petition that I shared above, and that so beautifully resonates with the Declaration; at that conference, I suddenly learned the important political context in which it fit. I had published a book on the Declaration of Independence—Our Declaration—in 2014, but until the spring of 2015, I had never heard of Hall.
Yet I have been studying African American history since childhood. When I was in high school, my school didn’t do anything to celebrate Black History Month. My father encouraged me to take matters into my own hands and propose to the school that I might curate a weekly exhibit on one of the school’s bulletin boards. The school was obliging. It offered me the one available bulletin board—in a dark corner in the farthest remove of the school’s quads. This was not the result of malice, just of a lack of attention to the stakes. But I was glad to have access to that bulletin board, and I dutifully filled it with pictures of people like Carter G. Woodson and Mary McLeod Bethune and Thurgood Marshall, and with excerpts from their writings.
I am deeply aware of how much historical treasure about Black America is hidden, and have been actively trying to seek it out. While I was on the faculty of the University of Chicago, I helped found the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, a network of archival organizations in Chicago dedicated to connecting “all who seek to document, share, understand and preserve Black experiences.” And while I was at Chicago—somewhat in the spirit of that old bulletin board—I curated an exhibit for the special-collections department of the campus library on the 45 African Americans who’d earned a doctorate at the university prior to 1940—the largest number of doctorates awarded to African Americans up to that time by any institution in the world. Even so, I had not known about Prince Hall.
Having discovered Hall at the ridiculous age of 43, I have since made it a mission to teach others about him. At Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, we have undertaken a major initiative to develop civic-education curricula and resources. Among the largest projects is a year-long eighth-grade course called “Civic Engagement in Our Democracy.” One of the units in that course is centered on Hall’s life. Through him and his exploration of the meaning of social contracts and natural rights, and of opportunity and equality, we teach the philosophical foundations of democracy, reaching through Hall to texts that he also drew on, and whose authors are required reading for eighth graders in Massachusetts—for instance, Aristotle, Locke, and Montesquieu. These writers and thinkers were important figures to Freemasons in Hall’s time.
Too much treasure remains buried, living mainly in oral histories, not yet integrated into our full shared history of record. That history can strike home in unexpected ways. Not long ago, I was talking with my father about Prince Hall and the curriculum we were developing. His ears pricked up. Only then did I learn that my grandfather, too, had been a member of the Prince Hall Freemasons.
washingtonpost.com
The Declaration’s dual traditions: Broad equality, and equality for whites
By Danielle Allen Danielle Allen Bio Follow July 2, 2015
7-8 minutes
Peter Drummey, chief reference librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, points to a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence. (Shiho Fukada/Bloomberg)
Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post.
This Fourth of July, like the preceding weeks, will be painful, following the Charleston massacre — a devastating example of the lofty ideal of human equality’s failure to take root in a human heart. Many would say, as many have said to me, that taking the ideals of the Declaration of Independence too seriously is a mistake, because the men who signed it didn’t. These folks say that I should be more clear-eyed about revolutionary hypocrisy. I counter that we should be more clear-eyed about how the Declaration launched two political traditions in this country: one for broad equality, and one for an equality limited to whites.
As the men of 1776 approached their fateful break from Britain, they argued over the proper orienting ideal for government: property or happiness? On the side of happiness were John dikkinson, the only slave owner in the Continental Congress to free his slaves after the summer of 1776, and John Adams, who never owned slaves, who considered slavery wrong and whose wife, Abigail, hired free black laborers in the spring of 1776. On the side of property were the Virginians, among them Thomas Jefferson.
In the fall of 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, proclaimed that any slave who escaped and fought for the British would earn freedom. The Virginians had been slower to tip toward revolution, and Dunmore’s proclamation radicalized them. They castigated the British for an alleged violation of the “right of property” entailed by the promise of freedom to their slaves.
When the Virginians began work on their Constitution in May 1776, they compromised. George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights invoked both property and happiness.
But when it came to the Declaration of Independence itself, happiness won. This was a compromise of a different order — a suppression of the pro-slavery position. We can assume the language worked, because happiness is an open-ended term. Advocates of the pro-slavery position will have had to imagine themselves included in it. And yet the absence in the Declaration of the core term of their defense, a right to property, constituted a pregnant silence.
Abolitionists recognized this immediately. In Boston in January 1777, Prince Hall, a free African American, submitted a petition to the Massachusetts Assembly seeking abolition in Massachusetts. Building on the language of the Declaration, he wrote: “[Negroes] have, in common with all other Men, a natural and unalienable right to that freedom, which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind.” Their enslavement, he wrote, was a “violation of the laws of nature and of nation.”
Hall was not alone. As literary historian Eric Slauter argued at a recent National Archives conference, in the years after 1776, quotation of the Declaration’s resounding celebration of rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was generally the province of abolitionists. Indeed, the first legal moves to abolish slavery relied on the language of the Declaration. In 1777, Vermont wrote in its constitution:
“[A]ll men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights, amongst which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty: acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Therefore, no male person, born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person, as a servant, slave, or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one years; nor female, in like manner, after she arrives to the age of eighteen years.”
Having accepted full human equality and explicitly rejected the use of the property right to defend slavery, Vermont’s legislators could embrace property as well as happiness. Massachusetts did the same in its 1780 Constitution, which also drew on the Declaration’s language. Its constitution supported a successful 1781 suit for freedom by the aptly named Elizabeth Freeman. A few months later, Massachusetts Chief Justice William Cushing instructed a jury that the state constitution had outlawed slavery, an interpretation the state’s Supreme Court affirmed in 1783.
Yet a pro-slavery states’ rights position also flowed out of the Declaration. The latter, pro-slavery tradition was incorporated into the union by means of the famous compromises in the Constitution but also through similar moves in the drafting of Declaration. Congress cut from the committee’s draft of the Declaration a condemnation of King George for protecting the slave trade.
The stark contrast between the two traditions reached its apex with the Civil War, when Lincoln reached back to the Declaration in his Gettysburg Address to rededicate the country to the cause of equality. The Confederacy took the opposite stance, vigorously repudiating the Declaration. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, wrote both that the original union “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races,” and that the Confederacy “is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”
It’s a mistake to paint the whole of the tradition of the Declaration in the colors of one interest.
To see that there is an anti-slavery tradition emanating from the Declaration as early as 1777 is not, however, the end of the matter. With his petition, Prince Hall, who fought at Bunker Hill, sought not freedom merely but political equality. Following the full logic of the Declaration’s self-evident truths, he sought his rights not only to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but also to participate as a member of “the people” in instituting government to secure society’s safety and happiness. In 1786, he offered to supply Massachusetts’ governor with 700 men to help quash Shay’s Rebellion but was rebuffed. Two months later he submitted a very different kind of petition to the assembly, this time seeking assistance for himself and 65 other African Americans to leave their “very disagreeable and disadvantageous circumstances” and to return to Africa.
For 18th-century African American freedom seekers, freedom alone was never the whole goal; equal empowerment was and is the promised land. This is the opposite of what the signs of the Confederacy stood and stand for. This country has many traditions. Some should be discarded.
The Declaration’s dual traditions: Broad equality, and equality for whites
By Danielle Allen Danielle Allen Bio Follow July 2, 2015
7-8 minutes
Peter Drummey, chief reference librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, points to a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence. (Shiho Fukada/Bloomberg)
Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post.
This Fourth of July, like the preceding weeks, will be painful, following the Charleston massacre — a devastating example of the lofty ideal of human equality’s failure to take root in a human heart. Many would say, as many have said to me, that taking the ideals of the Declaration of Independence too seriously is a mistake, because the men who signed it didn’t. These folks say that I should be more clear-eyed about revolutionary hypocrisy. I counter that we should be more clear-eyed about how the Declaration launched two political traditions in this country: one for broad equality, and one for an equality limited to whites.
As the men of 1776 approached their fateful break from Britain, they argued over the proper orienting ideal for government: property or happiness? On the side of happiness were John dikkinson, the only slave owner in the Continental Congress to free his slaves after the summer of 1776, and John Adams, who never owned slaves, who considered slavery wrong and whose wife, Abigail, hired free black laborers in the spring of 1776. On the side of property were the Virginians, among them Thomas Jefferson.
In the fall of 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, proclaimed that any slave who escaped and fought for the British would earn freedom. The Virginians had been slower to tip toward revolution, and Dunmore’s proclamation radicalized them. They castigated the British for an alleged violation of the “right of property” entailed by the promise of freedom to their slaves.
When the Virginians began work on their Constitution in May 1776, they compromised. George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights invoked both property and happiness.
But when it came to the Declaration of Independence itself, happiness won. This was a compromise of a different order — a suppression of the pro-slavery position. We can assume the language worked, because happiness is an open-ended term. Advocates of the pro-slavery position will have had to imagine themselves included in it. And yet the absence in the Declaration of the core term of their defense, a right to property, constituted a pregnant silence.
Abolitionists recognized this immediately. In Boston in January 1777, Prince Hall, a free African American, submitted a petition to the Massachusetts Assembly seeking abolition in Massachusetts. Building on the language of the Declaration, he wrote: “[Negroes] have, in common with all other Men, a natural and unalienable right to that freedom, which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind.” Their enslavement, he wrote, was a “violation of the laws of nature and of nation.”
Hall was not alone. As literary historian Eric Slauter argued at a recent National Archives conference, in the years after 1776, quotation of the Declaration’s resounding celebration of rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was generally the province of abolitionists. Indeed, the first legal moves to abolish slavery relied on the language of the Declaration. In 1777, Vermont wrote in its constitution:
“[A]ll men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights, amongst which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty: acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Therefore, no male person, born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person, as a servant, slave, or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one years; nor female, in like manner, after she arrives to the age of eighteen years.”
Having accepted full human equality and explicitly rejected the use of the property right to defend slavery, Vermont’s legislators could embrace property as well as happiness. Massachusetts did the same in its 1780 Constitution, which also drew on the Declaration’s language. Its constitution supported a successful 1781 suit for freedom by the aptly named Elizabeth Freeman. A few months later, Massachusetts Chief Justice William Cushing instructed a jury that the state constitution had outlawed slavery, an interpretation the state’s Supreme Court affirmed in 1783.
Yet a pro-slavery states’ rights position also flowed out of the Declaration. The latter, pro-slavery tradition was incorporated into the union by means of the famous compromises in the Constitution but also through similar moves in the drafting of Declaration. Congress cut from the committee’s draft of the Declaration a condemnation of King George for protecting the slave trade.
The stark contrast between the two traditions reached its apex with the Civil War, when Lincoln reached back to the Declaration in his Gettysburg Address to rededicate the country to the cause of equality. The Confederacy took the opposite stance, vigorously repudiating the Declaration. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, wrote both that the original union “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races,” and that the Confederacy “is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”
It’s a mistake to paint the whole of the tradition of the Declaration in the colors of one interest.
To see that there is an anti-slavery tradition emanating from the Declaration as early as 1777 is not, however, the end of the matter. With his petition, Prince Hall, who fought at Bunker Hill, sought not freedom merely but political equality. Following the full logic of the Declaration’s self-evident truths, he sought his rights not only to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but also to participate as a member of “the people” in instituting government to secure society’s safety and happiness. In 1786, he offered to supply Massachusetts’ governor with 700 men to help quash Shay’s Rebellion but was rebuffed. Two months later he submitted a very different kind of petition to the assembly, this time seeking assistance for himself and 65 other African Americans to leave their “very disagreeable and disadvantageous circumstances” and to return to Africa.
For 18th-century African American freedom seekers, freedom alone was never the whole goal; equal empowerment was and is the promised land. This is the opposite of what the signs of the Confederacy stood and stand for. This country has many traditions. Some should be discarded.
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Petition for freedom (manuscript copy) to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives, [13] January 1777
MHS Collections Online: Petition for freedom (manuscript copy) to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives, [13] January 1777
In this petition, "A Great Number of Blackes" of Massachusetts state their case for freedom, suggesting that such is the natural right of all people. This is a manuscript copy of a petition. The official copy that was submitted to the legislature (and is part of the Massachusetts Archives) dated 13 January 1777 has been attributed to Prince Hall (1735-1807) and signed by Hall and seven other free black men. It is possible that this document was based on an earlier draft petition (see online display of Petition for freedom to Governor Hutchinson).
MHS Collections Online: Petition for freedom (manuscript copy) to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives, [13] January 1777
In this petition, "A Great Number of Blackes" of Massachusetts state their case for freedom, suggesting that such is the natural right of all people. This is a manuscript copy of a petition. The official copy that was submitted to the legislature (and is part of the Massachusetts Archives) dated 13 January 1777 has been attributed to Prince Hall (1735-1807) and signed by Hall and seven other free black men. It is possible that this document was based on an earlier draft petition (see online display of Petition for freedom to Governor Hutchinson).
Can someone break this down to me real quick, cause I'm wondering why CACS are so mad about this and making posts on social media about this?
Did they lie about history again or did America really become established when our ancestors were brought to the New World in 1619?
Did they lie about history again or did America really become established when our ancestors were brought to the New World in 1619?
VOTING MATTERS
NPR Cookie Consent and Choices
Chauvin Trial: Judge Reinstates 3rd-Degree Murder Charge Over George Floyd's Killing
Bill ChappellMarch 11, 20219:45 AM ET
Derek Chauvin will face a third-degree murder charge in the death of George Floyd, after a district court judge reversed his earlier ruling on Thursday.
MPR News/Screenshot by NPR
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin will face an additional charge of third-degree murder, Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill ruled on Thursday, after an appeals court ordered Cahill to reconsider his earlier decision to dismiss the charge.
"The court is going to grant the motion to reinstate" the charge, Cahill said as he announced his decision.
The ruling came as a third day of jury selection was set to begin in the trial over the killing of George Floyd. Chauvin was already facing manslaughter and second-degree murder charges when the much-anticipated trial opened this week.
Chauvin's defense team had sought to block the additional murder charge, but the Minnesota Supreme Court denied the request for review, in a decision that was issued Wednesday afternoon.
Last Friday, the Court of Appeals ordered Cahill to reexamine the third-degree charge based on the precedent set by a recent appeals court ruling. The judge had initially found that ruling, in the case of former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor, was not a precedent for the Chauvin case.
On Thursday, Cahill said he now agrees with the higher court, and that its precedent takes effect immediately.
"I feel bound by that," the judge said, "and I feel it would be an abuse of discretion not to grant the [prosecution's] motion."
Noor was found guilty of third-degree murder in the killing of a woman outside her home. Prosecutors argued that the appeals court's ruling in that case supports the charge against Chauvin.
Chauvin's attorney, Eric Nelson, argued in court Thursday that the cases are different. At one point, he noted that in the Noor case, the officer had clearly put other people at risk when, seated in a car, he leaned over and fired his weapon through his partner's window.
When Cahill threw out the third-degree murder charge last fall, he ruled that prosecutors could not show probable cause that Chauvin's actions had placed people other than Floyd at risk. But he said the recent appeals court ruling changes the standard.
"Even though they are factually different, I have to follow the rule that the Court of Appeals has put in place," Cahill said, "specifically that murder in the third degree applies even if the person's intent and acts are directed at a single person."
Rights activists are also keeping the Noor case in mind as they watch the Chauvin case, because of the reversal of races: Noor is Black and the woman he killed was white; Chauvin is white and Floyd was Black.
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled last June that George Floyd's death was a homicide, saying that his heart and lungs stopped functioning "while being restrained."
The autopsy report cited neck compression – Chauvin was seen holding his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes – but it also noted "other significant conditions," including fentanyl intoxication, recent methamphetamine use, and signs of heart disease.
Floyd's death inflamed nationwide protests that quickly spread around the world, as people expressed outrage over the dramatic video in which Chauvin is seen pinning Floyd to the asphalt.
"Please, please. I can't breathe," Floyd repeatedly said before he died.
Five jurors are now seated for the trial, as the court works to select 12 jurors and two alternates. When they're chosen, jurors are told to report back to the courthouse on March 29, when opening statements are scheduled to begin.
Three other former Minneapolis officers who were at the scene — Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas K. Lane — face charges of aiding and abetting murder. They were fired along with Chauvin one day after Floyd was killed, and they were arrested several days later.
Judge reinstates 3rd-degree murder charge against Derek Chauvin in death of George Floyd
Judge reinstates 3rd-degree murder charge against Derek Chauvin in death of George Floyd
Chauvin also is facing second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
ByBill Hutchinson
March 11, 2021, 3:26 PM
The judge presiding over the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd has reinstated a third-degree murder charge in the case after the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that the application of the count in another civilian death involving a Minneapolis police officer established precedent.
Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill, who dismissed the third-degree murder charge in October, granted the motion by prosecutors to reinstate the charge after hearing arguments from both sides of the case.
Cahill's decision hinged on a recent appellate court decision upholding a third-degree murder conviction against former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor in the 2017 fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damondafter she called 911 to report an assault in progress near her home.
"With regard to the state's motion to reinstate, the court is going to grant the motion," Cahill said before the third day of jury deliberations began.
Cahill said that he initially disagreed with the appellate court's decision in the Noor case.
Prior to the Feb. 1 Appeals Court decision in the Noor case, a third-degree murder charge in Minnesota only applied if the defendant's actions endangered more than one person.
Chauvin's attorney's filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to review the appellate decision, contending it did not apply to Chauvin's case because the former officer is accused of targeting only Floyd. The petition prompted prosecutors in the case to ask the appeals court to halt jury selection, contending Cahill did not have total jurisdiction as long as Supreme Court was considering Chauvin's request.
Despite the petition from prosecutors on Monday to stay the trial, Cahill ruled that he was moving on with jury selection until the appeals court told him otherwise, which it never did.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected Chauvin's petition, putting the decision on the third-degree murder count back on Cahill.
"The court of appeals has said in a precedential opinion specifying the single-person rule applies to third-degree murder. I feel bound by that and I feel it would be an abuse of discretion not to grant the motion," Cahill said.
Prior to the ruling, Chauvin's lawyer, Eric Nelson, presented an unsuccessful last-ditch argument on why he believed the third-degree murder should not be reinstated. Nelson contended that the Noor case was procedurally and factually different than the Chauvin case.
"If you look at the facts of Noor, it's a Minneapolis police officer. This is a case involving a former Minneapolis police officer and that's about where the similarities end," Nelson said.
He said Noor was inside a patrol car with his partner and fired a gun across his partner's chest at a silhouette outside the vehicle that turned out to be Ruszczyk Damond, an "inherently dangerous" action that jeopardized anyone in the line of fire, including a bicyclist who was riding by at the time. He cited other cases to support his argument, saying they all include some form of instrumentality, whether it be a gun or a vehicle used to run someone over.
"Factually, there is no instrumentality here other than arguably Mr. Chauvin's knee," Nelson said.
He argued the cases are also procedurally different because Noor's appeal was filed after his conviction, and the Cauvin case is still in a pre-trial phase.
The prosecution's key evidence in the case against Chauvin is a bystander video of the May 25 arrest in which Chauvin, who is white, is seen kneeling on the back of Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes as the handcuffed and prone Black man repeatedly cried out, "I can't breathe."
Attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, who represent the Floyd family, applauded Cahill's decision.
"We're gratified that the judge cleared the way for the trial to proceed and for Chauvin to face this additional charge," Crump and Romanucci said in a statement. "The trial is very painful and the family needs closure. We're pleased that all judicial avenues are being explored and that the trial will move forward."
The circumstances of Floyd's death prompted weeks of protests in Minneapolis and across the nation, some of which were accompanied by violent clashes against police, looting and vandalism of businesses.
Like many people across the country, President Joe Biden is closely monitoring the Chauvin trial, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Thursday. She said Biden has no intention of weighing in on the criminal case, but added the president has previously spoken about racial justice and his support of police reform.
"He's watching it closely, as are many members of the administration," Psaki said.
Chauvin is being tried separately from three other former officers involved in Floyd's death. J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao are charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter and are scheduled to go on trial in August. All three have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
After the issue of the third-degree murder was settled, jury selection resumed, with the sixth juror seated on Thursday.
The latest member added to the panel is a man who works as a route driver, who described himself as Real Madrid soccer fan who enjoys true crime podcasts. He said it was "mind-blowing" to receive a jury summons in such a big case.
Attorneys said they're looking to select 14 jurors for the case, including two alternates.
ABC News' Whitney Lloyd contributed to this report.
An Honest History of Texas Begins and Ends With White Supremacy
An Honest History of Texas Begins and Ends With White Supremacy
One Texas Republican state House member wants to create a “patriotic” education project to celebrate the Lone Star State—and whitewash its ugly past.
The past few months have been rough for Texas—and for the Texas Republican Party in particular. Republicans in the state led the charge to overturn the 2020 election results, centering their anti-democratic arguments on fantasies of stolen ballots and smothered voices. Then a once-in-a-generation winter storm revealed the extent to which years-long GOP control had rotted the state’s infrastructure, providing a searing illustration of collapse that gripped the news cycle and the nation. (And leading to Senator Ted Cruz tucking tail for Cancun.) Just last week, Governor Greg Abbott—in a fit of “neanderthal thinking,” as President Joe Biden said—launched a premature lifting of the state’s mask mandate, setting the stage for new Covid-19 variants to wash across the population, the potential for new casualties in a pandemic the rest of the country is finally obtaining the upper hand over, and new reasons for voters who may be tilting in their partisan preferences to consider ousting the governor when he’s up for reelection in two years.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state’s GOP—mimicking its national counterpart—has responded to these cascading failures not with sound policy proposals but with a bushel of distractions related to America’s never-ending culture wars. The state’s oleaginous lieutenant governor has led the way, proposing legislation that would force publicly funded entities and events to perform the national anthem. The Texas Republican Party’s official headquarters, hurtling headlong into cognitive dissonance, endorsed the first serious secession bill the country has seen since the Civil War. That measure has since picked up multiple Republican sponsors in the House.
All of which brings us to the latest front that Texas Republicans have launched in their war on reality. This month, one Texas Republican House member filed legislation to force the creation of a new project for supposedly “patriotic education.” Calling for the formation of an “1836 Project,” named after the year Texas declared independence from Mexico, the bill models itself after former President Donald Trump’s ill-starred “1776 Project.” Trump’s effort—which barely lasted a week before the new administration obliterated it wholesale—was itself a response to The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which recentered slavery and human bondage in the story of colonial America.
According to Representative Tan Parker, the legislator who filed the bill, the proposal is “exclusively about celebrating Texas.” As Parker contended, “Many of our children are taught to denounce Texas history and do not understand what it means to be a virtuous citizen.” It’s unclear what Parker has in mind when he describes “virtuous” citizens, but it’s clear that the ultimate aim of the project is simply to whitewash Texas’s past of any critiques about the central role human enslavement played in the Texas Revolution. “It’s about reasserting whiteness and focusing on when white people ‘founded’ this state,” University of North Texas professor Amanda Vickery told The Dallas Morning News.
Vickery has this correct. Parker’s paeans to “patriotic education” are little more than a smokescreen for reinforcing the kinds of myths and legends about the Texas Revolution that have played down slavery’s central, essential role in breaking the state off from Mexico. But if Parker wants to paper over the role of race and revolution in Texas—and to try to parley these myths to a new generation of Texas students—the least we can do is highlight just how the Republic of Texas became arguably the most anti-Black, and most avowedly white supremacist, country to have ever existed.
A few years before Texians, the term given to those who resided in the state at the time, launched their independence movement against the Mexican government in 1836, officials in Mexico City launched a historic salvo of their own. Decades before his counterparts in Washington, Mexican President Vicente Guerrero issued a proclamation: Mexico, Guerrero announced in 1829, would abolish slavery.
While abolitionists celebrated the decree (and rightly perceived it as a precedent that would eventually sweep through the rest of North America), the Anglos flooding into northeast Mexico stood shocked. Enticed by the region’s fertile cotton lands, white settlers from the U.S. had blanketed the region, looking to replicate the slave-centered economic boom in other parts of the American South. Led by those like the Austin family, Anglos pegged economic success in the Mexican region of Texas to a single commodity: enslaved humans. “Keeping slavery legal was a key component of the success of Moses Austin’s settlement; Anglo settlement of Mexican Texas would not have happened without it,” Emily McCullar wrote for The Texas Monthly. Following Guerrero’s decree, Anglos were “aghast.” As The Houston Chronicle summed it up, Stephen F. Austin, Moses’s son, was clear: “Texas could not survive without slavery.”
Those like Austin were clear; as the Texan founding father stated in 1833, “Texas must be a slave country.”
Led by the younger Austin, Anglos managed to lobby Mexican officials for a carve-out to allow them to continue enslaving thousands of Black residents, forcing them to work the cotton fields against their will. (“The scheme simply redefined slavery as debt peonage,” the Chronicle continued.) But a seed had been planted, and Anglo slavers began worrying about their ability to extract wealth from those they enslaved. Those like Austin were clear; as the Texan founding father stated in 1833, “Texas must be a slave country.”
A few years later, the piling tinder gave way to revolution. While there was plenty of room for complaint about Mexican leader Santa Anna—the self-styled “Napoleon of the West” was hardly a democrat—demands for revolution caught fire among those with the most to lose: slaveholders. “The fact that calls for revolt bubbled up among Texans in the primary slave-holding region is no coincidence,” the Chronicle wrote. Thanks in no small part to Santa Anna’s incompetence, the Texians and Tejanos linking arms managed, over the course of a few short months, to steal independence from an anti-slavery republic.
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