Belinda Sutton's Appeal: Slavery, Political Activism, and Legal Claims in Revolutionary New England

Abstract

This dissertation tells the story of an enslaved mother’s appeal to Revolutionary America. Following the shadowy trail that leads from the life Sutton lived to the petition she authored, it provides an intimate sense of Sutton as a historical actor in her own right, as a mother who once walked down Boston’s cobbled streets. The trail leads to the rich political and intellectual world of Black New Englanders. Sutton was thoroughly embedded in this world, a milieu out of which sprang the first antislavery organization in the British empire—a committee of enslaved and formerly enslaved people whose antislavery campaign abolished slavery in Massachusetts. Sutton’s petition came on the heels of that campaign. Uncovering new details about the effort, I track its activists in the courts and the legislature, in the famous town meetings and Committees of Correspondence, in the press and the streets. Doing so reveals that Sutton drew on, and contributed to, a rich tradition of Black legal and political advocacy. It reveals, too, that Belinda Sutton and the Africans in her world had long made claims about what the law is or should be, about their rights, about what actions merited legal remedy. Together, they formulated their own critiques of slavery that shaped local legal culture and created new legal norms.