Act Worthy of Yourselves at King’s Chapel, 18–20 June

King’s Chapel has brought back Act Worthy of Yourselves, a sixty-minute drama set around the funeral of Dr. Joseph Warren in April 1776.

The teaser copy says:

The British army has finally left Boston. Now, nearly a year after his death, friends and family can finally hold a funeral for Dr. Joseph Warren.

Inside King’s Chapel, his brother, his fiancée, and his good friend Paul Revere gather to mourn Warren and to make sense of their loss. Outside the Chapel, two Black abolitionists wonder what this revolution will mean for them. A play about memory, legacy, and the potential and pitfalls of the American Revolution.

While anchored in April 1776, the play flashes back to episodes in the life of Dr. Warren earlier in the 1770s. In addition to the doctor’s brother John and his fiancée, Mercy Scollay, the characters include the black businessmen Lancaster Hill and Prince Hall, Paul and Rachel Revere, Abigail Adams, merchant and Freemason John Rowe, medical trainee William Eustis, rising young lawyer Perez Morton, and Christopher Monk, badly wounded at the Boston Massacre.

This play was written by Noah Good and Kaitlin Rose, and directed by Anjie Echemendia. With that large cast and many scenes set at different times and places, it’s a complex undertaking. Last year, as I recall, many of the performers came from the King’s Chapel interpretive staff rather than Boston’s professional theatrical scene.

The remaining performances for this year are on 18–20 June at 7:30 P.M. and on Saturday, 20 June, at 2:00 P.M. Tickets cost from $40 to $15 depending on the view, and are available through this website.

“Which service has not as yet been fully comply’d with”

Yesterday I described how in 1707 Massachusetts and Boston instituted a legal system of drafting free black men to work a certain number of days each year on maintaining highways.

The Boston selectmen’s records show that system being used often in the early decades of the eighteenth century, then less often. Eventually men were able to pay to get out of the labor.

In 1762, three wartime years after the last time they invoked this law, the selectmen of Boston once again cranked up the system to draft the town’s free black men.

The effort started on 12 May with a list in the selectmen’s records of all the free black men they could think of:

• Scipio—late a Servant of Capt. Osbornes
• Scipio, late a Servant of Mr. [Charles?] Apthorp
• Pompy Blackman
• Lank (a Lemmon Merchant, who has been sick)
• Charlestown ——
• Dick, late a Servant to Mr. Tyng, (both sick & lame).
• Toby, living at New Boston.
• Boston. (Jackson)
• Cesar Clark (Baker) keeps at Mr. Pollard’s Old House.
• Another Negro keeps with ye. above named, his name unknown
• Thomas (a Baker) late a Servant to Mr. Knox.
• Homan (late a Servant to the Widow Blackadore[)]
• Joseph, late a Servant to Richard Bill Esq.
• Scipio, late a Servant of Capt. [Thomas] Fayerweather
• Prince Holms
• A Negro at Deacon Fosters
• Jack Clemmons, so called
• George Cobourn, he came from Redding.

You can picture the town officials scratching under their wigs, trying to remember the men they’ve seen around town. “Oh, yeah, there’s a Negro baker over at Pollard’s.” “No, there are two.” “Didn’t Knox’s man become a baker?” “Yes, but he’s not one of them. What was his name?” “Speaking of names, why do we call so many ‘Scipio’?”

Six days later, the selectmen added more information they had collected. In particular, they noted how long each man had been free and how many days since becoming free each had worked for the town (and thus how many days of labor they owed):

• Prince Holmes, “has been free 23 years has paid for 12 Days work.”
• John Thurber, freed “last Novemr. Order’d to work...2 Days.”
• Pompy Blackman, free for six years the next October, 20 days.
• Fortunatus Pitts, free for seven years the next September, 24 days.
• Scipio Fayerweather, free for one year the next September, 2 days.
• Scipio Apthorp, free for two years the next September, 8 days.
• Homer Blackader, “has been sick since his mistresses death,” 0 days.
• Peter How, free nine years, “has work’d 2 Days,” 30 days.
• Richard Tyng, free five years, 10 days.
• Tobias Lockman, free six years as of 1 March, 18 days.
• Scipio Gunny, free as of the previous August, 2 days.
• Boston Jackson, free three years and “(has a Rate Bill),” 6 days.

The selectmen directed John Sweetser to set these men to work on the highways.

That information could be useful in connecting these men to their moments of manumission. In addition, I think the notation by Boston Jackson—“had a Rate Bill”—meant that he’d paid taxes, perhaps arguing that he didn’t need to contribute more to the community in labor.

Even with that added information, however, the selectmen and Sweetser couldn’t make the system work. On 15 December, the selectmen’s minutes say:

Whereas there was an Assignment made on the 18th Day of May last of a certain number of Days on which the Free Negros of this Town were to Work on the High Ways, which service has not as yet been fully comply’d with—therefore Voted—

that the Town Clerk Issue a Warrant this Day, Ordering and requiring them to work such a number of Days as shall be affixed to their respective Names.

Boston ss.
To Scipio and other Free Negros residing in the Town of Boston.

You are hereby severally Ordered and Required to perform so many Days work as is here under affixed to your Names, and this at the Time and Place you shall be directed by mr. John Swetser, appointed an Overseer for this purpose. It being such a proportion of Time as is adjudged to be equivalent to the service of Trainings, Watchings and other duty required of his Majesty’s Subjects, the benefit of which you share. Hereof fail not as you avoid the penalty of Law in such case made and provided.

By order of the Select men
Boston Decemr. 15. 1762
William Cooper Town Clerk.

The numbers of days demanded were:

• Lancaster Hill 16
• Pompey Blackman 20
• Dick Tyng 10
• Boston Jackson 6
• Toby Lockman 18
• Cesar Clark 16
• Thomas Knox 16
• Scipio Osborne 2
• Scipio Apthorp 8
• Peter How 30
• John Thurbur 4
• Fortunatus Pitts 24

Did that work? Not in all cases. On 11 June 1766, four years later, the selectmen’s records say: “Order was this Day issued to Tobias [Lockman, presumably] & Scepio (late Capt. Fayerweathers) Free Negros, to work on the High Way before the Market, four Days each, there being Several Years duty due from them.”

Through one method or another, free black Bostonians kept resisting the town’s demands for free labor. And the town evidently lacked the means or will to force the issue.

This was, of course, the same period when Boston’s Whigs were talking more and more about the importance of ”liberty,” making slavery and its remnants harder to defend. In the 1770s the Massachusetts General Court voted to end the slave trade. One of the men being pursued for work in 1762, Lancaster Hill, would sign a petition to the legislature seeking an end to slavery fifteen years later, as shown above.

The last sign of this law that I spotted in the selectmen’s records appeared on 17 June 1767: “Voted, that Mr. John Sweetser be directed to procure two Pick Axes, & two Wheelbarrows, and four Shovels, for the use of those Negros that may be imployed on the High Way,—and that those Tools are to be left in his care, he to be accountable for them.” Yet it’s unclear who actually used those tools and on what terms.

The selectmen of Boston never officially discussed drafting black men to work again. There were plenty of discussions about streets needing repair in the town records from 1769 to the start of the Revolutionary War, but no lists of black citizens or discussions of how to compel them to work.

TOMORROW: One last gasp.

EXTRA: Hanson Plass on “Lancaster Hill’s Revolution,” 8 Mar.

In the wake of the Boston Massacre Sestercentennial, there’s also an interesting talk about a Bostonian not prominent in that event but active in the quest for liberty in eighteenth-century America.

On Sunday, 8 March, at 12:15 P.M. Eric Hanson Plass will speak at King’s Chapel on “Lancaster Hill’s Revolution.”

The event description says:

Lancaster Hill, a free black man living in colonial and revolutionary-era Boston, married Margaret, a woman enslaved by a parishioner, at King’s Chapel in the 1750s. During the American Revolution, Hill joined the ranks of notable activist and abolitionist Prince Hall, and advocated for the abolition of slavery.

In 1777 Lancaster Hill signed his name to a petition with eight other men, demanding that this new independent state of Massachusetts abolish the institution of slavery once and for all. This stroke of a pen, in his own hand, was a distinct moment in this man's transformation into an American revolutionary. Over the span of some thirty years, Lancaster Hill transformed from being a man enslaved by a government, to a man who demanded recognition and accountability of government.

Hanson Plass brings over a decade of experience illuminating Boston’s history as a park ranger with the National Park Service. He holds a master's degree in Public History from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

This event is free and open to the public. Voluntary donations support the King’s Chapel History Program and its public programs.

“A People not insensible of the sweets of rational freedom”

On 13 Jan 1777, the Massachusetts legislature considered a petition from eight black men on behalf of “a great number of Negroes who are detained in a state of Slavery in the Bowels of a free and Christian Country.”

That petition drew on the natural-rights philosophy that underlay the Declaration of Independence and similar documents in the preceding years. The authors wrote:

That your Petitioners apprehend that they 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, and which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatever—But they were unjustly dragged, by the cruel hand of Power, from their dearest friends, and some of them even torn from the embraces of their tender Parents, from a populous, pleasant and plentiful Country—and in Violation of the Laws of Nature and of Nation and in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity, brought hither to be sold like Beasts of Burden, and like them condemned to slavery for Life—Among a People professing the mild Religion of Jesus—A People not insensible of the sweets of rational freedom—Nor without spirit to resent the unjust endeavors of others to reduce them to a State of Bondage and Subjection.

Your Honors need not to be informed that a Life of Slavery, like that of your petitioners, deprived of every social privilege, of every thing requisite to render Life even tolerable, is far worse than Non-Existence—In imitation of the laudable example of the good People of these States, your Petitioners have long and patiently waited the event of Petition after Petition by them presented to the legislative Body of this State, and can not but with grief reflect that their success has been but too similar.

They can not but express their astonishment, that it has never been considered, that every principle from which America has acted in the course of her unhappy difficulties with Great-Britain, pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your Petitioners.

The ask was for a law to free all adults enslaved in Massachusetts, and to ensure the liberty of all enslaved children when they reached the age of twenty-one (essentially treating them as apprentices).

The legislature didn’t enact such a law. The Massachusetts courts eventually made the first big step to making slavery unenforceable in the state.

Here are the signatures and marks of the eight men who submitted the petition, as shown in its digital form, courtesy of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions project.

The most famous of those men was Prince Hall. Others joined with Hall in the first African-American Freemasons lodge.

Today I’m focusing on the sixth man, whose given name was Nero. I’ve seen his surname transcribed as Funelo, Funilo, and even Suneto. I posit that that surname was Funels, a phonetic spelling of Faneuils, and that this man had been enslaved by one of the Faneuil family.

TOMORROW: Nero Faneuil in court.