Addresses, Essays and Sermons II: Early Republic and Gradual Emancipation, 1800–1829

This is the era in which Black New York finds its public voice. On January 1, 1808, the day the federal ban on the Atlantic slave trade took effect, Black congregations in New York and Philadelphia held services of thanksgiving, and the sermons and orations they published inaugurated an annual tradition: the January First oration, the first sustained body of published Black oratory in America.

Meanwhile, New York's gradual emancipation ground slowly forward (enslaved New Yorkers were not finally freed until July 4, 1827), kidnappers preyed on free Black citizens for the booming domestic slave trade, and in 1816 a new movement proposed to solve the problem of slavery by removing free Black people to Africa. The colonization scheme, and Black New Yorkers' answer to it, would structure the next thirty years of argument. By the era's close, two documents, Elizabeth Heyrick's demand for immediate abolition and Robert Alexander Young's apocalyptic Ethiopian Manifesto, point straight at the explosion to come. ‍

Landmark Documents

‍Absalom Jones, A Thanksgiving Sermon (1808). Preached at St. Thomas's African Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, on January 1, 1808, the day the slave-trade ban took effect. Jones, the first Black priest of the Episcopal Church, cast the ban as a providential deliverance and instituted the annual day of thanksgiving that became the January First tradition represented throughout this era. Read at Project Canterbury

Peter Williams Jr., An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1808). New York's oration of that same January First, delivered in the African Church by the young man who would found St. Philip's Church and later mentor Alexander Crummell. Among the earliest published orations by a Black New Yorker, and the beginning of the tradition of Black public argument that runs through this whole bibliography. Read at BlackPast · NYPL Digital Collecti‍ ‍

James Forten, Letters from a Man of Colour (1813). The wealthy Black Philadelphia sailmaker's anonymous protest against a bill to bar free Black migration into Pennsylvania. Forten's five letters are a founding document of Black citizenship argument: he claims the state constitution's promises as his own inheritance. His money would later help launch Garrison's Liberator. Kate Masur transcription · Gilder Lehrman

‍Robert Finley, Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks (1816). The founding prospectus of the American Colonization Society: remove free Black Americans to Africa, and emancipation might follow gently. Whatever its author's intentions, the scheme drew slaveholder support and free Black fury, and the fight over it, carried on in this section by Cornish, Wright, Garrison and the New York societies, became the crucible of immediatism. The document the next two decades answered. Read at the Internet Archive

Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition (1824). The Leicester Quaker's pamphlet gave the movement its defining word. Gradualism, Heyrick argued, was not caution but complicity; the only defensible demand was abolition now. Garrison read her, credited her, and built the American immediatist movement on her premise a decade later. Read the full text (PDF)

Nathaniel Paul, An Address, Delivered on the Celebration of the Abolition of Slavery (1827). July 4, 1827: the day gradual emancipation finally ended slavery in New York State. The Albany Baptist minister's celebration address is both a thanksgiving and a reckoning: freedom in New York, he insists, is only the beginning of the national account. Read at BlackPast

Robert Alexander Young, The Ethiopian Manifesto (1829). A New York street preacher's apocalyptic prophecy of a coming Black deliverer, printed months before David Walker's Appeal. Crude where Walker is systematic, Young's pamphlet shows militant Black messianism surfacing in New York at the exact moment the gradualist era closed. Read the full text (PDF)

The January First Orations

The slave-trade ban's anniversary produced an annual literature. Beside Jones and Williams above:

Henry Sipkins, An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1809). The second year of New York's tradition, delivered in the African Church. Read at the American Antiquarian Society

Jedidiah Morse, A Discourse Delivered at the African Meeting-House (1808). The Boston geographer marks the ban in Boston's African Meeting House, a white minister as guest in the tradition's Boston branch. NYPL Digital Collections

Adam Carman, An Oration Delivered at the Fourth Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1811). No digitized copy located. For this oration and others in the cluster never individually digitized, Dorothy Porter's Early Negro Writing, 1760–1837 (see Edited Primary Sources) is the recommended source.

The Trade at Home: Kidnapping, Conscience and Protest

Alexander McLeod, Negro Slavery Unjustifiable (1802). The New York Reformed Presbyterian's discourse committed his denomination to excluding slaveholders from communion: church discipline as antislavery weapon, decades early. Read at the Internet Archive · Michigan Making of America

Thomas Branagan, Serious Remonstrances (1805). A former slave-trader turned Philadelphia pamphleteer confronts the trade he once practiced. HathiTrust via Online Books Page

John Parrish, Remarks on the Slavery of the Black People (1806). A Philadelphia Quaker elder's late-life appeal to Congress and the nation. Read at the Internet Archive

Elias Hicks, Observations on the Slavery of the Africans (1811/1814). The Long Island Quaker's case for boycotting slave-produced goods: free produce a generation before it became a movement. Read at the Library of Congres‍ ‍

Jesse Torrey, A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States (1817). A Philadelphia physician documents the domestic slave trade and the kidnapping of free Black people, with some of the earliest illustrations of both. The kidnapping alarm sounded here becomes the New York Committee of Vigilance's daily work in era III. Read at the Internet Archive

John Kenrick, Horrors of Slavery (1817). An early Massachusetts compilation of slavery's cruelties, drawn from travelers' and participants' own accounts: the documentary method Weld would perfect in 1839. Read at the Internet Archive

Josephus Wheaton, The Equality of Mankind and the Evils of Slavery, Illustrated (1820). A Massachusetts minister's sermon in the year of the Missouri Compromise. Read at Cornell University Library

What Does Your Sugar Cost? A Cottage Conversation on the Subject of British Negro Slavery (1826). A British free-produce dialogue for household readers, kin to Heyrick's campaign. No digitized copy located.

Colonization Organizes in New York

First Report of the New-York Colonization Society (1823). The New York auxiliary's founding report: the institutional voice that Black New Yorkers and, later, the immediatists spent decades answering. Read at Univ. of Pittsburgh Digital Collection

Proceedings of the Formation of the New-York State Colonization Society (1829). The state society organizes in the very year gradual emancipation's era closes, and the year of Young's manifesto. The battle lines of era III are drawn. Read at Cornell University Library