Belinda, Petition of an African Slave, 1782
Detail from a portolan chart of the Atlantic Ocean, 1633. (Library of Congress)
Belinda, an enslaved woman, submitted this petition to the government of Massachusetts in February 1782. She tells of her capture in Africa and endurance of the Middle Passage, and her purchase by Isaac Royall, a Harvard professor who held her as a slave for fifty years. Royall fled to England during the Revolution, and Belinda filed a request to be paid for her years of labor. She was granted a pension by the state.
Belinda, “Petition of an African Slave, to the Legislature of Massachusetts,” 1782
Petition of an African Slave, to the Legislature of Massachusetts.
To the honourable the senate and house of representatives, in general court assembled:
The petition of Belinda, an African,
Humbly shews,
THAT seventy years have rolled away, since she, on the banks of the Rio de Valta, received her existence. The mountains, covered with spicy forests—the vallies, loaded with the richest fruits, spontaneously produced—joined to that happy temperature of air, which excludes excess, would have yielded her the most complete felicity, had not her mind received early impressions of the cruelty of men, whose faces were like the moon, and whose bows and arrows were like the thunder and the lightning of the clouds. The idea of these, the most dreadful of all enemies, filled her infant slumbers with horror, and her noon-tide moments with cruel apprehensions! But her affrighted imagination, in its most alarming extension, never represented distresses equal to what she has since really experienced: for before she had twelve years enjoyed the fragrance of her native groves, and ere she realized that Europeans placed their happiness in the yellow dust, which she carelessly marked with her infant footsteps—even when she, in a sacred grove, with each hand in that of a tender parent, was paying her devotion to the great Orisa, who made all things, an armed band of white men, driving many of her countrymen in chains, rushed into the hallowed shades! Could the tears, the sighs, and supplications, bursted from the tortured parental affection, have blunted the keen edge of avarice, she might have been rescued from agony, which many of her country’s children have felt, but which none have ever described. In vain she lifted her supplicating voice to an insulted father, and her guiltless hands to a dishonoured deity! She was ravished from the bosom of her country, from the arms of her friends, while the advanced age of her parents, rendering them unfit for servitude, cruelly separated her from them for ever.
Scenes which her imagination had never conceived of, a floating world, the sporting monsters of the deep, and the familiar meetings of billows and clouds, strove, but in vain, to divert her attention from three hundred Africans in chains, suffering the most excruciating torment; and some of them rejoicing that the pangs of death came like a balm to their wounds.
Once more her eyes were blest with a continent: but alas! how unlike the land where she received her being! Here all things appeared unpropitious. She learned to catch the ideas, marked by the sounds of language, only to know that her doom was slavery, from which death alone was to emancipate her. What did it avail her, that the walls of her lord were hung with splendor, and that the dust trodden under foot in her native country, crouded his gates with sordid worshippers! The laws rendered her incapable of receiving property: and though she was a free moral agent, accountable for her own actions, yet never had she a moment at her own disposal! Fifty years her faithful hands have been compelled to ignoble servitude for the benefit of an Isaac Royall, until, as if nations must be agitated, and the world convulsed, for the preservation of that freedom, which the Almighty Father intended for all the human race, the present war commenced. The terrors of men, armed in the cause of freedom, compelled her master to fly, and to breathe away his life in a land, where lawless dominion sits enthroned, pouring blood and vengeance on all who dare to be free.
The face of your petitioner is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame feebly bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the laws of the land, is denied the enjoyment of one morsel of that immense wealth, a part whereof hath been accumulated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.
Wherefore, casting herself at the feet of your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of virtue, and the just returns of honest industry—she prays that such allowance may be made her, out of the estate of colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives: and she will ever pray.
BELINDA.
Boston, February, 1782.
Source: The American Museum, or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, Prose and Poetical. For June, 1787 1, no. 6 (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1787).
Belinda, “Petition of an African Slave to Legislature of Massachusetts,” 1782
To the honourable the senate and house of representatives, in general court assembled:
The petition of Belinda, an African, Humbly shews, THAT seventy years have rolled away, since she, on the banks of the Rio de Valta, received her existence . . . before she had twelve years . . . an armed band of white men, driving many of her countrymen in chains, rushed into the hallowed shades . . . She was ravished from . . . her country, from the arms of her friends, while the advanced age of her parents, rendering them unfit for servitude, cruelly separated her from them for ever.
Scenes which her imagination had never conceived of . . . three hundred Africans in chains, suffering the most excruciating torment . . .
Once more her eyes were blest with a continent . . . her doom was slavery, from which death alone was to emancipate her . . . Fifty years her faithful hands have been compelled to ignoble servitude for the benefit of an Isaac Royall, until . . . the present war commenced. The terrors of men, armed in the cause of freedom, compelled her master to fly, and to breathe away his life . . .
The face of your petitioner is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame feebly bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the laws of the land, is denied the enjoyment of one morsel of that immense wealth, a part whereof hath been accumulated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.
Wherefore, casting herself at the feet of your honours . . . she prays that such allowance may be made her, out of the estate of colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives: and she will ever pray.
BELINDA.
Boston, February, 1782.
Source: The American Museum, or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, Prose and Poetical. For June, 1787, vol. 1, no. 6 (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1787), pp. 538–540.
ravished - stolen
ignoble - mean
augmented - make greater
Background
Belinda, an enslaved woman, submitted this petition to the government of Massachusetts in February 1782. She tells of her capture in Africa and endurance of the Middle Passage, and her purchase by Isaac Royall, a Harvard professor who held her as a slave for fifty years. Royall fled to England during the Revolution, and Belinda filed a request to be paid for her years of labor. She was granted a pension by the state.
Transcript
Belinda, “Petition of an African Slave, to the Legislature of Massachusetts,” 1782
Petition of an African Slave, to the Legislature of Massachusetts.
To the honourable the senate and house of representatives, in general court assembled:
The petition of Belinda, an African,
Humbly shews,
THAT seventy years have rolled away, since she, on the banks of the Rio de Valta, received her existence. The mountains, covered with spicy forests—the vallies, loaded with the richest fruits, spontaneously produced—joined to that happy temperature of air, which excludes excess, would have yielded her the most complete felicity, had not her mind received early impressions of the cruelty of men, whose faces were like the moon, and whose bows and arrows were like the thunder and the lightning of the clouds. The idea of these, the most dreadful of all enemies, filled her infant slumbers with horror, and her noon-tide moments with cruel apprehensions! But her affrighted imagination, in its most alarming extension, never represented distresses equal to what she has since really experienced: for before she had twelve years enjoyed the fragrance of her native groves, and ere she realized that Europeans placed their happiness in the yellow dust, which she carelessly marked with her infant footsteps—even when she, in a sacred grove, with each hand in that of a tender parent, was paying her devotion to the great Orisa, who made all things, an armed band of white men, driving many of her countrymen in chains, rushed into the hallowed shades! Could the tears, the sighs, and supplications, bursted from the tortured parental affection, have blunted the keen edge of avarice, she might have been rescued from agony, which many of her country’s children have felt, but which none have ever described. In vain she lifted her supplicating voice to an insulted father, and her guiltless hands to a dishonoured deity! She was ravished from the bosom of her country, from the arms of her friends, while the advanced age of her parents, rendering them unfit for servitude, cruelly separated her from them for ever.
Scenes which her imagination had never conceived of, a floating world, the sporting monsters of the deep, and the familiar meetings of billows and clouds, strove, but in vain, to divert her attention from three hundred Africans in chains, suffering the most excruciating torment; and some of them rejoicing that the pangs of death came like a balm to their wounds.
Once more her eyes were blest with a continent: but alas! how unlike the land where she received her being! Here all things appeared unpropitious. She learned to catch the ideas, marked by the sounds of language, only to know that her doom was slavery, from which death alone was to emancipate her. What did it avail her, that the walls of her lord were hung with splendor, and that the dust trodden under foot in her native country, crouded his gates with sordid worshippers! The laws rendered her incapable of receiving property: and though she was a free moral agent, accountable for her own actions, yet never had she a moment at her own disposal! Fifty years her faithful hands have been compelled to ignoble servitude for the benefit of an Isaac Royall, until, as if nations must be agitated, and the world convulsed, for the preservation of that freedom, which the Almighty Father intended for all the human race, the present war commenced. The terrors of men, armed in the cause of freedom, compelled her master to fly, and to breathe away his life in a land, where lawless dominion sits enthroned, pouring blood and vengeance on all who dare to be free.
The face of your petitioner is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame feebly bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the laws of the land, is denied the enjoyment of one morsel of that immense wealth, a part whereof hath been accumulated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.
Wherefore, casting herself at the feet of your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of virtue, and the just returns of honest industry—she prays that such allowance may be made her, out of the estate of colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives: and she will ever pray.
BELINDA.
Boston, February, 1782.
Source: The American Museum, or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, Prose and Poetical. For June, 1787 1, no. 6 (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1787).
Excerpt
Belinda, “Petition of an African Slave to Legislature of Massachusetts,” 1782
To the honourable the senate and house of representatives, in general court assembled:
The petition of Belinda, an African, Humbly shews, THAT seventy years have rolled away, since she, on the banks of the Rio de Valta, received her existence . . . before she had twelve years . . . an armed band of white men, driving many of her countrymen in chains, rushed into the hallowed shades . . . She was ravished from . . . her country, from the arms of her friends, while the advanced age of her parents, rendering them unfit for servitude, cruelly separated her from them for ever.
Scenes which her imagination had never conceived of . . . three hundred Africans in chains, suffering the most excruciating torment . . .
Once more her eyes were blest with a continent . . . her doom was slavery, from which death alone was to emancipate her . . . Fifty years her faithful hands have been compelled to ignoble servitude for the benefit of an Isaac Royall, until . . . the present war commenced. The terrors of men, armed in the cause of freedom, compelled her master to fly, and to breathe away his life . . .
The face of your petitioner is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame feebly bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the laws of the land, is denied the enjoyment of one morsel of that immense wealth, a part whereof hath been accumulated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.
Wherefore, casting herself at the feet of your honours . . . she prays that such allowance may be made her, out of the estate of colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives: and she will ever pray.
BELINDA.
Boston, February, 1782.
Source: The American Museum, or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, Prose and Poetical. For June, 1787, vol. 1, no. 6 (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1787), pp. 538–540.
ravished - stolen
ignoble - mean
augmented - make greater
