Absalom Jones

Absalom Jones was born a slave in Sussex County, Delaware, in 1746, and no one wrote down the day. When he was about sixteen the man who owned him sold the plantation, and sold his mother with it, and his sister, and his five brothers, and brought Absalom alone to Philadelphia to clerk in a store. He never saw them again in any record that survives. In the city he went at night to a school for Black students, and with money earned doing extra work he bought himself a Bible and a spelling book.

In 1770 he married Mary Thomas at Christ Church, and he was still a slave when he did it. Then he and Mary's father set about buying her freedom, borrowing from Quakers who would lend, and they bought hers first and years before his own. That was the whole point. A child in Pennsylvania followed the condition of the mother, so a free mother meant free children. Absalom Jones was not manumitted himself until October of 1784, when he was about thirty-eight, and afterward he went on working for the same man, now for wages.

Three years later he and Richard Allen founded the Free African Society, a company of free Black Philadelphians formed, in the words of its own founding articles, so that a society should be formed, without regard to religious tenets, provided the persons lived an orderly and sober life, in order to support one another in sickness, and for the benefit of their widows and fatherless children. It was written to help people bury their dead and feed their widows. Within a few years it would be asked to do that for an entire city.

Sometime in those years, worshipping at St. George's Methodist Church, Jones and Allen and the other Black members were pulled up off their knees in the middle of prayer, because a new rule had put them where they were not to kneel. They walked out, all of them together, and did not come back.

Then in 1793 the yellow fever came to Philadelphia and killed something near five thousand people. Those who could leave left, physicians among them. The city's most famous doctor, Benjamin Rush, held and said publicly that Black people did not take the fever, and on that assurance Jones and Allen sent the members of their Society into the sick rooms as nurses, into the streets as cartmen, into the graveyards as diggers, at first for nothing. The assurance was false. Sixty-seven Black Philadelphians were buried the year before the fever; three hundred and five were buried during it, and Jones and Allen counted those graves themselves. They bled upwards of eight hundred people. When the accounts were added up at the end, they had spent more than they took in and were out of pocket by £177 9s. 8d.

And then a publisher named Mathew Carey, who had left the city himself, printed a pamphlet saying the Black nurses had robbed the dying. So Jones and Allen answered him in print, in 1794, which is how we have any of this at all. They set down the money. They set down the names. They asked, in one line that has outlasted the whole quarrel, "Is it a greater crime for a black to pilfer, than for a white to privateer?" And they wrote to the mayor that they would not swear an oath to clear their own names: "we fear not our enemies, let them come forward with their charges, we will not flinch, and if they can fix any crime upon us, we refuse not to suffer." Sixteen days later the mayor signed a certificate saying they had done their duty, and they printed that too.

Into the same pamphlet they put things that had nothing to do with defending themselves. A poor widow, Sarah Bass, who nursed whole families for nothing and, when anything was offered, "left it to the option of those she served." A young Black woman asked to sit the night with a white man and his wife when nobody else could be got, offered great wages, who said: "I will not go for money, if I go for money God will see it, and may be make me take the disorder and die, but if I go, and take no money, he may spare my life." She went at nine, found them both on the floor, could get no candle, stayed two hours. They died that night. She took the fever afterward, and lived.

The congregation Jones led dedicated its church in July of 1794 and voted to become Episcopalian. The diocese received it in 1795, and in the same breath excused Jones from Greek and Latin and forbade his church to send its rector or any delegate to the diocesan convention, "or to interfere with the general government of the Episcopal Church." Bishop William White ordained him deacon that year, and made him wait seven more to be ordained priest, on the twenty-first of September, 1802: the first Black priest in the Episcopal Church in the United States. The bar on his congregation was not lifted in his lifetime, nor for forty-seven years after his death.

He kept petitioning the government that would not listen. He drafted a petition in 1797 for four freed North Carolina men being hunted back into slavery, and the House refused to hear it, fifty to thirty-three. He put his own name first on another in 1799, with seventy others, asking that the slave trade end and that men be given the liberties the Constitution held out; a congressman said it would create disquiet and jealousy and deserved no encouragement, and it was voted down.

On the first day of January, 1808, the trade in stolen human beings became illegal in the United States, and Absalom Jones stood up in his own church to preach on the text where God tells Moses he has seen the affliction of his people and heard their cry and has come down to deliver them. Jones took that text and carried it forward without a seam: "He came down into the Congress of the United States, the last winter, when they passed a similar law, the operation of which commences on this happy day." He told them that not one of those groans had been lost: "every tear they shed, was preserved, and every groan they uttered, was recorded; in order to testify, at a future day, against the authors of their oppressions." He gave the congregation five things to do, and the last was this, and he was asking for it, not being granted it: "Let the first of January, the day of the abolition of the slave trade in our country, be set apart in every year, as a day of publick thanksgiving for that mercy." Then he prayed, and in the prayer he said what he had been arguing in petitions for eleven years: "We thank thee, that thou art no respecter of persons, and that thou hast made of one blood all nations of men."

Slavery itself was not touched by that law, and he knew it, and in the same sermon he asked God to move the legislature toward the ones still in bondage. He died on the thirteenth of February, 1818, and the church he had built out of a burial society numbered more than five hundred. He had bought his wife's freedom before his own, and lived to see the first of January kept.