Roy E. Finkenbine

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 732 words from this article are provided below; about 4536 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase this article in PDF form for $10.00.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Roy E. Finkenbine | Belinda's Petition: Reparations for Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.1 | The History Cooperative

Belinda's Petition: Reparations for Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts

AS British and American diplomats negotiated in Paris in 1783 to bring the American Revolution to a formal conclusion, an obscure Boston woman struggled to find her own personal peace. Belinda—history never records that she adopted a surname—had begun the Revolution as the slave of Isaac Royall of Medford, Massachusetts, the largest slave owner and one of the wealthiest in the colony. As an avowed loyalist, Royall had fled to England in 1775, shortly after Lexington and Concord, leaving his business interests, his Georgian mansion, his extensive slave quarters, and his two dozen or so slaves behind. Though Massachusetts had confiscated his real property in 1778, several of the slaves, including Belinda, were manumitted and left to fend for themselves. Like many other African Americans freed in New England during or shortly after the Revolution, Belinda chose to exchange the site of her bondage for the thriving seaport city of Boston, probably hoping to become part of the free black community developing there. Freedom, however, came with its own costs. Belinda was aged, poor, and living on the margins of society while also caring for an invalid daughter, Prine, who had accompanied her to Boston. Furthermore a son, Joseph, may have been sold away from her at the time she was manumitted. Apparently troubled by her failure to realize any of the fruits of the labor she had performed for decades in bondage, she presented a petition to the Massachusetts legislature on February 14, 1783, asking for an annual pension to be paid to her and Prine out of the proceeds of Royall's estate.¹	1
Divergent sources have misremembered Belinda's petition as a plea for freedom. These publications include An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes (1810), among the first positive assessments of black ability in the literature of the modern West; Freedom's Journal, the first African American newspaper; The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, one of the earliest works of African American history; and a poem by Rita Dove, the former poet laureate of the United States. Actually, the petition is a systematic but subtle statement of the right of reparations and a plea for a specific form of reparations, a very personal one. Anthropologist Rosalind Shaw has argued that Belinda's case represents "perhaps the earliest example of reparations for the slave trade and slavery."² As a call for personal compensation for slavery, the petition offers evidence of a radical thread in African American thought and writing in the era of the Founding Fathers. In slightly more than eight hundred words, arranged in five brief paragraphs, the petition recounts Belinda's suffering and unrequited toil as a consequence of slavery and the slave trade and seeks to justify her argument for an annual pension. It makes a moral and an intellectual appeal.	2
The first paragraph of the petition contrasts an edenic Africa with Belinda's violent capture by slavers at about age twelve. Belinda, who was born near the banks of the Volta River along the Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana) around 1713, remembered her childhood home as a pleasant place. It consisted of "mountains, covered with spicy forests— vallies, loaded with the richest fruits spontaneously produced—joined to that happy temperature of air, which excludes excess." Among her favorite early memories were "the fragrance of her native groves" and visiting "a sacred grove, with each hand in that of a tender parent, [who] was paying devotion to the great Orisa, who made all things." Into that untroubled world came "an armed band of white men, driving many of her countrymen in chains." Shocked by their appearance and the suddenness of their arrival in her village, she remembered them as men "whose faces were like the moon, and whose bows and arrows were like the thunder and lightning of the clouds." They "rushed into the hallowed shades," wrenching her from her parents, whom she described as too old to be fit for bondage. Though she "lifted her supplicating voice to an insulted father, and her guiltless hands to a dishonoured deity," she was never again to see her parents or her home. It was at this point that "her mind received early impressions of the cruelty of men." Following her capture she was taken overland to the Guinea coast.³	. . .

There are about 4536 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.