The Forgotten Tavern Meeting of 1775 That Sparked America’s Abolitionist Movement
In April 1775, just days before the “shot heard ’round the world” at Lexington and Concord initiated the American Revolutionary War, a quieter but equally revolutionary gathering took place in Philadelphia. At the Rising Sun Tavern, 24 men convened to form the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, an event historians now cite as the genesis of organized abolitionism in America.
While popular history often focuses on the Founding Fathers drafting documents of independence, this specific meeting marked the formation of the first anti-slavery society in the Western world. Organized largely by Quakers and led by the educator and activist Anthony Benezet, the group dedicated itself to the legal defense of people of African descent who had been kidnapped or illegally enslaved. This organization eventually evolved into the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, a group that would later boast Benjamin Franklin as its president and petition the Constitutional Convention to end the slave trade.
The backdrop of this meeting highlights a profound historical irony. As colonists prepared to take up arms for their own liberty against the British Crown, this small cohort challenged the hypocrisy of demanding freedom while maintaining the institution of chattel slavery. Their efforts bore fruit relatively quickly in their home state; largely due to their lobbying, Pennsylvania passed the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, the first law of its kind in the Western hemisphere to legally mandate the eventual end of slavery.
However, historical analysts caution against viewing this 1775 meeting as a silver bullet that ended slavery. The road from the Rising Sun Tavern to the ratification of the 13th Amendment was long, bloody, and complex. Critics of the “gradualist” approach note that the legislation born from these early movements often left thousands enslaved for decades longer; the 1780 Act, for example, freed no living slaves immediately, only the future children of enslaved mothers. Furthermore, it would take nearly another century and a devastating Civil War to dismantle the institution of slavery on a national scale.
Despite these caveats, the 1775 meeting remains a critical inflection point. It established the template for moral activism and legal intervention that would sustain the anti-slavery cause through the darkest decades of the 19th century.
