Religion and Black Abolitionism in the
Era of the American Revolution

In January 1773, Massachusetts slaves submitted the first of four petitions that decade to the legislature of the colony requesting their release from bondage. Around the same time writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Caesar Sarter began to attack both slavery and the slave trade in print.

Many scholars have discussed these individual writers and the petitioning campaign of Boston’s blacks as an example of the ways in which subordinate groups used the rhetoric of Revolution to advance their own claims. In this talk, Christopher Cameron located the origins of their political thought even further back in puritan religious ideology and discussed the advent of black petitioning and other forms of antislavery writing in the colony, which represented the beginning of the organized abolitionist movement in America.

This event was part of our Religion of Revolution lecture series, sponsored by New England's Hidden Histories.

The Congregational Library & Archives newest digital exhibition, Religion of Revolution: Congregational Voices on Liberty, is free to visit anytime at https://congregationallibrary.quartexcollections.com/online-exhibits/revolution.

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Christopher Cameron is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He was the founding president of the African American Intellectual History Society and currently serves as the founding secretary of the Black Humanist Studies Association. Cameron received his BA in History from Keene State College and his MA and PhD in American History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Cameron is the author of To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and The Making of the Antislavery Movement and Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism.