Richard Allen: The Night the Dungeon Shook

Sometime around 1777, on a farm near Dover, Delaware, a seventeen-year-old slave named Richard could not sleep for fear.

He had been working the fields by day and praying by night for a long time. He had heard Methodist preachers say that every person is a sinner who needs the mercy of God, and he believed it. He had even felt, for a few days, that he had found that mercy. Then the doubts came back. Perhaps he had fooled himself. Perhaps there was no mercy for someone like him. “My sins were a heavy burden,” he wrote. “I was tempted to believe there was no mercy for me. I cried to the Lord both night and day. One night I thought hell would be my portion.”

We do not know where he was that night, in a slave cabin, in a field, or on the floor of the farmhouse kitchen. He did not say. What he did say, more than forty years later, is what happened when he cried out one more time to God: “all of a sudden my dungeon shook, my chains flew off, and glory to God, I cried. My soul was filled. I cried, enough for me—the Saviour died.”

Those words are strange and powerful when you remember who wrote them. Richard Allen was in real chains. He was owned by another man, and could be sold like a horse. And yet the chains he says flew off that night were not those. They were the chains of guilt and fear before God. The other chains, the ones made by human beings, he would have to work his way out of, coin by coin, over the next several years. But in his own mind, the first freedom came first, and it made the second one possible.

Born Owned

Richard Allen was born on 14 February 1760, in Philadelphia, the largest city in Britain’s American colonies. He was born a slave. His first owner was Benjamin Chew, a wealthy and powerful Philadelphia lawyer. In those years slavery was legal in every one of the thirteen colonies, north and south, and Black people were bought and sold in the markets of Philadelphia as they were in Virginia or Carolina.

When Richard was still a small child, Chew sold the whole family, his mother, his father, and four children, to a farmer named Stokeley Sturgis, who lived near Dover in Delaware, about eighty miles south. Allen remembered Sturgis kindly. “He was more like a father to his slaves than any thing else,” he wrote. “He was a very tender, humane man.”

But even a “kind” master is still a master, and kindness did not keep the family together. Sturgis got into debt and could not finish paying for the family he had bought. So he sold Richard’s mother and three of the children away. Richard, an older brother and a sister stayed. Allen records the sale in a sentence or two, flatly, the way people sometimes write about the worst things that have happened to them. He tells us that his mother afterwards “sought the Lord” and became “a very pious woman,” which means that somehow, at some point, he heard news of her. He does not tell us whether he ever saw her again.

He also tells us the plain truth that hung over every enslaved person, even on the “best” farms: “slavery is a bitter pill, notwithstanding we had a good master.” Sturgis was deep in debt. If he died, the slaves would be sold to pay what he owed, “to the highest bidder,” to anyone at all. Allen remembered weeping over that thought. A teenager on the Sturgis farm could work hard, be honest, and be loved by his master, and still have no idea where he would be living next year, or with whom.

The Methodists Come to Delaware

In the 1770s a new kind of preacher was riding the roads of Delaware and Maryland. They were called Methodists. The movement had begun in England with John Wesley and his brother Charles, who preached that anyone, rich or poor, educated or not, could know God’s forgiveness personally through faith in Jesus Christ, and could be sure of it. Methodist preachers travelled on horseback from village to village and preached in barns, fields and private houses. They spoke plainly. And, unusually for that time, they preached to Black people as well as white, enslaved as well as free, and many early American Methodists spoke openly against slavery.

Allen never forgot what that plain preaching meant to people like him. Other churches, he said, “preached so high-flown that we were not able to comprehend their doctrine.” The Methodists spoke so that the unlearned could understand. “I feel thankful that ever I heard a Methodist preach,” he wrote. “The Methodists were the first people that brought glad tidings to the coloured people.”

Allen does not give the year he first heard them or the name of the preacher. Historians usually place his conversion in 1777, when he was about seventeen. What he does tell us is the shape of what happened inside him. First he was “awakened,” the Methodist word for waking up to the truth about yourself, “and brought to see myself poor, wretched and undone, and without the mercy of God must be lost.” Then he “obtained mercy through the blood of Christ,” and rejoiced. Then came the long, frightening season of doubt. And then came the night the dungeon shook.

His picture of the dungeon is borrowed from the Bible and from Methodist hymns. In the book of Acts, Paul and Silas are locked in a prison at midnight, praying and singing, when “suddenly a strong earthquake shook the foundations of the prison. At once all the doors flew open and everyone’s chains came loose.” And Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can It Be,” well known among early Methodists, describes a prisoner who wakes to find “the dungeon flamed with light; my chains fell off, my heart was free.” Whether Allen was thinking of those words at the time or found them later to describe what he had felt, we cannot know. But it is easy to see why a young slave would reach for them.

And notice what he cried out: “enough for me—the Saviour died.” That is the centre of his faith, then and for the rest of his life. He did not find peace by becoming good enough. He found it by trusting that Jesus had died for him, and that this was enough.

Making Religion Respectable

Allen’s first instinct after his conversion was to tell people. “I was constrained to go from house to house,” he wrote, “exhorting my old companions, and telling to all around what a dear Saviour I had found.” He joined a Methodist “class,” a small group that met weekly for prayer and to talk honestly about their spiritual lives. His met at the home of Benjamin Wells, out in the forest, led by a man named John Gray. He met in that class for several years.

His older brother and his sister became Christians too. This made the neighbours nervous. They told Stokeley Sturgis that letting his slaves go to religious meetings would ruin him: they would get ideas, and stop working. So Richard and his brother had a talk together. They decided that nobody would be able to say religion had made them worse workers. They would work “night and day” to keep their crops ahead. When their work was behind, they skipped the meetings rather than give anyone an excuse.

Allen remembered what happened next. Sturgis noticed that his young slaves were not going to their meetings and asked them why. They told him they would rather stay and get the work done. And their master, who was not a Christian himself, told them to go. Allen remembered his words: “Boys, I would rather you would go to your meeting: if I am not good myself, I like to see you striving yourselves to be good.”

Over time, Sturgis became convinced that, as Allen put it, “religion made slaves better and not worse.” It is a painful sentence to read today. It shows how much Black Christians had to prove simply to be allowed to worship. But Allen was not trying to be a better slave. He was trying to be a faithful Christian, in a situation where faithfulness and survival were tangled together.

Weighed in the Balance

Then Richard did something bold. He asked his master whether Methodist preachers could come and preach in the farmhouse itself. Sturgis, who was by now old and in poor health, agreed. Richard went to invite a preacher, who hesitated at first, because a slave had come with only his own word and no written note from the master. The class leader, John Gray, vouched for him. “My word was sufficient,” Allen wrote with quiet satisfaction. Preaching at the Sturgis house began on a Wednesday and went on for months.

One of the preachers who came was Freeborn Garrettson, a Methodist from Maryland who had freed his own slaves after his conversion. (Allen spells his name “Garrison.”) Garrettson preached from a verse in the book of Daniel, in the words Allen remembered: “Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting.” In the Bible those words were written by a mysterious hand on a king’s palace wall, a sign that God had judged him. Garrettson went through different kinds of people, one after another, and asked how they would look on God’s scales. One of the kinds he named was slaveholders.

Stokeley Sturgis was sitting in his own house, listening. “My master believed himself to be one of that number,” Allen wrote, “and after that he could not be satisfied to hold slaves, believing it to be wrong.”

Sturgis did not simply set them free. He offered Richard and his brother the chance to buy their freedom, “to pay him sixty pounds gold and silver, or two thousand dollars continental money.” That was a huge sum for a young man with nothing. The agreement was made around 1780, when Richard was about twenty. Allen leaves the year blank in his book, but other records show he finished paying by about 1783.

He went out into the world with nothing but his hands. His first job was chopping firewood, and on the first day his hands blistered so badly he could barely open or close them. He knelt and prayed for God to make a way. He worked in a brickyard, did odd jobs, and during the American War of Independence drove a wagon hauling salt. Along his route he set up regular places to stop and preach. “While my hands were employed to earn my bread,” he wrote, “my heart was devoted to my dear Redeemer.” It was around this time that he took the surname Allen.

When he left the Sturgis farm, he said it was “like leaving our father’s house.” That is a hard thing to hear from a man buying himself back from the person who owned him. But Allen was honest about both things at once: the man was kind, and slavery was a bitter pill. He did not pretend either one away.

What Came After

After the war, Allen became a travelling preacher, walking and riding through Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. He worked to support himself, so that, as he put it, “no man could say I was chargeable to the connexion.” He preached to white congregations as well as Black. When the American Methodists formed their own church at Baltimore in 1784, he was there. Bishop Francis Asbury, the leader of American Methodism, invited him to travel with him through the South, but told him that there he must not mix with the slaves. Allen said no.

In February 1786 he came to Philadelphia, the city of his birth, and was asked to preach at St. George’s Methodist Church at five o’clock in the morning. He saw a huge need among the city’s Black people, many of whom went to no church at all, and he preached sometimes four or five times a day. In 1787, with his friend Absalom Jones, another formerly enslaved man, he helped start the Free African Society, a group in which Black Philadelphians paid in small amounts to help one another in sickness, widowhood and death.

Then came the moment that has made Allen famous. As more and more Black worshippers came to St. George’s, the white leaders moved them from their usual seats to the walls, and then told them to go up to the gallery. One Sunday, Allen and his friends went up and knelt as the prayer began. Then he heard scuffling. He looked up and saw a church trustee pulling Absalom Jones up off his knees in the middle of the prayer, saying, “You must get up—you must not kneel here.” Jones asked to be allowed to finish praying. The trustee refused and called for help. “By this time prayer was over,” Allen wrote, “and we all went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued with us in the church.” Allen gives no date for this. Historians have argued for 1787 and for around 1792, when the gallery was built; many now favour the later date, but it is still disputed.

Allen and his friends set out to build a church of their own. Most of the group chose to join the Episcopal Church, and Absalom Jones became their minister. Allen would not leave the Methodists, who had brought him the gospel. In the deadly yellow fever epidemic of 1793, when thousands in Philadelphia died and anyone who could afford to fled, Allen and Jones organised Black volunteers to nurse the sick and bury the dead, in part because doctors wrongly believed Black people could not catch the disease. They were not immune, and many caught it. “We found a freedom to go forth,” they wrote, “confiding in him who can preserve in the midst of a burning fiery furnace.”

In 1794, Allen bought an old blacksmith’s shop, hauled it to a lot he owned on Sixth Street, and turned it into a church. Bishop Asbury preached at its opening, and it was named Bethel, “house of God,” after the place where Jacob said, “This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven!” For years the white Methodist leaders tried to take control of the building. Bethel fought them, finally winning in Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court. In April 1816, Black Methodist churches from Philadelphia, Baltimore and other places met and formed one body, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first fully independent Black denomination in the United States. Richard Allen was consecrated its first bishop. Today the AME Church has millions of members across the world.

He spent the rest of his life serving his people and speaking against slavery. To slaveholders he wrote: “We wish you to consider, that God himself was the first pleader of the cause of slaves.” He died in Philadelphia on 26 March 1831, at seventy-one, and was buried at Bethel. His own account of his life was published two years later.

Bishop, builder, founder, campaigner: he became all of these. But it all grew out of one night on a Delaware farm, when a seventeen-year-old slave, who could have been sold the next day, cried out to God and found that “the Saviour died” was enough.

In Their Own Words

“All of a sudden my dungeon shook, my chains flew off, and glory to God, I cried. My soul was filled. I cried, enough for me—the Saviour died.”

— Richard Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours (1833)

Think It Through

1. Allen says his chains “flew off” the night he was converted, while he was still legally a slave. What did he mean? Does that idea make slavery seem less wrong, or does his later life show it the other way round?
2. Richard and his brother decided to work harder so that no one could say religion had made them worse. Was that wise, or unfair that they had to? When do Christians today feel they have to prove their faith by how they act?
3. Freeborn Garrettson preached about being “weighed in the balance” in a slaveholder’s own house. What would it take for a preacher to say that? What would it take for a listener to change?
4. Allen stayed loyal to the Methodists even after they treated him badly, but he also refused to be pushed around. How did he hold those two things together?

Read More on Ochorus

Richard Allen’s own book, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, is in the library, and it is short enough to read in an evening. It tells this story in his own words, from the farm in Delaware to the founding of the AME Church, and it also includes his and Absalom Jones’s account of the yellow fever of 1793 and his addresses to slaveholders and to the free people of colour. His biography on his author page fills in the rest of his life.