The History of Black Congregants at the Old South Meeting House — Part Two
Written by Jim Bennett, Visitor Experience Supervisor
Published: October 2026
This blog is the second installment in a three-part series exploring the history of Black congregants at Old South Meeting House, based on research by Visitor Experience Supervisor and historical interpreter Jim Bennett. In the first installment, Bennett examined the influence of the Great Awakening on Black and Indigenous participation in religious life, as well as the concept of religious agency among enslaved people. This time, we explore the justifications of slavery.
The Writings of Thomas Prince
In May 1709, nineteen-year-old Thomas Prince arrived on the island of Barbados. Although he had seen slavery in his native New England, the brutal conditions of the sugar plantations shocked his conscience. He wrote in his diary “’Tis computed that in this Island, to no more than 8000 Whites, there are no less than 45,000 negros, all absolute slaves, till kind Death wrests them out of the hands of their Tyrannical Masters…. they are loath to lose that miserable life, till rendered by the Barbarianism of Christians almost intolerable.”1 In 1718, after further travels and time spent living in England, Prince returned to Boston and was ordained as co-pastor of Old South Meeting House. Ten years later, Joseph Sewall, who served alongside Prince as Old South Meeting House’s co-pastor, recorded the baptism of “Lucy Manoel a free negro woman, who dwells with Mr. Prince,” the strike-through witnessing to Sewall’s own uncertainty about the status of Prince’s enslaved woman. By 1738, Manoel was free, as Boston’s marriage records tell us that “James Basset & Lucy Manwill, both free Negroes” were married by Sewall.
How Colonial People Justified Slavery
There are no other references to Prince enslaving anyone other than Lucy Manoel, whom he eventually manumitted. Even so, based on his extraordinary revulsion to the slavery he witnessed in Barbados, it may surprise modern readers that he later became an enslaver at all. But this would be to misunderstand Prince’s cultural context. Most Christians of the early eighteenth century believed that slavery could be an unusually cruel practice, degenerating to the sort of “Barbarianism of Christians” which disgusted Prince. Yet they also believed that slavery as an institution was Biblically permissible and could be practiced in a morally upright and Christian manner.
This sort of Christian slavery was upheld by the pastors of Old South Meeting House. Early in his pastorate, Sewall preached a sermon in which he established an expectation that the enslavers in his congregation would teach their enslaved people to read, to instruct them in religion at home, and to bring them to church on Sundays.2 Sewall explained that enslavers had a sacred duty to give their enslaved people time for religious edification, for “Our Servants are not so ours, but they are the LORD’s still, and GOD expects that part of their time be daily devoted to His more immediate Service; so that if we refuse to grant convenient time for such Duties, we rob GOD of His due.”3
Sewall himself set an example for his flock of how to be a Christian enslaver. In 1719, Sewall baptized Jane, “an Indian woman who belongs to my Family Joseph Sewall,” along with her daughter, Rose. Twenty years after her baptism, in 1739, Rose, “Negro Servant to Rev. Joseph Sewall” made her confession of faith and became the 10th Black member of Old South Meeting House. In 1762, “Rose, Servant to Joseph Sewall D.D.” married “Negro James, Servant to Mr. Jonathan Simpson.” Over the course of more than 40 years, from baptism, to full membership, and then through marriage, Rose’s life showed that Christianity at Old South Meeting House was in no way incompatible with the ongoing maintenance of the system of enslavement.
A New Movement
By the 1760s, at least one Old South Meeting House congregant, James Otis, found slavery irredeemable, as he wrote “Nothing better can be said in favor of a trade, that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant, from the director of an African company to the petty chapman in needles and pins on the unhappy coast.”4 That revolution in sentiment came not from the pulpit, but from a new, secular discourse on natural rights that would start a revolution in Boston and lead to the legal end of enslavement in Massachusetts in 1783.
The next blog post will focus on an enslaved man named Cornwall, diving into the benefits, or lack thereof, that he received for being a full member of the Old South Meeting House Congregation, and the hypocrisy it reveals about colonial attitudes.
- Thomas Prince, Thomas Prince Journal, 1709–1711, P-110, 1 reel (microfilm), Massachusetts Historical Society.
- Joseph Sewall, Desires That Joshua’s Resolution May Be Revived: Or, Excitations to the Constant and Diligent Exercise of Family-Religion: Being the Substance of Sundry Sermons (Boston in N.E.: Printed by B. Green, for Samuel Gerrish at his shop on the north side of the town shop, 1716). Accessed on the Evans Early Imprint Collection, University of Michigan.
- Ibid
- James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. By James Otis, Esq; [Four lines in Latin from Virgil] (Boston: Printed and sold by Edes and Gill, in Queen-Street, 1764), 29. Accessed on Evans Early Imprints, University of Michigan.