One man’s courage. One judge’s conscience. One case that challenged the foundations of slavery in colonial America.

In 1709, Manuel Jala, a free Afro-Campechano sailor, was kidnapped and sold into slavery across Spanish, English, and French territories. His captor—a British naval officer—insisted Jala was a slave by nature of his skin color. But Jala had a remarkable ally: Judge Samuel Sewall, author of The Selling of Joseph, the first printed tract in North America to denounce both slavery and the slave trade.

Together, in a Boston courtroom, they took aim not only at one man’s captivity but at the very legal basis of racial slavery itself. Drawing on the law of nations and the natural rights of all people, their groundbreaking petition—long forgotten—revealed the early moral and legal fault lines that would echo through the centuries.

Bringing to light a gripping true story set amid privateering, imperial warfare, and Boston’s entanglement in the transatlantic slave trade, Jala’s Petition offers a powerful testament to the struggle for freedom in an age of empire—and to the enduring possibilities of human dignity and conscience.

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