Peter Williams, Jr.: “Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade”

About the Author

Peter Williams, Jr., was born around 1780, in Brunswick, New Jersey. His mother, Mary Durham, was an indentured servant from Saint Kitts, and his father, Peter Williams, Sr., was a slave who purchased his freedom in 1785. Williams, Sr., had fought on the side of the Patriots in the Revolutionary War and instilled in his son a love for the nation and its government. The family moved to New York, where a growing number of free blacks were living. There the elder Williams sold tobacco, while young Peter attended the African Free School and had private tutors. In 1796, Williams, Sr., helped found the first African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New York.

As an adult, Williams helped in the tobacco business and kept his father’s books. He also began to participate in activism against slavery and joined the Episcopal Church. On the first day of the new year in 1808, the young man delivered “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade” at the African Church in New York, in order to celebrate the occasion of the official end of the legal Atlantic slave trade of Africans. Within a week, Williams was asked to provide a copy for publication.

In 1818, frustrated with the segregation in the Episcopal church he attended in New York (they could use the church only at certain times of the week), Williams established Saint Philip’s African Church, which soon relocated to the village of Harlem in the north of Manhattan. He was consecrated as an Episcopal deacon and, in 1826, was ordained as the first black priest in the New York diocese (the second in the United States, after Absalom Jones). Although other Episcopal clergymen did not show Williams the customary respect and the congregation was not allowed into to the diocesan convention, Williams’s church continued to grow and came to include several future notable abolitionists, like James McCune Smith and Alexander Crummell.

Williams was very active in different societies for abolition and for black education and relief, including the New York African Society for Mutual Relief and the American Anti-Slavery Society. The year after he was ordained a priest, Williams cofounded the Freedman’s Journal, the first African American newspaper in the United States, to which some of the leading black writers and activists of the day submitted work. In 1830 he helped organize the Philadelphia National Negro Convention’s first session. He founded the Phoenix Society in 1833 to further the education of African Americans. The society aided both children and adults, enrolling them in classes, programs, lectures, and apprenticeships as well as putting together libraries for their use, providing self-improvement groups, and supplying clothing to children who could not otherwise participate.

In July of 1834, as part of a series of area assaults on New York abolitionists, African Americans, and their organizations, Saint Philip’s Church was attacked by a mob and damaged. Soon thereafter, Williams received a letter from his bishop advising him to resign from the Anti-Slavery Society for the good of the Episcopal Church and the community. This Williams did, in a public letter, humbly and respectfully. Throughout the rest of his life Williams supported and encouraged education for African Americans and the end of their oppression in all its forms across the nation. He died in New York City on October 17, 1840, a respected and beloved member of the community, remembered for his activism on behalf of African Americans and for his moral courage.