Abstract

Belinda Sutton (c. 1712–after 1793) was a Black woman who was born in what is today Ghana, kidnapped and enslaved as a child, and sold to one of the largest slave-owning families in Massachusetts, the Royalls. When this family abandoned its plantation to flee to England during the American Revolution, Sutton—already in her sixties—gained freedom. In 1783, she petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for reparations from the seized Royall estate to compensate her for the labor that was stolen from her. The petition succeeded, and she was awarded an annual pension. The petition was reprinted in several newspapers and became an influential antislavery text; this chapter reproduces it in full. As part of her argument for reparations, Sutton provides a short autobiography, making this text a rare eighteenth-century slave narrative by a woman.