As the rhetoric of freedom rang out across the colonies in the early 1770s, blacks in the North raised their voices against the injustices of slavery and legal discrimination against freedmen. In 1773 and 1774 slaves in Massachusetts sent a series of petitions to the colony's legislature asking for emancipation and requesting that they either be settled on a grant of land in the colony or given passage to Africa. These slaves described themselves as a "Grate Number of Blacks of this Province who are held in a State of Slavery within the bowels of a free and Christian country" who claimed in "comon with all other men a natural right to our freedom without Being depriv'd of them by our fellow men. . . ." The petitioners failed to gain the support of the legislature.

Hall and Cuffe.

Nevertheless agitation continued in Massachusetts. Prominent free blacks...