Belinda Sutton’s 1788 petition. Source: Massachusetts Archives
As a child, Belinda Sutton was kidnapped into slavery in West Africa and brought to Massachusetts. She was enslaved by Isaac Royall Jr., a merchant and politician with strong ties to the British Crown. Royall fled to Canada at the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775; he died in England six years later.
On Feb. 14, 1783, Sutton petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for a pension paid out of her former enslaver’s estate. The legislature awarded her a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings (roughly $3,800 today) per year, but payments tapered off after the first two. Sutton had to petition again and again over the next decade for funds she was legally owed.
Her 1783 petition, excerpted here, marks one of the earliest known cases in U.S. history of a formerly enslaved person acquiring economic reparations for slavery.
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, apart whereof hath been accumulated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.
Read more in the lesson “Founding” Documents We Don’t Learn About.
Rita Dove wrote a poem called “Belinda’s Petition.” Learn more from BlackPast and the Missed in History podcast. See the petition and ruling: Massachusetts Archives Collection. v.239: p.12-14, petition of Belinda, February 14, 1783. SC1/series 45X and read full text.
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