The Black American Founders

Born into slavery and known for much of her early life as “Mumbett,” Elizabeth Freeman’s origins are largely unrecorded. She was born sometime around 1744 and enslaved in New York by Pieter Hogeboom. Hogeboom transferred the seven-​year-​old Freeman to his daughter, Hannah, who had married the politically active John Ashley. Though denied literacy and legal personhood, Freeman was observant and intelligent. Her work as a domestic servant and midwife in Ashley’s prominent Massachusetts household placed her at the center of political conversation during the Revolutionary era. Many guests of the Ashleys underestimated Freeman, assuming she was incapable of grasping the ideas under debate.

It is unclear how Freeman first learned of the new Massachusetts Constitution, which was adopted in 1780. Notably, it did not mention slavery or explicitly recognize the institution. While legally ambiguous, its declaration that “all men are born free and equal” presented an opportunity. Some immediately recognized that slavery could be challenged in court, even as many slaveholders assumed existing laws sanctioning slavery remained in force.

Freeman’s turning point came that same year. After shielding another servant from a brutal punishment, she suffered a deep burn on her arm and refused to hide the scar. It became her testimony against the Ashleys. Elizabeth approached Theodore Sedgwick, a lawyer and frequent guest in the household, about whether the new constitution meant she, too, was free. “Won’t the law give me my freedom?” she asked.

Sedgwick agreed to take her case, joined by attorney Tapping Reeve. They filed suit in Berkshire County Court on behalf of Freeman and another man enslaved by the Ashleys, named Brom. In 1781, a jury ruled that Brom and Bett were not property and awarded them damages. John Ashley declined to appeal, wary of the precedent already emerging from similar cases, including that of Quock Walker.

After the ruling, she chose “Elizabeth Freeman” as her name. She went to work for the Sedgwick family, who cherished her as a member of their household. Freeman helped raise Sedgwick’s daughter Catherine, who later recorded Freeman’s fierce devotion to liberty. Freeman once said to Catherine, “If one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it.”

Freeman purchased her own home, raised her daughter, and became a respected figure in the Stockbridge community. She died in 1829. The Sedgwicks buried her in their family plot, which was an extraordinary honor at the time. Though she left no written record of her life, Freeman’s obscure case reshaped Massachusetts law. Judicial precedent, established by people like Freeman, rendered slavery unconstitutional in the state. Freeman’s life stands as proof that some of the most effective advocates for liberty emerge from those with almost no formal power.

Lemuel Haynes was born in 1753 in West Hartford, Connecticut, into what one clergyman later described as “not only extreme poverty but the worst kind of orphanage.” His mother, a white woman of respectable ancestry, abandoned him shortly after birth, likely to avoid the stigma of bearing a Black child.

At five months old, Haynes was placed in indentured servitude with the Rose family in Granville, Massachusetts. Though legally bound, Haynes found affection and opportunity in the Rose household. Deacon David Rose, a devout Puritan, ensured Lemuel received an education. Haynes could study only at night after long days of labor, but he still developed an extraordinary memory. He could preach sermons from memory while only a boy, and he adopted the laudable habit of learning “something more every night than I knew in the morning.”

At twenty, Haynes experienced a profound religious conversion after witnessing the aurora borealis and believing Judgment Day was imminent. He embraced Calvinism and immersed himself in theological study. When his indenture ended after he turned twenty-​one, he joined the Revolutionary Minutemen. In 1775, he marched with the Granville militia in the aftermath of the Boston Massacre. In 1776, he served at the garrison of Ticonderoga, recently seized by forces led by Ethan Allen. Haynes believed the Revolution was a moral struggle between liberty and tyranny.

Inspired by the Declaration of Independence, Haynes wrote “Liberty Further Extended” in 1776. Though unpublished, the essay circulated widely. Here, Haynes argues that America’s promise of liberty must include Black Americans, declaring that “Liberty is a jewel which was handed down to man from the cabinet of Heaven.” Slavery, he insisted, violated both natural law and divine will.

As Americans fought for their rights against the British Empire, Haynes warned “While we are so zealous to maintain, and foster our own invaded rights, it cannot be thought impertinent for us candidly to reflect on our own conduct.” God, Haynes argued, granted every person an equal right to freedom. “Liberty is equally as precious to a Black man, as it is to a white one, and Bondage equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other.”

After the war, Haynes devoted himself fully to ministry and education. He studied Latin, Greek, and homiletics. Working as a schoolteacher to support himself, he was licensed to preach in 1780. He was the first Black man to receive such recognition in a Protestant church in America. In 1788, he accepted a call to pastor the West Parish Church of Rutland, Vermont, where he served for thirty years.

Vermont, which had abolished slavery in its 1777 constitution using language echoing the Declaration, proved fertile ground for Haynes’s vision. In his sermon “True Republicanism,” Haynes wrote, “We are not to conclude that the fair tree of liberty hath reached its highest zenith.” Slavery, he believed, remained a stain on the republic. In 1804, Middlebury College awarded him an honorary master’s degree—the first such honor given to a Black American.

When Haynes died in 1833, a Black newspaper called him “the only man of known African descent who has ever succeeded in overpowering the system of American caste.” His fusion of theology and republicanism shaped a moral vision of liberty that influenced generations of abolitionists.

James Forten was born free in Philadelphia on September 2, 1766, an extraordinary status for a Black child at the time. His father, Thomas Forten, taught him to read, write, and sew sails, passing down something few Black children possessed: education, a trade, and freedom. When Thomas Forten died, James was only seven years old. Thomas left the family in precarious circumstances. Forten worked wherever he could and attended the Friends’ African School before it closed due to lack of funds.

At the age of nine, Forten heard the Declaration of Independence read aloud for the first time. During the Revolution, the British offered freedom to enslaved people who fought for the Crown. Despite this temptation, Forten joined the American cause as a privateer to support his family at the age of sixteen.

In 1781, Forten served aboard the Royal Louis under Captain Stephen Decatur. When the ship was captured by the British vessel Amphion, Forten faced the terrifying possibility that the British might sell him into slavery in the West Indies. Instead, he was assigned to supervise the captain’s children. The British captain later offered Forten a position in his household in England, but Forten refused, declaring, “I have been taken prisoner for the liberties of my country, and never will prove a traitor to her interest.”

The British imprisoned Forten aboard the notorious Jersey prison ship, where disease and death were rampant. After seven months, they released him, and he walked barefoot from New York to Trenton. Following the war, he apprenticed as a sailmaker under Robert Bridges, a friend of his late father. Forten proved so skilled that Bridges eventually made him his successor.

In 1798, Forten took ownership of the sail loft with the consent of its workers, becoming the first Black American to own a business of such a scale. His workforce was integrated, a rarity that drew public notice. By the 1820s, Forten had become one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Philadelphia.

He invested in real estate, received a medal for personally saving lives along the Delaware River, and emerged as a leader in Philadelphia’s growing Black community. When legislators proposed restricting Black migration to Pennsylvania in 1813, Forten responded with Letters from a Man of Colour, defending the Constitution and declaring that “the Law knows no distinction.”

Forten supported William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionist cause, providing money, expertise, and global intelligence through his maritime connections. He died in 1842. His funeral at St. Thomas’s Church was attended by thousands of people of every race.

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Taken together, Elizabeth Freeman, Lemuel Haynes, and James Forten point toward the existence of a Black founding generation who lived through the Revolution, absorbed its ideas, and insisted that its promises applied to them fully and without exception. They were active participants in the founding moment, shaping the meaning of liberty through law, theology, and business.

Yet American memory has been slow to acknowledge this Black founding generation. Traditional narratives of the Revolution often treat Black Americans as peripheral. This omission is not entirely accidental. Recognizing Black founders forces a confrontation with the contradiction at the heart of the Revolution: that a nation born proclaiming universal rights simultaneously denied the humanity of millions. The loyalty some Black Americans had to a nation that denied their humanity remains one of the most complex features of early American history. For Freeman, Haynes, and Forten, loyalty did not mean naïve trust or uncritical patriotism. Their allegiance was not to existing institutions as they stood, but to the moral logic embedded in the Declaration of Independence.

The Black founding generation also complicates modern assumptions about progress and resistance. Their arguments were not always secular, not always radical in form, and not always aimed at immediate overthrow of the existing oppressive system. To recover the history of the American founding is to recognize that liberty was not simply granted downward by enlightened elites or postponed until later generations corrected earlier mistakes. The story of the United States is not complete without the Black Americans who believed in its principles before these principles were applied to them.