“Can This Be Right?”: The 1779 New Hampshire Petition Against Slavery

In November 1779, in the middle of the Revolutionary War, a group of enslaved men in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who called themselves "Natives of Africa," petitioned the state's Council and House of Representatives to abolish slavery. They turned the Revolution's own language back on the people who held them, asking "from what Authority they assume the Power to dispose of our Lives, Freedom and Property."

The first page of the petition, addressed to the Council and House "now sitting at Exeter." Courtesy of the New Hampshire State Archives.

The document

Prince Whipple

Among the signers was Prince Whipple, enslaved aide, bodyguard and soldier to General William Whipple Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Prince Whipple was with him in Philadelphia during the Second Continental Congress, where he likely heard the talk of freedom filling the city — and the Whipple household there — around the time the Declaration was signed. He also followed his enslaver onto the battlefields of the Revolution.

What the petition says

The petitioners claimed the "Rights of Mankind" as fully as the white men who enslaved them and governed the state. They opened with a statement of natural equality:

"That the God of Nature gave them Life and freedom upon the Terms of the most perfect Equality with other men, That Freedom is an inherent Right of the human Species, not to be surrendered but by Consent…"

They described being seized as children, "incapable of Self-Defence," and carried from a country where they were born free, and the families torn apart by slavery, asking: "Can this be Right? Forbid it gracious Heaven!"

They then went looking for the source of their enslavers' authority — in scripture, in law, in nature — and found it nowhere:

"Is it from the Volumes of Nature? No. Here we can read with others! … Here, we know that we ought to be free agents! Here, we feel the Dignity of Human Nature! … Here, we know that the God of Nature made us free! Is their authority assumed from Custom? if so, Let that Custom be abolished, which is not founded in Nature, Reason nor Religion."

Their masters, they argued, would lose nothing, since most of the petitioners had already given "our whole Strength and the Prime of our Lives in their Service." Freed, they promised to show "our Love of Freedom" by opposing tyranny over the very country that had enslaved them. They closed by asking for laws so "that the Name of Slave may not more be heard in a Land gloriously contending for the Sweets of Freedom."

The signatures

The petition is signed Seneca Hall, Peter Warner, Cato Warner, Pharaoh Shores, Windsor Moffatt, Garrett Colton, Kittindge Tuckerman, Peter Frost, Prince Whipple, Nero Brewster, Pharaoh Rogers, Romeo Rindge, Cato Newmarch, Cesar Gerrish, Zebulon Gardner, Quam Sherburne, Samuel Wentworth, Will Clarkson, Jack Odiorne and Cipio Hubbard. Several names are spelled differently in the petition's opening lines.

What happened to it

On April 25, 1780, the House voted that the petitioners be heard at the next session of the General Assembly, and that the petition and the order be printed for three successive weeks in the New Hampshire Gazette so that anyone might come forward to argue against it. The Council concurred the same day.

The petition was ultimately dismissed as ill-timed while the nation was at war with Britain, and slavery stayed legal in New Hampshire until 1857. Prince Whipple and four other men were eventually freed. Fourteen of the signers died enslaved.

In March 2013, State Senator Martha Fuller Clark brought the petition back, and the New Hampshire Senate passed it unanimously, freeing the 14 men posthumously.

Sources

Based on "1779 Petition to the New Hampshire Government," Independence National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Petition quoted from the park's transcript of the original in the New Hampshire State Archives.