“carceral landscape”: Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 209.
1764–1769: Phillis Wheatley
The date Phillis: Phillis Wheatley’s first published poem, “On Messers Hussey and Coffin,” and the accompanying note, were published in the Newport Mercury on December 21, 1767.
“the difficult miracle”: June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America,” Poetry Foundation, August 15, 2006.
“extraterrestrial and the supernatural”: James Levernier, “Style as Protest in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley,” Style 27, no. 2 (1993): 172–93.
1769–1774: David George
“had not the fear of God”: David George, “An Account of the Life of Mr. David George from Sierra Leone, Africa, Given by Himself,” in Woody Holton, ed., Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era: A Brief History with Documents (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 112.
first Black Baptist church: Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 91.
shared religious life and culture: Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 37.
any religious tradition: See the Pew Research Center’s surveys of the “religiously unaffiliated,” www.pewresearch.org/topics/religiously-unaffiliated/.
1774–1779: The American Revolution
“All men are born”: Constitution or Frame of Government, Agreed upon by the Delegates of the People of the State of Massachusetts Bay (Boston: Benjamin Edes & Sons, 1780).
These same rights: Emily Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three: The Turning Point in the Law of Slavery and Freedom in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2002): 24–51; Arthur Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1968): 614–24; and Christopher Cameron, “The Puritan Origins of Black Abolitionism in Massachusetts,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 39, no. 1–2 (2011): 78–107.
Mumbet’s political education: Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
“all indentured servants”: John Murray, “Printed copy of John Dunmore’s Proclamation…, November 7, 1775,” National Archives, Kew (UK).
carried into subsequent conflicts: Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
characterized the founding texts: George William Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
“Brom & Bett”: “Brom & Bett vs. J. Ashley, 1781,” in Catherine M. Lewis and J. Richard Lewis, eds., Women and Slavery in America: A Documentary History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011), 150–52.
incomplete and misleading monument: Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three”; Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet”; Cameron, “Puritan Origins of Black Abolitionism”; and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” Bentley’s Miscellany (1853): 417–24.
1779–1784: Savannah, Georgia
“were expected to become”: Walter J. Fraser, Jr., “James Edward Oglethorpe and the Georgia Plan,” in Leslie Harris and Daina Ramey Berry, eds., Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 2–3. For a general overview of the history, see Harris and Berry, Slavery and Freedom; and Whittington B. Johnson, Black Savannah, 1788–1864 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996).
“built around central squares”: Buddy Sullivan, “Savannah,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/counties-cities-neighborhoods/savannah.
about four hundred enslaved people: James A. McMillin, “The Slave Trade Comes to Georgia,” in Harris and Berry, Slavery and Freedom, 9.
oldest Black church: “The Oldest Black Church in North America,” First African Baptist Church, August 10, 2019, www.firstafricanbc.com/history.php.
Reverend Andrew Bryan: Sandy D. Martin, “Andrew Bryan (1737–1812),” New Georgia Encyclopedia, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/andrew-bryan-1737–1812.
“twelve negroes”: Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 154.
“were instrumental in the defense”: Ibid., 148.
1,094 of these soldiers: Ibid., 82.
1784–1789: The U.S. Constitution
two enslavers: “Richard Allen: Apostle of Freedom,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania, hsp.org/history-online/exhibits/richard-allen-apostle-of-freedom/allen-enslaved.
didn’t know hard work: “The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen…,” Documenting the American South, docsouth.unc.edu/neh/allen/allen.html.
hard just to live: Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 198.
“A nation, without”: Federalist Papers, No. 85, Avalon Project, avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed85.asp.
“do good” to those: Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 206.
The abuse and affront: “Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours.”
“this mode of alluding to slaves”: Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860, www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/nyregion/full-text-abraham-lincolns-cooper-union-address.html.
Free African Society (FAS): “The Free African Society,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania, hsp.org/history-online/exhibits/richard-allen-apostle-of-freedom/the-free-african-society; “Free African Society,” Encyclopædia Britannica,