Anglican Commemoration
First African-American Priest
February 13 · d. 1818
Absalom Jones was born enslaved in Delaware in 1746 and died a priest in Philadelphia in 1818, the first Black man ordained in the Protestant Episcopal Church. He founded the Free African Society with Richard Allen in 1787, organized Black Philadelphians to nurse and bury the dying through the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, defended them in print when they were slandered for it, petitioned Congress twice against slavery, and served the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas until his death.
Absalom Jones was born a slave in Sussex County, Delaware, in 1746, and no one wrote down the day. When he was about sixteen the man who owned him sold the plantation, and sold his mother with it, and his sister, and his five brothers, and brought Absalom alone to Philadelphia to clerk in a store. He never saw them again in any record that survives. In the city he went at night to a school for Black students, and with money earned doing extra work he bought himself a Bible and a spelling book.
In 1770 he married Mary Thomas at Christ Church, and he was still a slave when he did it. Then he and Mary's father set about buying her freedom, borrowing from Quakers who would lend, and they bought hers first and years before his own. That was the whole point. A child in Pennsylvania followed the condition of the mother, so a free mother meant free children. Absalom Jones was not manumitted himself until October of 1784, when he was about thirty-eight, and afterward he went on working for the same man, now for wages.
Three years later he and Richard Allen founded the Free African Society, a company of free Black Philadelphians formed, in the words of its own founding articles, so that a society should be formed, without regard to religious tenets, provided the persons lived an orderly and sober life, in order to support one another in sickness, and for the benefit of their widows and fatherless children. It was written to help people bury their dead and feed their widows. Within a few years it would be asked to do that for an entire city.
Sometime in those years, worshipping at St. George's Methodist Church, Jones and Allen and the other Black members were pulled up off their knees in the middle of prayer, because a new rule had put them where they were not to kneel. They walked out, all of them together, and did not come back.
Then in 1793 the yellow fever came to Philadelphia and killed something near five thousand people. Those who could leave left, physicians among them. The city's most famous doctor, Benjamin Rush, held and said publicly that Black people did not take the fever, and on that assurance Jones and Allen sent the members of their Society into the sick rooms as nurses, into the streets as cartmen, into the graveyards as diggers, at first for nothing. The assurance was false. Sixty-seven Black Philadelphians were buried the year before the fever; three hundred and five were buried during it, and Jones and Allen counted those graves themselves. They bled upwards of eight hundred people. When the accounts were added up at the end, they had spent more than they took in and were out of pocket by £177 9s. 8d.
And then a publisher named Mathew Carey, who had left the city himself, printed a pamphlet saying the Black nurses had robbed the dying. So Jones and Allen answered him in print, in 1794, which is how we have any of this at all. They set down the money. They set down the names. They asked, in one line that has outlasted the whole quarrel, "Is it a greater crime for a black to pilfer, than for a white to privateer?" And they wrote to the mayor that they would not swear an oath to clear their own names: "we fear not our enemies, let them come forward with their charges, we will not flinch, and if they can fix any crime upon us, we refuse not to suffer." Sixteen days later the mayor signed a certificate saying they had done their duty, and they printed that too.
Into the same pamphlet they put things that had nothing to do with defending themselves. A poor widow, Sarah Bass, who nursed whole families for nothing and, when anything was offered, "left it to the option of those she served." A young Black woman asked to sit the night with a white man and his wife when nobody else could be got, offered great wages, who said: "I will not go for money, if I go for money God will see it, and may be make me take the disorder and die, but if I go, and take no money, he may spare my life." She went at nine, found them both on the floor, could get no candle, stayed two hours. They died that night. She took the fever afterward, and lived.
The congregation Jones led dedicated its church in July of 1794 and voted to become Episcopalian. The diocese received it in 1795, and in the same breath excused Jones from Greek and Latin and forbade his church to send its rector or any delegate to the diocesan convention, "or to interfere with the general government of the Episcopal Church." Bishop William White ordained him deacon that year, and made him wait seven more to be ordained priest, on the twenty-first of September, 1802: the first Black priest in the Episcopal Church in the United States. The bar on his congregation was not lifted in his lifetime, nor for forty-seven years after his death.
He kept petitioning the government that would not listen. He drafted a petition in 1797 for four freed North Carolina men being hunted back into slavery, and the House refused to hear it, fifty to thirty-three. He put his own name first on another in 1799, with seventy others, asking that the slave trade end and that men be given the liberties the Constitution held out; a congressman said it would create disquiet and jealousy and deserved no encouragement, and it was voted down.
On the first day of January, 1808, the trade in stolen human beings became illegal in the United States, and Absalom Jones stood up in his own church to preach on the text where God tells Moses he has seen the affliction of his people and heard their cry and has come down to deliver them. Jones took that text and carried it forward without a seam: "He came down into the Congress of the United States, the last winter, when they passed a similar law, the operation of which commences on this happy day." He told them that not one of those groans had been lost: "every tear they shed, was preserved, and every groan they uttered, was recorded; in order to testify, at a future day, against the authors of their oppressions." He gave the congregation five things to do, and the last was this, and he was asking for it, not being granted it: "Let the first of January, the day of the abolition of the slave trade in our country, be set apart in every year, as a day of publick thanksgiving for that mercy." Then he prayed, and in the prayer he said what he had been arguing in petitions for eleven years: "We thank thee, that thou art no respecter of persons, and that thou hast made of one blood all nations of men."
Slavery itself was not touched by that law, and he knew it, and in the same sermon he asked God to move the legislature toward the ones still in bondage. He died on the thirteenth of February, 1818, and the church he had built out of a burial society numbered more than five hundred. He had bought his wife's freedom before his own, and lived to see the first of January kept.
Both of Absalom Jones's petitions were refused, and he wrote the second one anyway. That is worth sitting with, because most of what you are asked to do faithfully will not visibly work, and the temptation after the first refusal is to conclude that the asking was naive. Jones seems not to have drawn that conclusion. He kept the accounts, he named the widow who would take no payment, he stood up on the first day a law took effect and asked his congregation to keep the date every year afterward, as though the small mercy were worth a permanent feast. He was working on a scale of time longer than his own life, and he knew it: the trade was banned, slavery was not, and he prayed for the ones still in bondage in the same breath as the thanksgiving. Where in your own life have you stopped asking because the answer came back no, and what would it look like to file the petition again?
The documentary record of Absalom Jones divides sharply at 1787. Before that there is almost nothing: no birth record has surfaced, no baptismal entry, no plantation register, and every date given for his childhood is a modern reconstruction from later sources. After 1787 he is a man who signs things, and the record is dense and often primary. He left no autobiography; a first-person birth statement that circulates in search results belongs to Dorothy Porter's editorial introduction to Early Negro Writing (1971), not to Jones.
Two works survive. The first is the Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793, printed at Philadelphia in 1794 and written jointly with Richard Allen. Everything drawn from it here is read from the digitized first edition. It is openly polemical, written to answer Mathew Carey's A Short Account of the Malignant Fever (1793) point by point, and it is signed by both men with no internal marker of which wrote which sentence; no line in it can be assigned to Jones alone. The second is A Thanksgiving Sermon, preached January 1, 1808 and printed that year at Philadelphia by Fry and Kammerer at the vestry's resolution of February 11. It is the only surviving work that is Jones's by himself, and it supplies his theology rather than his biography. There is no manuscript of either, no stemma, and no critical edition. The petitions of 1797 and 1799 survive as documents in the records of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Several dates are genuinely unsettled and are given here as they stand. The birth day is November 6 in most accounts and November 7 in some, both undocumented. The year Mary's freedom was purchased is given as 1778 in one place and as the early 1780s in another, and neither has been traced to its source. The ordination to the priesthood is September 21, 1802 in the sources this page follows, but a September 1804 date recurs in at least two reference works and is not a single slip. The year Jones was ordained deacon, 1795, is well attested; no reachable source supplies the day, and none is given here. The most consequential gap is the walkout from St. George's, dated variously to 1787, 1791, and 1792 with no contemporary record traced; a November 1787 date would place it after the founding of the Free African Society that April, inverting the order in which the story is usually told. It is written above without a year for that reason. Allen's own autobiography narrates the incident and would be the source to read.
Two things the record does contain should not be smoothed. The diocese that received St. Thomas's in 1795 barred it from convention in the same act; a full admission vote failed in 1854, the clergy in favour and the laity against, and succeeded only in 1865. And on January 15, 1817, some three thousand Black Philadelphians met at Bethel Church over the American Colonization Society's scheme to resettle free Black Americans in Africa. The meeting was called by the city's Black leadership, Jones among them, who were not at first hostile to the plan; the assembly rejected colonization outright and the leaders took up its position. That is the sequence, and it runs the opposite way from the usual telling.
Absalom Jones was never canonized, because the Episcopal Church does not run that machinery: there is no cause, no positio, no miracle dossier. He entered the calendar by a vote of General Convention, and he is kept on February 13, the day he died, as "Absalom Jones, Priest, 1818." The year of that vote is given as 1973 in most accounts and as 1977 in some, and neither has been checked against the Journal of General Convention.
What grew up around him is unusually tangible for an Anglican commemoration. His remains were moved four times: buried at St. Thomas's original churchyard in 1818, removed with the rest of the burials to Lebanon Cemetery in 1887, removed again to Eden Cemetery in Collingdale when Lebanon was condemned in 1903, and brought at last, in the early 1990s, to the church his congregation now occupies on Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia. The Absalom Jones Chapel there was dedicated on November 10, 1996, and his ashes are enshrined in its altar; an Absalom Jones memorial window by Robert C. Moore was dedicated the following July. No one else claims the remains.
The observance has spread past his own communion. The Diocese of Pennsylvania keeps an annual celebration and award in his name; Pennsylvania set a state historical marker for him and for St. Thomas's in September 1984; the North American Lutheran Church carries him on February 13; and the Diocese of Pittsburgh keeps a joint ecumenical celebration of Absalom Jones and Jehu Jones, a different and later man with whom he is often confused. The Absalom Jones Episcopal Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta, on the Morehouse College campus, still carries the work under his name.
Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793; and a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown Upon Them in Some Late Publications (Philadelphia: printed for the authors by William W. Woodward, 1794). Quotations here follow the first edition as digitized from the National Library of Medicine copy: "Is it a greater crime for a black to pilfer, than for a white to privateer?" at p. 8; Sarah Bass and the unnamed nurse who would not take money at pp. 11–12; the letter to Mayor Matthew Clarkson of January 7, 1794, ending "we will not flinch," at p. 22, with Clarkson's certificate of approbation of January 23 printed after it. The burial figures and the accounting are in the same pamphlet. https://archive.org/details/2559020R.nlm.nih.gov
Absalom Jones, A Thanksgiving Sermon, Preached January 1, 1808, in St. Thomas's, or the African Episcopal, Church, Philadelphia, on Account of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, on That Day, by the Congress of the United States (Philadelphia: Fry and Kammerer, 1808). Quoted here from the full transcriptions, which bracket the original pagination: "He came down into the Congress of the United States" in the opening pages, following the Exodus 3:7–8 epigraph; "every tear they shed, was preserved" at p. 9/10; the five duties and "Let the first of January… be set apart in every year" at pp. 14–19; "no respecter of persons" in the closing prayer at p. 20. https://anglicanhistory.org/usa/ajones/thanksgiving1808.html
Preamble to the Articles of Association of the Free African Society, Philadelphia, April 1787, quoted here as transmitted in William Douglass, Annals of the First African Church in the United States of America Now Styled the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, Philadelphia (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1862). The archival original was not consulted. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h465t.html
"Petition of Absalom Jones, and Others, People of Colour, and Freemen, Against the Slave Trade to the Coast of Guinea," signed December 30, 1799 and presented to the House of Representatives January 2, 1800. Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.; transcription at https://home.nps.gov/articles/000/inde-1799-12-30-petition-ajones-abolition-guinea.htm
The 1797 petition, drafted by Jones and signed by Jacob Nicholson, Jupiter Nicholson, Job Albert, and Thomas Pritchet, presented January 23 and refused a hearing fifty to thirty-three on January 30: https://hamilton.gilderlehrman.org/supporting-document/petition-protect-freed-slaves-1797
Two petitions, both defeated, and a founding that came with an exclusion attached: the public record of this life is mostly a record of things refused. What it also records is that he kept filing them.
O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servant Absalom Jones to be a pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Pastor
Isaiah 6:1–8Psalm 71:16–23v1 Peter 5:1–11 or Acts 20:24–35Matthew 24:42–50