Part 9: Slavery and Freedom

“Slavery . . . the worst and Liberty the best State . . .”: Freedom and Enslavement at Penn

If Slavery be deservedly esteemed the worst and Liberty the best State Mankind can be placed in, and Ignorance surely leads to the one, and Knowledge to the Other . . . Then . . . You have the greatest Reason to expect the Approbation and Thanks of all good Men, on the Opening of this Academy for the Instruction of Youth in Piety, Virtue, and useful Knowledge.

Richard Peters, A Sermon on Education, 1751.

During Rev. Richard Peters’s sermon at the Academy of Philadelphia’s opening ceremony, he told his audience that “Slavery” posed a danger to “Liberty.” This was not an abolitionist speech: slavery, for Peters, was a metaphor for ignorance or mental subjection. Education—“knowledge”—was the way forward.

But human enslavement in Philadelphia was no abstraction: over one thousand enslaved people lived and worked in the city. Some of them may have heard this speech. Several lived and worked on the school’s campus, and one man named Caesar was charged with ringing the Academy’s bell to announce classes and meetings. Smith, Franklin, most of the Trustees, and some of the faculty owned slaves at various points in their lives. Large numbers of enslaved people were taken from ships at the docks, and slave auctions were held only blocks away in front of the London Coffee House. Advertisements for runaway slaves were frequent in the newspapers.^[1]

During the tumultuous first decades of the school’s existence, an increasing number of voices, led by Quakers, called for an end to the slave trade and even to all slavery throughout the colonies. These calls would become more public during the Revolution, and by 1773, medical professor Benjamin Rush would write, “The plant of liberty is of so tender a Nature, that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery.”

Educational reformers, too, put new plans in place. Only blocks from Penn, abolitionist Anthony Benezet was teaching Black students in his home, and in 1758 a co-educational primary school for Black children opened, funded by Anglicans and supported by Franklin and College graduate Francis Hopkinson.^[2] However, there is no record of the Academy, College, and Charitable School admitting any Black students.

Like the bell that Caesar would ring, a fundamental question would resonate through the revolutionary era: could colonists pursue their “Liberty,” and could students devote themselves to liberty through the pursuit of Knowledge, without also advocating for the freedom of those who were enslaved?

Debates and conversions

These real and rhetorical paradoxes would without doubt have been evident both to students and to their teachers. Perhaps the earliest glimpse we have into debates on campus is from the November 1768 commencement. One group of students presented “A Forensic Dispute on the Question, whether keeping Slaves be lawful,” while another, George North, gave an oration “on Liberty.”^[3] The debates may be the first in the colonial colleges addressed slavery directly, and publicly.^[4] Unfortunately, texts of these debates do not survive. In July 1780, another graduating group of students gave their own presentation, in the presence of the members of the Continental Congress and Thomas Paine, “on the Question, ‘Is it Lawful to enslave Africans, with their Posterity?’” Here too we have only a brief newspaper summary: “Messrs. Gray and Caldwell maintained the Rights of the Blacks to equal Privileges with their fellow Creatures, in a masterly manner, and were opposed by Messrs. Bleakley and Sitgreaves, in ingenious Performances.”^[5]

Some school leaders underwent their own conversions. Radical leader and mathematics professor James Cannon owned one slave who was freed after Cannon’s death. Trustee George Bryan, appointed as Treasurer in the new administration of 1779, was a key figure in the drafting and passage of Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act (1780). Like Cannon and others, he was once an enslaver but came to see it against the principles of the revolution. 

Behind the Façades: The Penn & Slavery Project

Since 2017, Penn undergraduate students, directed by Professor Kathleen Brown, have been researching the links between the institution and slavery. Their work has investigated topics including school finances, Trustee and faculty ownership of enslaved people, land and labor, and medical education. Some of their research is featured throughout this exhibition.

Learn more at the Penn & Slavery Project website.

Tax records, scarce for early Philadelphia, are a clue to slave ownership. Teacher Rev. Ebenezer Kinnersley held one enslaved person, documented here in the 1767 Philadelphia County tax assessors’ book. This person may well be a man in his 20s named Caesar, who was responsible for many jobs at the school, including ringing the bell that is now located on the first floor of this building.

“Ye ADVOCATES for American Liberty, rouse up and espouse the cause of Humanity and general Liberty.”

Although Medical School Professor Benjamin Rush’s views on racial equality have long been debated, he was one of the first Philadelphians outside of the Quaker community to support a ban on the slave trade. In this 1773 pamphlet, Rush, “a Pennsylvanian,” writes in support of a legislative attempt to increase the import duties upon enslaved people brought into Pennsylvania, a measure designed as a deterrent to the trade. He also refutes proslavery arguments based on scriptural and on environmental grounds, and he includes dramatic images of enslaved men, women, and children being punished, and hunted. Rush later wrote that his pamphlet “did some good in removing several errors and prejudices upon the subject of domestic slavery, but it did me harm, by exciting the resentment of many slaveholders against me. It injured me in another way, but giving rise to an opinion that I had meddled with a controversy that was foreign to my business.”^[6] Like many of the Founders, however, Rush was briefly a slaveholder himself.

“May I speak plainly to you? I must.”

Perhaps no one among early American white abolitionists was as outspoken and influential as the Quaker Anthony Benezet. His powerful condemnations of the slave trade in person and in print; his work for the abolition of slavery more generally; and his efforts to educate Blacks (children and adults) in Philadelphia, often in opposition to Quaker leaders, made him a constant focus of attention and controversy. He gained international standing for his views, and students and faculty at Penn could not have ignored his presence in their city. This brief pamphlet, likely printed by the radical printer James Crukshank, is one of these emotive polemics. On its final page the printer squeezes in more words in a smaller typeface. Benezet concludes, “Give Liberty to whom Liberty is due, that is to every child of man, to every partaker of human nature.”

Abolition, gradually

Passed into law in 1780, the “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” was the first of its kind in America. Presbyterian merchant and College Trustee George Bryan played a central role in negotiating the bill’s passage.^[10] However, it was more conservative than abolitionists like Bryan had hoped, consigning those born to slaves after the act’s passage to twenty-eight years of bondage. Even so, the act may have sparked a backlash against Pennsylvania legislators.^[11] Writing as “Cato,” the pseudonym of the Roman ethicist that William Smith also adopted, a group of free Blacks printed a protest against a possible roll-back of the law in 1781.^[12]

“for sweeping ... chimneys in the College / Absalom Jones”

This humble “receipt” book records payments made to teachers and workers, for salaries, supplies, repairs, and other expenses. A brief reference at the top of the page on display here is of great importance for early African American history in Philadelphia. It reads: “Rec[eive]^ḍ 8^tḥ Ap[ri]^ḷ 1791 of H[enry] Hill [treasurer] Twelve Shill[ing]^ṣ in full of sweeping as many chimneys in the College p[er] order of D^r [William] Smith / Absalom Jones."

Jones, who purchased his freedom in 1784, is well known for his protest against segregation at the Methodist Episcopal Church; he and Richard Allen led Black members out of the church in 1792.^[7] Jones went on to found the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in 1794. Jones himself did attend a school, perhaps Benezet’s, in the 1760s, and in 1799 he made plans to open his own school, sponsored by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.^[8] At essentially the very moment he and Allen were engaged in these actions, Jones was working as a hired chimney sweep at the University. Chimney sweeping was one of the few occupations open to Blacks in the early republic.

Penn as a Landlord in the free Black community

Documents like this rent book from the 1780s document another side of the University: its ownership and management of land and property in the city. On this page we can see evidence that property on S. 5^th Street near Walnut across from Independence Hall, confiscated by the state from Loyalist Andrew Allen, was rented by the school to a number of tenants in 1787, including Blacks named Isaac Siddens, John Eyers, and Vergin White, and a Frenchman named Santpervaley. An image (below) of these small wooden houses and the Anatomical Hall (on the right with cupola) next to them was produced by William Birch.

“…he is twenty-six years old and was born of free Parents…”

This recently-acquired 1797 legal deposition provides an unusual glimpse into Philadelphia’s free Black community in the aftermath of the Revolution and of Philadelphia’s “gradual emancipation” law. A Black man named John Hill, from Chestertown, Maryland, swears that he was born to free parents there. Another Black Philadelphian, Benjamin Clark, identified as a “Labourer,” testifies to Hill’s status as a freeman, and also to his own acquaintance with Hill’s family. Both men sign with an “x,” and the document is attested to by Hilary Baker, Philadelphia’s pro-abolition mayor. We do not yet know the context surrounding this document. Perhaps these testimonies to Hill’s free status were needed because someone had attempted to capture and sell him into slavery. Kidnappings were not unusual during this decade.

“…one of these friendly people took me to see a free-school they had erected for every denomination of black people, whose minds are cultivated here…”

Among the most famous early Black voices in Anglo-America was Equiano, abolitionist and author of the narrative of his life, one of the earliest “slave narratives.” The book was a publishing success in England thanks to Equiano industrious work to gain subscribers; the edition on view is the sixth, printed four years after the first. In the complex frontispiece—one of the earliest representations of an African as an author—Equiano confronts his readers directly, holding a Bible open to the Book of Acts, 4:12 (“Neither is there salvation in any other…”). He is dressed as a gentleman and, as “G. Vasa,” is listed as the image’s publisher. Biographer Vincent Carretta has argued that Equiano attempted to balance his African and British identities throughout this work and in his activist career.

Equiano visited Philadelphia on three occasions (1766, 1785, and 1786) and would have walked the streets around the College of Philadelphia. During the 1766 visit, he attended a Quaker meeting (after selling goods to some Quaker merchants) and heard George Whitefield preach to a large outdoor crowd. In 1785 he writes of his happiness at visiting “this favorite old town” and notes his visit “to see a free school,” almost certainly the school for Black children led by Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet, located in his house at 4^th and Chestnut streets, a mere two blocks from the University.

Equiano’s imposed and adopted name, Gustavus Vassa, has revolutionary resonance. Vassa (Vasa) was a 16^th century Swedish king who liberated Sweden from Danish rule. Henry Brooke’s mid-18^th century play about Vasa, banned in England, was reprinted, dedicated to George Washington, in Philadelphia in 1778, and performed at the College of Philadelphia in 1781.

“The opening of an African Church, in America”

Magaw, an Anglican, followed in William Smith’s footsteps early in his career. He was a member of Smith’s circle and of the first College class, a part of the ill-fated German school project, served briefly as a missionary to Lenape peoples, and became an ordained Anglican minister. During the Revolution, however, Magaw allied himself with the new College leaders and went on to become vice Provost and professor of moral philosophy during the 1780s until 1791 while also serving as the rector of St. Paul’s Church.

Magaw delivered this sermon at the inauguration of St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church, led by Absalom Jones, in 1794. The event was attended by a large group of White Philadelphia philanthropists and religious leaders. Magaw walks a racial and rhetorical tightrope, lamenting the pagan ignorance of African populations while suggesting that such “darkness” is the common lot of all sinners. He goes on to praise the “great Light” that has brought them both freedom and Christianity, and he applauds the efforts of Quaker reformers like Anthony Benezet, leaders of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society like Benjamin Franklin, while acknowledging the financial contributions from “the citizens of Philadelphia.” Magaw also cautions church members: “Remember, that you have enemies, as well as friends; that you will be narrowly watched; and that less allowance will be made for your failings, than for those of other people.”

One might wonder how the audience responded. By the 1790s, a newly empowered free African community, led by figures like Jones and Richard Allen, had an increasingly strong civic voice.

1. For images of Philadelphia and slavery, see, i.e., Nash and Soderland, Freedom by Degrees, 74. ↑

2. Van Horne, “The Education of African Americans in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia,” 79ff. ↑

3. The Pennsylvania Gazette, no. 2084, December 1, 1768, p. 3. ↑

4. At the University’s annual commencement, four graduating students debated the question of ‘A Forensic Dispute on the Question, whether keeping Slaves be lawful.’ It was the first student debate to discuss the moral issues surrounding African slaves. ↑

5. The Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, no. 1348, July 12, 1780, p.1. ↑

6. Rush, Autobiography, 83. ↑

7. On Jones’s enslavement: Nash, Forging Freedom, 67–70. ↑

8. Van Horne, “The Education of African Americans in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia,” ↑

9. Nash and Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees, 112. See also 224n44, in which this is misscited as Freedom’s Journal. ↑

10. Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 322-323; Foster, In Pursuit of Equal Liberty, 109–114. ↑

11. Nash, Forging Freedom, 62–63. ↑

12. Nash, Forging Freedom, 64. ↑