This conflict, dealing with the hypocrisy of slavery while building a foundation of “All men are created equal,” was an ongoing contest throughout the country. It became the primary discord at the Constitutional Convention.
“A nation, without a national government, is, in my view, an awful spectacle,” wrote Alexander Hamilton. If the United States were to survive as a nation, it would need a central government. That reality, that overriding necessity, drove the convention’s compromises with slavery.
Because of my faith, I was less judgmental and more forgiving than were many about this hypocrisy. We were instructed to “do good” to those who hated and despitefully misused us. Those weren’t just words; they were a command. I obeyed.
With other American Africans, I had been attending services at St. George’s in Philadelphia. One Sunday an elder was standing at the door and told us to go to the gallery. We took seats in the same location as where we used to sit downstairs. No sooner had we touched our seats than a prayer was announced, so we got on our knees.
I was focused on the prayer when I heard a commotion of tussling and angry low voices. I looked up to see a trustee pulling my friend and colleague, Absalom Jones, off his knees, saying, “You must not kneel here!”
Jones said he would get up when prayer was finished. The trustee would not have that. Jones was told to rise immediately or he would be forced to rise. The prayer ended just then.
We rose as one and left as one, never to return to St. George’s. The abuse and affront were the harder to bear since we had contributed largely of our monies and given our labor generously to laying the church floor and building the gallery.
We were shut out of St. George’s by 1787. The Constitutional Convention was in town. There, too, we were shut out. The most vigorous debates were over allowing slavery without building it into our new institutions.
I read the U.S. Constitution. Nowhere are the words slave or slavery to be found. Abraham Lincoln later told a Cooper Union audience that “this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.”
It is an honest and realistic argument that slavery became incorporated into the Constitution without naming it because slavery was considered on its way to extinction. To many, the Constitutional Convention compromises were but a temporary accommodation.
Some see only the hypocrisy. They admit of no decent impulses at all in the convention’s compromises—and refuse to tolerate slavery’s existence for a while longer as a necessity, with the intent that it should in time be no more.
But named or not, slavery was there in writing, a presence allowed by the Constitution. As for myself, I had been owned by good men who wouldn’t be able to see their own sin for years. But I knew of my own sins. And I have a Lord who commands me to forgive. So I forgave and did not sit in judgment.
While I did not judge souls, I did judge behavior. It was my decision, and that of my fellow worshipers, never to return to St. George’s Methodist Church. Jones and I, therefore, sought to establish a Free African Society (FAS) based on faith but not affiliated with any church. Today it would be called nondenominational. Following the example of the Constitution, we drew up a preamble, then outlined its purpose and functions.
The FAS would be a self-help group for those recently freed African Americans who were adrift in a hostile society that actively sought to deny them opportunities to advance. The society cultivated and mentored new leaders. It formed a warm community, provided a social life, constructed a network of people who cared.
It was needed. In 1780 there were but 240 freed Americans of African descent in Philadelphia. But by the next census ten years later, the city had 1,849 freed men and women.
I am greatly satisfied that FAS served as a model for many leaders and prophets who would come after me, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
When we withdrew from St. George’s, we rented a storeroom to continue worshiping. This was much opposed by a church leader who visited us twice on the subject, using persuasion ranging from belittling to beseeching.
There are several twists to this story, but the ending is that we settled on a lot on Fifth Street, where I later turned the first shovel for construction. This led, eventually, to the first Independent African church in April 1816, an institution that continues to this day, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, consisting of 2.5 million members.
It saddens me that with all the blood spilled—drawn first by the lash, then by the sword, later drained by dogs, clubs, bombs, and guns during the civil rights era—today the federal courts are reversing the human rights gains so long in coming, so dearly won. And doing it with the facade that racism is no longer with us.
I was a poor vessel whom God used to give gifts to his oppressed—the tools to free them. American Africans have served a vital function in this democracy. We have been the flint against which the Almighty has sparked this country’s struggle to live out the proposition that “all men are created equal.”
Whether we are entering a period of regression, or are on the verge of reaching the mountaintop, the tools He gave me are still available: self-help groups, faith and self-discipline, community, and moral leadership as constants from the home to the nation.
1789–1794
SALLY HEMINGS
Annette Gordon-Reed
In August 1789, Sally Hemings was living at the Hôtel de Langeac on the rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Élysées in Paris. She had arrived about two years earlier after living in London for two weeks at the home of John and Abigail Adams.
Hemings had accompanied Mary (Polly) Jefferson, the nine-year-old daughter of Thomas Jefferson, on an Atlantic voyage from Virginia that lasted five weeks. Jefferson was in Paris serving as the American minister to France. John Adams was the American minister in London. He and his wife had agreed to receive Jefferson’s daughter and her traveling companion, and to keep Polly until her father could arrive and bring her to Paris.
Jefferson had asked for a “careful Negro woman” to accompany Polly. Then the woman was to return to Virginia. He had suggested Isabel Hern, who was about twenty-eight years old. Hern was unable to make the trip, having recently given birth. So Jefferson’s in-laws, Francis and Elizabeth Eppes, with whom Polly and Sally were staying, sent fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings instead.
In the convoluted world of Virginia slavery and family, Sally Hemings’s father was John Wayles, the father of Jefferson’s deceased wife, Martha, and also of Elizabeth Eppes. So the little girl whom Hemings helped bring across the ocean was her half-niece. When she arrived in Paris, Hemings joined her brother James, who had been in the city since 1784, having come over with Jefferson and Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha (Patsy).