Free African Americans Petition Congress — Ignored

In 1797 a group of free Black men from North Carolina, including Jacob Nicholson and Jupiter Nicholson, submitted a petition to Congress detailing how they had been freed by their Quaker enslavers, only to be re-enslaved under a North Carolina law that voided such manumissions. Congress refused to receive the petition on the grounds that it lacked jurisdiction over state slavery laws. It was one of the earliest formal Black political petitions in US history.