Black churches provided one arena in which African Americans could demonstrate their independence. It was no accident that the Bethel African-American Methodist Church was founded in Philadelphia, which attracted large numbers of free blacks after passage of the state’s gradual emancipation law in 1780. Although the northern states with the largest enslaved populations—New York and New Jersey—did not pass such laws until 1799 and 1804, the size of the free black population increased throughout the region.
Many of these free blacks were migrants from the South, where tens of thousands of enslaved women and men gained their freedom during or immediately following the Revolution (see chapter 6). A few slave owners took Revolutionary ideals to heart and emancipated their slaves following the war. Many others emancipated slaves in their wills. In addition, several states prohibited the importation of slaves from Africa during or immediately following the Revolution, including Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. Despite these emancipations and prohibitions, the number of individuals enslaved in the United States in 1800 was far greater than in 1776, and the enslaved population continued to grow rapidly thereafter. Now, however, slavery was increasingly confined to the South. As northern states passed gradual abolition laws, southern states moved in the opposite direction, making it more difficult for owners to free their slaves and for free blacks to remain in the South.
The limits on emancipation in the South nurtured the growth of free black communities in the North, especially in seaport cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and New Bedford, Massachusetts. In these areas, most African Americans focused on establishing families, finding jobs, and securing the freedom of relatives still enslaved. Others, like Richard Allen, sought to build black communities by establishing churches, schools, and voluntary societies and demanding a political voice. Some northern states, such as New Jersey, granted property-owning blacks the right to vote. Others, such as Pennsylvania, did not specifically exclude them. Records suggest that few black men participated in elections in the early Republic, yet many petitioned state and local governments—in the North and the South—to provide African American communities with schooling, burial grounds, and other forms of assistance.
To read a petition from free blacks, see Document 7.3.
Although blacks gained little support from most white Americans, they did have some allies. The Society of Friends, the only religious denomination to oppose slavery in the colonial period, became more adamant in its stance in the post-Revolutionary period. Many affluent Quakers finally freed their slaves and withdrew from the slave trade. Anthony Benezet, a Quaker writer and educator, advocated tirelessly for the abolition of slavery within the Society of Friends and directed the Negro School in Philadelphia, which he had founded in 1770.