John Allen

Who is John Allen?

Baptist minister John Allen, although not well-connected with colonial patriots in British North America, had an enormous impact on re-igniting the tensions within the Empire in 1772 when he mentioned the Gaspée Affair and the Royal Commission of Inquiry seven times in his Thanksgiving Day sermon at Second Baptist Church in Boston. This sermon, An Oration, Upon the Beauties of Liberty, Or the Essential Rights of the Americans, was reprinted seven times in four different cities, making it the sixth most-popular pre-independence pamphlet in British America.