New Light on Richard Allen: The Early Years of Freedom

Abstract

ICHARD Allen was one of the most gifted Americans of his generation. At a time when historians have been commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution and the accomplishments of the white founding fathers, little attention is paid to this black founding father. Yet his role as a shaper of thought and a builder of institutions was matched by few of his white contemporaries, and what he accomplished was done in the face of obstacles that most of them did not have to overcome. At age twenty, only a few months released from slavery, he was preaching to mostly white audiences and converting many of his hearers to Methodism. At age twenty-seven, he was one of the founders of the Free African Society of Philadelphia, perhaps the first autonomous organization of free blacks in the United States. Before he was thirty-five he had become the spiritual leader of what would grow into Philadelphia's largest congregation-Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Over a long lifetime he founded, presided over, or served as officer in a large number of other organizations designed to improve the condition of life and expand the sphere of liberty for Afro-Americans. Never receiving formal education, he became an accomplished and eloquent writer, penning and publishing sermons, tracts, addresses, and remonstrances; compiling a hymnal; and drafting articles of organization and governance for various organizations. He lived past his seventy-first birthday, dying in i83 i, and left a legacy that flourishes today. Almost all that is known about Richard Allen's early years, especially the crucial few years after he obtained his freedom, comes from his autobiographical reflections, narrated to his son Richard Allen, Jr., when the senior Allen was an old man. The memoir was discovered by Daniel A. Payne in a trunk in the possession of Allen's youngest daughter in i850, when Payne began research for the first history of the African MethodistEpiscopal Church.1 In the course of doing research on the formation of the free black community in Philadelphia, I have found documents that add to what is known about Allen's early years of freedom and, at the same time, testify in most particulars to the accuracy of his memory when, late in life,