'A More Convenient Opportunity'

CONCORD, NH – When state representatives started debating the last bill on their docket Wednesday, it was a debate that really began 234 years ago. Its time had finally come:

Free the slaves.

Exercising the wisdom that "the time is always right to do what is right," as Martin Luther King said, lawmakers voted unanimously to pass a bill for "posthumously emancipating enslaved Africans in New Hampshire."

This was no squeegee to the slate of history, seeing as the bill comes 150 years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The state's legislative history on this issue actually goes back to 1799, when 20 slaves from Portsmouth petitioned the General Court, asking it to abolish slavery so "That the name of slave may not more be heard in a land gloriously contending for the sweets of freedom," according to the bill.

The General Court denied the petition, stating in part: "Therefore ordered that the further consideration and determination of the matter be postponed till a more convenient opportunity."

Fourteen of the 20 men died as slaves. Six men became free and independent family heads by 1800, according to the bill, which quotes historian Valerie Cunningham. 

Bill sponsors included Sen. Martha Fuller Clark (D-Portsmouth), Rep. Jacqui Cali-Pitts (D-Portsmouth), Rep. Laura Pantelakos (D-Portsmouth), Rep. Brian Wazlaw (D-Portsmouth), Rep. Renny Cushing (D-Hampton), Sen. David Watters (D-Dover) and Sen. Sylvia Larsen (D-Concord)

Watch the attached VIDEO as Rep. Peter Sullivan (D-Manchester) reads the names of those petitioners ... 234 years later.