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Absalom Jones was the first African American ordained as a priest in the Episcopal church, founded the first Black Episcopal congregation, and was a major figure in the religious and political life of revolutionary Philadelphia and the early republic.

Jones was born into slavery in Sussex County, Delaware on November 6, 1746, on the plantation of the slaveowner and Dutch immigrant Abraham Wyncoop. From a young age, Jones saved pennies to purchase books and taught himself to read by using the New Testament. Jones was separated from his family at age sixteen and brought to Philadelphia by the slaveowner Benjamin Wynkoop (Abraham Wynkoop’s son). Benjamin Wynkoop attended and was a vestry member at Christ Church and St. Peter’s. In Philadelphia, Jones worked as a clerk and as a general assistant in Wynkoop’s grocery store, while starting to earn some of his own money. From 1767 onwards, in the evenings and without Wynkoop’s knowledge, Jones attended Quaker Anthony Benezet’s night school for African Americans, where he learned mathematics and handwriting. In 1770, Jones married Mary Thomas, who’s owner also attended Christ Church, and Jones was able to purchase Thomas’s freedom. The two were married by Jacob Duche, the rector of Christ Church. Jones obtained his own freedom through manumission in 1784.

In 1787, Jones and Richard Allen formed the Free African Society (FAS). Both also served as lay preachers at St. George’s Methodist Church and helped to increase the size of the congregation. In 1792, the church vestry at St George’s attempted to enforce segregation without notice by removing Black worshippers to a newly built upstairs gallery. The vestry attempted to forcibly remove Jones during prayers, and Allen recalled that a trustee pulled Jones up “off his knees” and exclaimed “you must get up – you must not kneel here.” The two men then led the Black contingent out of St. George’s. The episode increased sympathy for FAS and helped the organization raise funds to build a church of their own. That year, under the leadership of Jones and Allen, “The African Church” was formed as an outgrowth of FAS. Allen eventually withdrew with a part of the congregation to found Bethel Church (later, Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church). Jones remained as the leader of The African Church which was formally received into the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania on October 17, 1794 and renamed St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. William White, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania ordained Jones a deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1795. Seven years later, in 1802, White ordained Jones as the first African American Episcopal priest in the face of intense resistance from some white religious leaders.

Jones’s key role in building Black religious institutions in Philadelphia extended to political activism. He helped found a day school for Black students who were barred from public school at the time, the Female Benevolent Society, and several other Black community services. In 1793, Jones and Allen co-authored A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia. It chronicled the role of African Americans who helped to save many whites during the yellow fever epidemic and challenged the racist assumption that Black people were immune to the disease. In part, Benjamin Rush abandoned a number of racial stereotypes after seeing the medical skills of African Americans and the heroism of Jones and Allen during the epidemic. Jones was part of the first group of African Americans to formally petition the United States government. The petition to end the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was brought before Congress in 1797 on behalf of four Black men who had been kidnapped back into slavery was denied. Jones was also involved in writing a second petition in 1799 which included the signatures of seventy Black Phialdelphians. He preached against the slave trade not just in the United States but also in Great Britain, and began a tradition of giving anti-slavery sermons on different holidays which argued that God would deliver the oppressed from bondage, and became a vocal early critic of the American Colonization Society.

By the early nineteenth century, the congregation of St. Thomas stood at roughly five hundred and Jones had built one of the most significant Black churches in Philadelphia and the nation. Between 1795 and Jones’s death in 1818, he baptized 1,218 people.

Bibliographical Information

“About the Reverend Absolam Jones.” The African Episocal Church of St. Thomas, accessed April 30, 2023. http://www.aecst.org/ajones.htm.

Campbell, James T. Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Coleman, Charles L. “The Emergence of Black Religion in Pennsylvania, 1776-1850,” Pennsylvania Heritage, vol 4, no. 1 (December 1977): 24-28.

Douglass, William. Annals of the First African Church in the USA, Now Styled the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, Philadelphia. Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1862).

Dunkley, D. A., “Black Radicalism in the Episocal Church: Absalom Jones and Slave Resistance, 1746-1818,” Anglican and Episocal History, vol. 91, no. 3 (Sept. 2022): 263-90.

Jones, Absolom, and Richard Allen. A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793. Philadelphia, William W. Woodward, 1794.

Lammers, Ann C. “The Rev. Absolam Jones and the Episocal Church: Christian Theology and Black Consciousness in a New Alliance,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Epsiocoap Church, vol. 51, no. 2 (June 1982): 159-84.

Short biography

Absalom Jones was the first African American ordained as a priest in the Episcopal church, founded the first Black Episcopal congregation, and was a major figure in the religious and political life of revolutionary Philadelphia and the early republic. Jones was born into slavery in Delaware in 1746, brought to Philadelphia at the age of sixteen, and obtained his freedom through manumission in 1784. In 1787, Jones and Richard Allen formed the Free African Society (FAS). Both also served as lay preachers at St. George’s Methodist Church. In 1792, the church vestry attempted to enforce segregation and Jones, Allen, and other Black members of the congregation left. They formed The African Church as an outgrowth of FAS. The African Church was formally received into the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania on October 17, 1794 and renamed St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. William White, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania ordained Jones a deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1795. Seven years later, in 1802, White ordained Jones as the first African American Episcopal priest in the face of intense resistance from some white religious leaders. Jones was a key political activist in Philadelphia, part of the first group of African Amerians to formally petition the United States government in 1797 and 1799. He preached against the slave trade in the United States and abroad, and was one of the earliest critics of the American Colonization Society.

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Benjamin Franklin was a prominent political philosopher and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. While he was born in Boston, he became a prominent Philadelphian, founding various important civic organizations including the Library Company and the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania).

Franklin appreciated the social role of religion, but at various times in his life he was a religious skeptic, deist, and freethinker. As a young man he published A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725) which promoted deist thought. However, he eventually tried to suppress the distribution of the publication and did not actively promote his deist beliefs.

Notable moments in Franklin’s life include when he became a member of the Philadelphia City Council in 1748, justice of the peace in 1749, and in 1751 a city alderman and a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly.

Additionally, he had a hand in the writing of the Declaration of Independence, contributed to the drafting of the Articles of Confederation—America’s first national constitution—and was the oldest member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that wrote the Constitution of the United States of America in Philadelphia.

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Jarena Lee was an African American female preacher active towards the end of the Second Great Awakening. She settled in Philadelphia and was converted at Mother Bethel AME Church. Lee was the first woman authorized to preach in the AME Church and penned the first religious autobiography by an African American woman.

Lee was born in Cape May, New Jersey, on February 11, 1783. While she and her family were legally free, her parents hired her out as a domestic servant at the age of seven. Lee’s family was not religious but after settling in Philadelphia as an adult she started to attend different church services. In 1804, Lee became convinced of the need to seek salvation after she heard a Presbyterian missionary read a psalm during a worship service. In the same year, she attended a service at Mother Bethel and had a conversion experience during one of Richard Allen’s services. After hearing Allen preach, Lee became convinced that this was “the people to which my heart unites,” and started to share her testimony in the following weeks.

In 1807, Lee heard a voice tell her to “go and preach the gospel.” To begin with she was convinced that no one would believe her. However, Lee approached Allen two days later and told him she felt it were her religious duty to preach. Allen said that Lee could hold prayer meetings and give exhortations with the authorization of the preacher of the church but denied her a preaching license as the Methodists did “not call for women preachers.” Interestingly, Allen noted that a “Mrs. Cook, a Methodist lady” had previously requested the same privilege.

In the following years, Lee set aside the idea of becoming a preacher and instead married one. When her husband died, Lee renewed her request for a preaching license in 1817. Allen still denied the request, but in 1819, Lee interrupted a minister’s sermon during a service at Mother Bethel because she simply could not wait until it was over to exhort the congregation. Rather than being expelled, this incident convinced Allen that Lee could become an itinerant preacher. While he would not issue an official license for Lee to preach, he endorsed her as an official travelling exhorter which significantly helped open church doors to her around the United States. Despite much opposition, Lee travelled across multiple American states and attended various AME conventions. She preached at Mother Bethel on multiple occasions and even traveled to border states such as Maryland and Virginia, which were often considered dangerous for Black preachers and travelers. In 1832 and 1833, Lee travelled more than 2,700 miles and two years later she preached a total of 692 sermons in a single year.

In the 1830s, Lee recorded her life in a spiritual autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, giving an account of her call to preach the gospel (1836). When the Book Committee of the AME Church refused to publish the autobiography, Lee personally financed the printing of 2000 copies, and it was published and printed by an unnamed editor. Lee published an expanded version thirteen years later, The Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee (1849), despite a church ban on the publication of such texts without formal approval.

As Lee travelled across the country, people would often travel significant distances to hear her preach. This included enslaved individuals which only increased Lee’s belief that slavery was a sin that needed to be eradicated. She became active in the abolition movement and joined the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839. In 1853, when the society held its convention in Philadelphia, Lee spoke before the meeting which included prominent abolitionist leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, and Sojourner Truth.

Lee was never granted an official preaching license and in 1852 the AME Church passed a definitive ruling that forbid women from preaching. Despite these obstacles and opposition, within and outside of her denomination, Lee was a trailblazer for African American women’s activism within religious communities and strenuously argued throughout her life that women had as much right to preach the gospel as men. As she wrote in The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, “For as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for a woman to preach, it should be remembered that nothing is impossible with God. And why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper for a woman to preach? Seeing the savior died for the woman as well as the man” (11). Lee, like several women preachers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, defended the right to preach the gospel as a divine calling based on scriptural revelation. As the scholar Catherine Brekus notes, the focus on female equality rooted in scriptural revelation, rather than natural rights, may speak to one of the reasons that many female preachers of this era have been written out of the historical record: they were viewed as too radical to be remembered by evangelists, yet too conservative to be remembered by women’s rights activists. While most early records suggested that Lee died at some point in the 1850s, recent archival research by Frederick Knight suggests that Jarena Lee died in Philadelphia in early 1864.

Documents

Lee, Jarena. Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, giving an account of her call to preach the Gospel. Philadelphia: published for the author, 1836.

Lee, Jarena. Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel. Philadelphia: published for the author, 1849.

Bibliography

Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Giver-Johnston, Donna. Claiming the Call to Preach: Four Female Pioneers of Preaching in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Lee, Jarena, 1783-. Ann Arbor: ProQuest, 2020. https://proxy.library.upenn.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/encyclopedias-reference-works/lee-jarena-1783/docview/2471645686/se-2.

"Jarena Lee." Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 100, Gale, 2012. Gale In Context: Biography, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1606007040/BIC?u=upenn_main&sid=summon&xid=21ab9951. Accessed 18 July 2023.

Knight, Frederick. “The Many Names for Jarena Lee.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 141, No. 1 (Jan. 2017): 59-68.

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