The Slave-Turned Bishop Who Delivered George Washington’s Eulogy

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Few Americans know the extraordinary story of Richard Allen, who rose from slavery in colonial America to become a prosperous entrepreneur and inspirational preacher in the early Republic. Rich Newman is a historian at Rochester Institute of Technology who’s been researching Richard Allen for over twenty years. Rich wrote the acclaimed book, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, The AME Church and the Black Founding Fathers.

Let’s take a listen. If you don’t know about Richard Allen, he’s probably the most important figure in the Founding era of American history that you’ve either not learned about or need to learn about. So, who was Richard Allen? He was born into slavery in either Philadelphia or Delaware in 1760. He was one of six siblings. We also know that his mother and father loved him very much, but the family was split up by bondage when he was young. But Richard Allen “got religion,” as they say, when he was a teenager in the mid-1770s, just as the American Revolution was kicking into high gear. Richard Allen joined groups of traveling Methodist preachers who roamed the countryside in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, and he felt really inspired by their word. African Americans like Richard Allen thought that evangelical religion offered a key to their own liberation. So Richard Allen became a devoted follower of the Methodist Church. He went to class study sessions to learn more about the Bible. He listened to the orations of many of the great traveling preachers in his day, people like Freeborn Garretson, and he paid attention to the egalitarian message. No matter your class, no matter your status, no matter your race, you were equal in the eyes of God. And for a young enslaved man like Richard Allen, a teenager who said that “slavery is a bitter pill” had split apart his family, this was a necessary and inspiring message. Indeed, let me talk to us a little bit more about the evangelical network that Richard Allen encountered during the Revolution in America. This was a network that was steeped in the tradition of John and Charles Wesley and their understanding of a church that welcomed all souls, regardless of status, regardless of race. So Richard Allen learned at the feet of white preachers. He encountered African American preachers. We have records of Black preachers who spoke at camp meetings and on the evangelical circuit, but he mentions various white preachers who had given sermons, who had led class meetings, who talked about the Bible insights from the Wesley Brothers, talked about some of the anti-slavery writings of John Wesley. Religion and evangelical study also provided a pathway to freedom by allowing him to learn literacy skills. In many parts of the South, including Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, slaveholders frowned on education for enslaved people because either (a) it would provide them with a wider worldview that would undermine bondage, or (b) it would give them literacy skills, like writing skills, that would actually allow them to write passes to freedom that would facilitate their escape from bondage. So Richard Allen gained these literacy skills as a teenager and combined them with his religion and sharpened them into a really powerful set of anti-slavery tools and even weapons. So, with these weapons, Richard Allen started to plot for his own freedom from bondage. So again, we have to think about the time period around him. It’s the American Revolutionary era. American patriots are fighting for their own liberation. They’re arguing that they have been enslaved to British masters—imperial officials who treat them as if they were unfree underlings. So Richard Allen hears that message too and imbibes it, and he thinks that this is the perfect moment to go to his master with a proposition. He wants to bring one of the traveling Methodist preachers to his home for a sermon. And Richard Allen’s master says that this would be good. But what he doesn’t know is that Richard Allen has plotted in some ways for the evangelical preacher to give an abolitionist sermon. So, imagine a small house of roughly eight people. You’ve got just a few rooms, you’ve got candlelight, there’s war, and then this preacher that Richard Allen has brought into the house of Stokely Sturgis just gives a fire and brimstone sermon, in which he essentially points his finger at Richard Allen’s master and, quoting from the Book of Daniel, says, “Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting.” In other words, God is judging your soul, just as he judged the souls of ancient Egyptian masters and smote them. So too is he now looking at you as an unrepentant slaveholder in Revolutionary America. Unless you change things, you too will be destined for a hellpit of fire and brimstone. And this scares the living hell out of Stokely Sturgis, who agrees to let Richard Allen and his brother buy their freedom from bondage. So Richard Allen, from that moment in 1780, works diligently in Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania. He’s cutting wood, he’s hauling bricks, he’s hauling salt. He’s doing anything that will earn some sort of compensation so that he can pay his master. And it works. He pays off his master early, after roughly three and a half years, so by the end of 1783, he is free, and he’s on good terms with his former master. He’s made a lot of contacts in the evangelical community, and he starts roaming around this part of the Middle Atlantic countryside as a traveling preacher himself. He now claims to be the voice of God. The Revolution has just ended in 1783, so people are not only talking about peace, they’re talking about the meaning of freedom, and just as he did when he was working, Richard Allen is a very diligent preacher, traveling everywhere he can to get an audience to preach the word of the Just and Righteous God. So he writes about this in his autobiography, which his son publishes posthumously in 1833. But he starts telling these stories later in life, writing some things down, having his son keep notes, and a lot of these early stories are about his traveling the evangelical circuit. He’ll speak to interracial audiences here. He’ll talk to white Methodists there. He’ll stay with African American Methodists. Outside of Philadelphia, he’ll preach several times a day. He’ll fall asleep essentially preaching or reading his Bible or talking to people, so he’s really committed to this task. He arrives in Philadelphia after Methodist preachers there hear about all of his accomplishments on the evangelical circuit. Philadelphia is the home to the largest and most important Methodist church in America, Saint George’s Episcopal Church. It’s a grand edifice. It’s still in existence. The congregation is still there in Philadelphia near the waterfront. And Richard Allen is going to help build up the African American congregation at Saint George’s Methodist Church. As he says, he began preaching before dawn and he preached after the sun went down. He preached five times a day. He got a lot of new congregants into the church, not just African Americans, but others heard his preaching at the church and in and around parts of Philadelphia. So he felt like he was helping to recreate Saint George’s and American Methodism in the eyes of a Righteous and Just God. He’s bringing interracial fellowship into the church. He’s talking about the importance of emancipation, Black liberation, and things seemed to be going well until there are stirrings that Richard Allen and Black congregants are pushing a little too hard and a little too fast. And Richard Allen’s reply is, “We just fought our Revolution for human freedom. It’s in the Declaration of Independence. Many of you pray to a God who believes that everyone is created equal. What should we wait for?”

And you’ve been listening to Rich Newman tell the story of Richard Allen. And what a story he’s telling, what temerity, what courage it took for him to invite an itinerant pastor into his master’s home to give a sermon on how God is displeased with the idea of owning another human being. And the master is convicted from that message. But what next? Ah, that’s the key. He goes around the country traveling as an itinerant evangelical preacher, and then he lands in Philadelphia, and there was the largest Methodist church in the country at the time, Saint George’s, and he wanted to grow that church and make it a special church with great interracial fellowship. When we come back, we’ll find out what happens next. This is Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and with the story of Richard Allen. Telling it is Rich Newman, a historian at Rochester Institute of Technology, and who is the author also of the acclaimed book, Freedom’s Prophet. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

Eventually, white leaders create a segregated seating program at the church where Black congregants will be put either in the back of the church or in a newly created and elevated church pew. This set the stage for the first sit-in in American history for civil rights and then the first walk-out on behalf of civil rights in American history. So Richard Allen walks into Saint George’s Methodist Church one day and is told that the segregated seating program has now been put into operation and Black congregants have to go to the back, and they walk right by the sexton. Then they sit where they have always sat on the main floor of the church, and they begin praying. Richard Allen and his great activist and civil rights colleague Absalom Jones are in prayer, and white leaders of the church come up and they try to move them. Richard Allen stays firm, so too does Absalom Jones, and finally Absalom and Richard Allen say, “Leave us alone until we’re done in prayer, and then we won’t bother you again.” And when they’re done praying, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and most of the members of the Black congregation get up in unison and walk out of the church. It’s a really defiant and glorious moment, and as Richard Allen said later on, “They never saw us again.” So in Philadelphia in the early 1790s, Richard Allen buys church property and begins building institutionally and organizationally the seeds of what becomes Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Initially it’s going to be under the organizational wing of the Methodist Church, but Richard Allen says, “This is a Black church.” African American trustees and preachers and congregants are in control. And when it’s dedicated in July of 1794, Richard Allen believes this is a Black redoubt of freedom and liberty and justice. So in Richard Allen’s time, the first church building was located at Sixth and Lombard Streets. So you can look in the Philadelphia phone book and you can see this notation. This is the longest continuously owned parcel of property by any African American community in North America. So this is really significant. When Allen buys this piece of property, he thinks he’s really setting down church roots forever. So in the summer of 1793, the city of Philadelphia, which is also at that time the capital of the United States government. It’s where the federal government is located between 1790 and 1800. The Congress is there, the President is there, the Supreme Court is there. A lot of governing officials are there. This is the heart and soul of America’s national governing infrastructure. And in the summer of 1793, the capital of Philadelphia is hit with a devastating Yellow Fever epidemic. Yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes. The virus is really nasty and attacks various parts of the body, and it creates punishing fevers. It creates a yellowing condition in the skin. People who survive it never forget it, but many people don’t survive it. The big news for Philadelphians is there’s no cure. There’s no inoculation. In 1793, so around three months—late August to early November—nearly five thousand Philadelphians perish from the Yellow Fever. If that doesn’t sound like a truly large number to die from a disease, consider this population fact. In 1793, Philadelphia was the nation’s largest city, and its population was fifty thousand people. So five thousand or thereabouts constituted roughly ten percent of Philadelphia’s overall population. So scholars estimate that somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people left Philadelphia. This follows on conversations that Richard Allen had with the celebrated physician Benjamin Rush, who is perhaps America’s leading physician. He works at the College of Physicians, the leading medical college in the United States, based in Philadelphia. Benjamin Rush is treating a lot of Yellow Fever cases, and he needs help, and he asks Richard Allen and Absalom Jones if they will mobilize members of the Black community to help him and to help Philadelphians. So Benjamin Rush, Richard Allen, white and Black reformers agree that this might be a way to intervene on behalf of the abolitionist and civil rights struggles. But Benjamin Rush believes that bleeding people is the way to go, and he trains Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in the art and science of bleeding, and they minister to dozens and dozens of white as well as African American people who feel like there’s hope in this treatment. But Richard Allen and Black aid workers do so much more. They meet with people who are sick and need aid because family members have left them, so they’re engaging in nursing activities. They clear out infected homes after people die per city ordinances. This requires burying and burning beds, furniture, clothing, blankets, anything that people think would be infected by the Yellow Fever. Richard Allen also meets with people who are terminally ill and know they’re going to die. In the narrative he writes about the Yellow Fever epidemic, he has a moving account of meeting with someone who was left alone by his family and asked Richard Allen and Absalom Jones to measure him, fit him out for a coffin, and make sure that he was buried when he died. So, as Richard Allen says, “Truly, our task was hard.” As people return in late November of 1793, December of 1793, and into 1794, they start talking about what happened in Philadelphia while they were gone, and rumors start to spread that there was a lot of looting and a lot of theft. Richard Allen himself came down with Yellow Fever, sat in a recovery institution for a little while, and barely recovered. When he does finally recover, he reads this Yellow Fever pamphlet and he can’t believe the stories that are being told. He says, “I was here during Yellow Fever. I saw what the Black community did. I saw how they interacted with members of the white community.” Richard Allen also lost a business; he and Absalom Jones started a nail-producing business during the very early stages of the Yellow Fever summer. They lost that business. So Richard Allen goes to the mayor, goes to reformers like Benjamin Rush, but he realizes that what he has to do is write his own history. Matthew Carey’s History of Yellow Fever becomes a runaway bestseller. It goes through second, third, fourth, and fifth editions. So that story about Black theft and Yellow Fever is getting set in stone as more and more people read it, so Richard Allen decides to write his own history of the Yellow Fever. It also affixes to that narrative an abolitionist sermon that challenges Americans coming back to Philadelphia, particularly members of Congress, to think about enacting national abolitionist laws. As Richard Allen says, “If you love your country, if you love the God of Love, free your hands from slaves. Burden out your country with them.” So this is published in January 1794, and it gains rich and Allen a national reputation. What Allen is saying is that the life of the nation depends on the death of bondage. That slavery is killing the American Dream, especially for African Americans, but also because it’s killing the very idea, the egalitarian idea of the nation that’s the heart of the Declaration of Independence. He’s speaking to the very soul of the American Dream. And in that quote, I think he really lays bare his greatest hopes, and his biggest nightmares: that if Americans don’t confront slavery, if they don’t use love to defeat the fear of bondage, then the nation itself will be ruined, and in a sense he’s predicting a future Civil War.

And you’ve been listening to author Rich Newman tell one powerful story about Richard Allen, and what Allen is predicting, of course, is what happens. The country doesn’t wrestle with this original sin, or it does, but not enough. And in the end, the Civil War is the only way out. “If you love your country, free your hands from slavery,” he implored. “By the way, Jefferson struggled with this at the end of his life too; read his final writings.” He’s tortured by slavery. “The life of the nation depends on the death of bondage.” When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of Richard Allen. Here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Richard Allen as told by Rich Newman, a historian at Rochester Institute of Technology, and his book Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, The AME Church and the Black Founding Fathers. Let’s pick up where we last left off. Eventually, reformers in the abolitionist community send the Yellow Fever pamphlet to England, and people circulate it there. And Matthew Carey, who originally came from the British Isles—