In July of 1779, while the colonies were fighting for their freedom, 20 enslaved men in Portsmouth, NH were asking for the same. Most of the men who signed the petition were fighting in the war alongside their masters, and they believed that because of this and because of the ideals the revolutionaries claimed to have, that slavery should be outlawed. The petition was printed in the New Hampshire Gazette as the law required but was framed to make it look like a joke, and the NH Legislature didn’t respond for another 235 years.
The petition itself was forgotten about until historian Valerie Cunningham found it in the legislative archives while researching for her book Black Portsmouth. It is currently held in the New Hampshire State Archives. Six of the men who signed the petition had freed themselves before they died but fourteen of them died still in bondage. They were not technically freed until former Governor Hassan signed a bill freeing them in 2014 - 235 years later.
Slavery itself was not abolished in New Hampshire until the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified in 1865. The New Hampshire state constitution makes no mention of it either way. Article 2, written in 1784, says “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by this state on account of race, creed, color, sex or national origin.” But this apparently was not applied to people held in slavery.
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