The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

THE SLAVE’S CAUSE

THE SLAVE’S CAUSE

A History of Abolition

Manisha Sinha

Yale

UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of James Wesley Cooper of the Class of 1865, Yale College.

Copyright © 2016 by Manisha Sinha. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Karsten,

My German Philosopher

But while endowing her imaginary heroes with every perfection under the sun, Jo was discovering a live hero, who interested her in spite of many human imperfections. . . . There were lines upon his forehead, but Time seemed to have touched him gently, remembering how kind he was to others.

—Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Radical Tradition of Abolition

PART I. The First Wave

ONE. Prophets Without Honor

TWO. Revolutionary Antislavery in Black and White

THREE. The Long Northern Emancipation

FOUR. The Anglo-American Abolition Movement

FIVE. Black Abolitionists in the Slaveholding Republic

SIX. The Neglected Period of Antislavery

PART II. The Second Wave

SEVEN. Interracial Immediatism

EIGHT. Abolition Emergent

NINE. The Woman Question

TEN. The Black Man’s Burden

ELEVEN. The Abolitionist International

TWELVE. Slave Resistance

THIRTEEN. Fugitive Slave Abolitionism

FOURTEEN. The Politics of Abolition

FIFTEEN. Revolutionary Abolitionism

SIXTEEN. Abolition War

Epilogue: The Abolitionist Origins of American Democracy

Notes

Illustration Credits

Index

Illustrations follow Chapter 6

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has taken me ten years to write, and my debts are numerous. Perhaps the largest is the one I owe to my research home away from home, the American Antiquarian Society, where this project began during a yearlong National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. I have done the bulk of the research for this book there, enjoying the luxury of reading abolitionist newspapers in print and the excitement of coming across pamphlets personally signed and donated to the society by the black abolitionist Martin Delany. I thank the AAS community, for whom I became a fixture: Joanne Chaison, Ellen Dunlap, Paul Erickson, Babette Gehnrich, John Keenum, Marie Lamoureux, Elizabeth Pope, Caroline Sloat, and the numerous staff members who assisted me. Jaclyn Penny generously reproduced many of the illustrations that grace this book. I am thrilled that President Barack Obama has recognized this national treasure with a National Humanities Medal. I also thank the librarians and staff at the Boston Public Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Library of Congress, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the New-York Historical Society, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Rare Book and Manuscript division of Butler Library at Columbia University, the Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard University, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for their assistance. Nicole Joneic and Krystal Appiah of the Library Company of Philadelphia also provided invaluable assistance gathering images. Chris Densmore of the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College shared his expertise on Quaker history with me.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and its director, James Basker, who shares my passion for all things antislavery, Deborah Schwartz of the Brooklyn Historical Society, and Pamela Green of the Weeksville Heritage Center, who hired me as the lead consultant for the exhibition In Pursuit of Freedom on Brooklyn’s abolitionists, facilitated my research trips to New York City. Above all, I would like to thank the benefactor of many of the institutions mentioned above, Sid Lapidus. A delightful visit to his personal library of early antislavery literature was the highlight of my research.

Much of the writing of this book was done at the AAS, during a faculty fellowship year at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, and a sabbatical supported by the Howard Foundation at Brown University and the University of Massachusetts. I thank all the fellows: Daniel Carpenter, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Cornelia Dayton, Francoise Hamlin, Maartje Janse, Albrecht Koschnick, Daniel Kryder, Cindy Lobel, Christopher Lukasik, Lisa Materson, Timothy McCarthy, Lisa McGirr, Lisa Tetrault, and Susan Ware. Dan Carpenter’s tremendous project of digitizing all known abolitionist petitions will long prove a boon to scholars of antislavery. I thank Nicole Topich for sending the entire database to me and Jennifer Fauxsmith of the Massachusetts Archives for permission to reprint a petition gratis.

I want to acknowledge my professional home of nearly twenty years, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where this book was conceived and written. I cannot possibly name them all, but my colleagues in the Afro-American; American; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and History Departments deserve special mention. I thank all those who attended my presentations at the Five Colleges History Seminars, one at the start and the other at the end of this book project: Chris Appy, Joyce Berkman, Joye Bowman, David Glassberg, Jennifer Heuer, John Higginson, Margaret Hunt, Bruce Laurie, Laura Lovett, Lynda Morgan, Kym Morrison, Brian Ogilvie, Mary Renda, Leonard Richards, James Smethurst, Susan Tracy, Robert Weir, and all the graduate students. Neal Salisbury’s comments at the first presentation and Frank Couvares’s at the last were much appreciated. The Massachusetts Society of Professors and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts provided me with a generous budget for acquiring images.

I am particularly grateful to those who took the time to read my manuscript when it was well over a thousand pages, truly a labor of friendship: Eric Foner, who has always been there for me and who invited me to contribute to his anthology Our Lincoln, and Graham Russell Hodges and James Sidbury, both of whose work on early African American history I greatly admire. All three gave me excellent advice on how to trim the manuscript and asked good questions. John Stauffer has been a superb coadjutor, as the abolitionists would say. I value his unstinting support.

I thank other scholars who supported me, sent me their work, solicited my input, commented on parts of the book at conferences, and invited me for talks: A. J. (Amy) Aiseirithe, Erica Ball, Edward Baptist, Ira Berlin, Robin Blackburn, David Blight, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Steve Bullock, Chris Cameron, the late Stephanie Camp, Erik Chaput, Robert Churchill, Mathew Clavin, A. Glenn Crothers, David Brion Davis, Andrew Delbanco, Allison Efford, Daniel Feller, Sharla Fett, Barbara Fields, François Furstenberg, Sarah Gronningsater, Leslie Harris, Stanley Harrold, Mischa Honeck, Martha Jones, Prithi Kanakamedala, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie, Ethan Kytle, Drew McCoy, Richard Newman, James Oakes, John Quinn, Patrick Rael, Stacey Robertson, the late Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, David Smith, Mitchell Snay, Elizabeth Strodeur-Pryor, Kristin Waters, and Michael West. Sam Haselby and Adam Rothman made me shorten the title. I thank my current and former graduate students: Sean Alexander, Kabria Baumgartner, Julia Bernier, Emahunn Campbell, Alex Carter, Nneka Dennie, Crystal Donkor, Vanessa Fabien, David Goldberg, Erin Judge, Michael Landis, Christopher Lehman, David Lucander, Zebulon Miletsky, Johanna Ortner, Ousmane Power-Greene, Rita Reynolds, David Swiderski, Crystal Webster, Robert Williams, and Peter Wirzbicki.

I owe a lot to my agent extraordinaire, Sandra Dijkstra, and to John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, for acquiring this book. The advice of my wonderful editor, Christopher Rogers, was always stellar and consistently encouraging. It has been a genuine pleasure to work with him. Erica Hanson, Susan Laity, and Lawrence Kenney expertly shepherded the manuscript into production.

My personal debts are also many. My ninety-year-old father and eighty-nine-year-old mother, Srinivas and Premini Sinha, are still looking out for me. I value the good cheer and support of my extended family, friends, and neighbors, especially Abha Bunty Sawhney, Jean DiPanfilo Hahn, Malini Sood, Al and Suzanne Thomas. I dedicate this book to my partner of over thirty years, Karsten Stueber. There really is no other. Our sons Sheel and Shiv have lived with this book. It has nearly spanned Sheel’s school years and Shiv’s entire life. Sheel worked with the illustrations and read the proofs on the eve of his departure to college. Shiv learned well from the abolitionists. He added a whipping post and auction block to his school project on slavery. I could have finished this book a bit earlier if I had not watched all their soccer, basketball, and baseball games. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

ABBREVIATIONS

THE SLAVE’S CAUSE

INTRODUCTION: THE RADICAL TRADITION OF ABOLITION

The conflict over the contours and nature of American democracy has often centered on debates over black freedom and rights. The origins of that momentous and ongoing political struggle lie in the movement to abolish slavery. This book tells the story of abolition. It is a comprehensive new history of the abolition movement that extends its chronological parameters from the classical pre–Civil War period back to the American Revolution and rejects conventional divisions between slave resistance and antislavery activism. A history of abolition in the longue durée, it centers African Americans in it. Abolition was a radical, interracial movement, one which addressed the entrenched problems of exploitation and disfranchisement in a liberal democracy and anticipated debates over race, labor, and empire.

Caricatured as unthinking, single-minded fanatics who caused a needless war, abolitionists are often compared unfavorably to political moderates and compromise-minded statesmen. Their resurrection as freedom fighters during the modern civil rights era has been relatively brief. It is often dismissed as neoabolitionist history. While a bland celebration of the abolitionist movement with its radical edges shorn off inhabits popular culture, the dominant picture of abolitionists in American history is that of bourgeois reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism.¹ Neither the scholarly nor the lay consensus on abolition does justice to the movement’s rich, diverse, and contentious history.

Slave resistance, not bourgeois liberalism, lay at the heart of the abolition movement.² Slave rebellions paralleled isolated criticisms of slavery in colonial America. The enslaved inspired the formation of the first Quaker-dominated abolition and manumission societies as well as the first landmark cases that inaugurated emancipation in the Western world. The actions of slave rebels and runaways, black writers and community leaders, did not lie outside of but shaped abolition and its goals. As most abolitionists understood, the story of abolition must begin with the struggles of the enslaved. The connection between slave resistance and abolition in the United States was proximate and continuous. Prominent slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition. Fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery. Recent historians have declared black resistance to enslavement passé, but it was central to abolition. Not restricted to wartime emancipation, the American abolitionist moment unfolded in a hundred-year drama in law, politics, literature, and on-the-ground activism. To reduce emancipation to an event precipitated by military crisis is to miss that long history.

The history of abolition is an integrated story even though it is usually not told in that manner. Black abolitionists were integral to the broader, interracial milieu of the movement. To read them out of the abolition movement is to profoundly miss the part they played in defining traditions of American democratic radicalism. The insidious divide between white thought and black activism that pervades some books on abolition is both racialist and inaccurate. There was no such racial division of political labor in the abolition movement. Early African American literature, black abolitionists’ intellectual response to the pseudo science of race, and debates over citizenship and emigration performed the work of political protest. The theoretical sophistication of black abolitionist thought should finally put to rest the influential yet glib view of it as imitative, mired in the strictures of middle-class reform and elitism, and divorced from the plight of southern slaves and northern masses. Black and white abolitionists also went beyond a simple appeal to the American republican tradition that sought to include African Americans in its promise. They generated a powerful critique of the slaveholding Republic and constructed a counternarrative that highlighted its origins in the slave trade and slavery.³

The alternative nature of abolitionism is showcased by its diverse membership, which gave rise to cooperation as well as to creative conflict across rigid lines of race, class, and gender that characterized early American society. The abolition movement, in which the disfranchised, including women, played a seminal role, was driven by passionate outsiders. Women were abolition’s foot soldiers and, more controversially, its leaders and orators. In birthing the first women’s rights movement, abolition again revealed its radical face. The abolition movement married the black struggle against slavery to progressive white evangelicalism and to the iconoclasm of more secular reformers. Its steady radicalization on women’s rights, organized religion, politics, and direct action made it quickly outgrow the empire of religious benevolence and moral reform.⁴

Abolition was a radical, democratic movement that questioned the enslavement of labor. The best works on abolition have tried to understand it by overturning simplistic social control models that emphasized social and ideological conformity to legitimize an emerging capitalist economy. Scholars have long known that modern racial slavery fostered the growth of early capitalism. If slavery is capitalism, as the currently fashionable historical interpretation has it, the movement to abolish it is, at the very least, its obverse. The history of capitalism illustrates that it has rarely marched in lockstep with democracy. The fraught relationship between capitalism and democracy is characterized more by contestation. Modern racial slavery was a monstrous hybrid that combined the horrors of an archaic labor system with the rapacious efficiencies of capitalism.⁵ Like the slave system they opposed, abolitionists were hybrids, old-fashioned moralizers as well as modern exponents of human rights. It is no coincidence that the brief, incomplete triumph of the abolitionist vision resulted in the greatest expansion of American democracy, and that the demise of abolition went hand in hand with the greatest contraction of democracy. At the heart of that movement lay the slave’s struggle for freedom and human dignity.

Never the so-called monomaniacs they were lampooned as, abolitionists recognized that the oppression of slaves was linked to other wrongs in their world. More than a few abolitionists joined such international radical movements as utopian socialism, feminism, and pacifism and championed Native American, immigrant, and workingmen’s rights. Some even anticipated contemporary American scourges, criticizing the criminalization of blackness and the use of capital punishment and force by the state. Abolitionists were the intellectual and political precursors of twentieth-century anticolonial and civil rights activists, debating the nature of society and politics, the relationship between racial inequality and democracy, nation and empire, labor and capital, gender and citizenship. They used the vehicle of antislavery to criticize the democratic pretensions of Western societies and expose their seamier side. Abolitionists were opponents of rather than stalking horses of new forms of servitude and imperialism. As radical agitators, they were not so much theorists of liberal democracy as critics of it. In prioritizing the abolition of slavery, they did not ignore and certainly did not legitimize other forms of oppression in the modern world. Only by conflating the state with the social movement can historians view abolition as the progenitor of European imperialism.⁶

Abolitionists were original and critical thinkers on democracy, not simply romantic reformers who confined themselves to appeals to the heart. The movement against slavery made a signal contribution to the discourse of both human rights and humanitarianism. The depiction of abused black bodies in abolitionist print culture, from slave narratives dripping with blood to abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets, has appeared to many scholars as bourgeois sentimentality, voyeuristic pornography, and racist objectification of the enslaved. This scholarly gaze, the vast condescension bestowed on the very real history of black suffering under the political economy of a harsh slave regimen, leads people astray. It is based on a whitewashed understanding of abolition that reads out the black presence in it completely. Its roots lie in slaveholders’ defensive response to abolitionist criticism, and it fundamentally misreads abolitionist agitation, the attempt to evoke radical empathy from an audience whose very comforts were dependent on the exploitation of those deemed inferior and expendable.⁷ Those lessons remain useful today.

Confronted by a reactionary, expansionist slaveholding class that dreamed of a global empire based on slavery, the real Slave Power rather than a figment of paranoid imagination, abolitionists developed an uncompromising response to its imperialist aggressions at home and abroad. As the movement matured in the teeth of strong slaveholding opposition and state power in the United States, the cause of the American slave became intertwined with that of democracy, civil liberties, and the emancipation of women and labor. Far from being an extremist formulation with no relevance to national politics and the important events of the day, abolitionists’ political project, the overthrow of the slavery-based polity of the nineteenth-century American Republic, was at the vanguard of antislavery. Some abolitionists became disenchanted with their country and government, while others sought to harness the power of the state against slavery. The history of abolition is an ideal test case of how radical social movements generate engines of political change. As they do in all social movements, questions of principle versus expediency permeated abolition, giving rise to divisions over tactics. Abolitionists debated the culpability of the church, state, and society as well as their amenability to change: whether society could be transformed through political action and whether the state was an arena of conflict or a tool of the Slave Power. It is a mistake, however, to equate slaveholders’ political power with modern state formation. For good reason the conservative political tradition of American slaveholders, who dominated the federal and their state governments from inception and used all the repressive powers of the state to further the interests of slavery, was strongly antistatist.⁸

During the Civil War and Reconstruction the enslaved and their radical allies pushed the nation to realize their ideal of an interracial democracy. And for a brief period, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, the slave stood in the sun before being shoved back into the shadows. The overthrow of Reconstruction had little to do with the alleged poverty of the abolitionist vision and a lot to do with the enduring power of abolition’s opponents. When the horror of racial injustice settled in again, not just the formerly enslaved but democracy as a whole suffered. The fate of American democracy lay not in the hands of the powerful, with their dreams of wealth and empire, but in the postwar movements for racial, gender, and economic autonomy.⁹ The abolitionist project of perfecting American, indeed global, democracy remains to be fulfilled. In that sense, its legacy is an enduring one.

A new historical narrative of abolition, this book challenges long-standing interpretive binaries. For too long historians of abolition have told its story in a fragmented fashion and continue to do so along the lines of race and gender. Older historical debates over the relative importance of Garrisonians versus the evangelicals and political abolitionists, that is, eastern versus western abolitionists, revisit and rehash abolitionist divisions, at times uncritically adopting the positions of their subjects. I have found them to be far less important than the attention lavished on them suggests and highly conducive to the perpetuation of stereotypes that defy the historical record.

Recent syntheses on abolition provide global histories of slavery and emancipation in the modern West.¹⁰ By contrast, my book narrates a movement history of abolition in the United States in a transnational context. It stresses continuity rather than rupture in the abolitionist tradition, which from its inception was an interracial one and tied to the development of democracy. From the early Quaker and black protests against slavery to the rise of the Anglo-American movement against the slave trade in the late eighteenth century to the golden age of abolitionism in the years before the Civil War, abolitionists were united by their devotion to the slave’s cause. Even after bitter divisions sundered the movement, nothing brought all abolitionists together more readily than the fugitive slave’s desperate bid for freedom. The title of the book comes from the words of abolitionists, who commonly used the phrase to describe their movement, signing their letters, Yours for the slave.

It has taken me many years of archival research and reading of the enormous historical scholarship on abolition to do justice to this topic. Abolitionists were not just quintessential agitators but also wordsmiths. Whatever they lacked in power, they made up for by outproducing their mighty opponents in newspapers, books, pamphlets, letters, diaries, memoirs, material, and artwork, creating a huge, complicated historical archive. Any history of abolition must begin with that archive, as it opens a window into their worldview. In narrating a history of abolition, I engage the ideas and actions of men and women, black and white, who proved to be a match for the New World’s slaveholding ancien régime. They were the disfranchised themselves and the allies of the disfranchised. They understood that the slave’s cause never dies.

Part I.

THE FIRST WAVE

1

PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOR

The history of abolition begins with those who resisted slavery at its inception. In 1721 an unnamed African woman informed her enslaved compatriots aboard the English slaver Robert anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone that an unusually small number of sailors were standing guard on deck that night. She brought them weapons that she took from sailors onboard the ship and instigated the start of a rebellion. The rebels, led by a Captain Tomba, who was whipped unmercifully for refusing to submit to inspection, killed three of the five sailors on watch before being subdued by the rest of the crew. The woman was hanged by her thumbs, whipped, and slashed with knives until she was dead. Two of the rebels were forced to eat the heart and liver of a dead sailor before being executed. African resistance to enslavement was epitomized in shipboard insurrections that dot the four centuries of the slave trade and in the formation of quilombos, the Afro-Portuguese term for communities of runaway slaves, on the West African coast. African opposition to the slave trade and slavery, spurred by specific ethnic and national identities, is often forgotten in the literature on African participation in it. The first antislavery propaganda, which was born in West Africa, viewed European slave traders as cannibals and as brutal, treacherous tricksters. How else explain the ever-increasing numbers of Africans who disappeared in the transatlantic trade?¹

The story of the rise of abolition is an interracial one. The devastation wrought by the Atlantic slave trade on West African nations and communities and the horrific nature of that trade inspired such early abolitionists as Anthony Benezet, the Quaker schoolteacher in Philadelphia credited with originating the movement. Writers of African descent were among the first to wrestle with the problems of race and slavery in the modern West. Slave rebellions complemented pioneering antislavery protests by Quakers and other Protestant dissenters in British North America. In Britain, runaway slaves, building on colonial precedent, led Granville Sharp to apply English notions of law and liberty to Africans. Black resistance to slavery was the essential precondition to the rise of abolitionism.

PIONEERS

Early modern Europe lacked a systematic antislavery tradition. With a few exceptions, Western thinkers had justified rather than challenged slavery. But popular prejudice against slavery had long been prevalent, at least since the collapse of serfdom in western Europe. Notions of inherent racial inferiority served to counter this sentiment. Starting in the medieval period, some European countries defined their territories as free soil, a nationalist conceit that predated the rise of modern racial slavery. Serfs who ran away to cities, Stadtluft Macht Frei (the German saying that city air makes free), began a fugitive tradition of creating free spaces that extended to the enslaved of all nationalities in Europe and colonial America. It is not widely known that a slave who claimed his freedom on the grounds that any slave who entered the city of Toulouse was free helped inspire the French political theorist Jean Bodin to write against slavery. Even Spain and Portugal, who followed the ancient law of Roman slavery, at times enforced the freedom principle within their national boundaries. State formation and servile resistance interacted in the creation of freedom in Europe’s metropolises.²

Before their encounter with Europeans, Africans and Native Americans had their own traditions of slavery and captivity. The institution of colonial slavery in the New World led to incipient criticism of it. The Spanish Jesuit Bartolomé de las Casas, in his widely translated and reprinted Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies by the Spanish (1552), recommended the enslavement of Africans to protest the treatment of Native Americans, though he came to regret his solution to the problem of labor in the Americas. In its detailed exposé of Spanish atrocities, Las Casas’s book anticipated abolitionist writing even though he was complicit in the conquest and subjugation of native populations. The debates in Valladolid, Spain, between him and the proslavery natural law philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who dismissed antislavery as German-inspired Lutheran heresy, were the first public discussions on racial slavery in colonial America. Las Casas’s early efforts and a petition to the pope resulted in a papal bull in 1537 against the enslavement of Indians, although this was mainly a symbolic gesture.

Some Dominican priests went further. Antonio de Montesinos preached against the ill-treatment of Indians in Santo Domingo and for an end to the Spanish forced labor systems of encomienda and repartimiento. Bartolomé de Albornoz of Mexico, whose antislavery book was censored by the Inquisition, condemned the enslavement of Africans as illegal. Tomás de Mercado and the Jesuit Luis de Molina criticized the African slave trade. In 1555 Fernando Oliveira denounced not just the slave trade but also the perpetual nature of racial slavery. In his On Restoring Ethiopian Salvation (1627), the Jesuit priest Alonso de Sandoval of Cartagena de Indias, criticized the conduct of the slave trade and slavery while arguing for the Christianization of Africans. But Sandoval, who subscribed to the biblical story of the curse of Ham popularized by Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theologians to justify the enslavement of Africans, did not publicly avow abolition. Most Catholic clerics made their peace with racial slavery, advocating only the Christianization of slaves and amelioration of slavery.

The church and state in the Spanish and Portuguese American colonies squelched individual reservations about slavery. Brazilian authorities summarily expelled Jesuit priests who argued that the enslaved should be treated more humanely. Among the petitions against the slave trade submitted to the Vatican in the seventeenth century were two by an Afro-Brazilian, Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça. In 1684 Mendouça, who claimed to be of royal Kongolese descent, questioned the slave trade and the permanent enslavement of Christian descendants of Africans, describing graphically and at length the diabolic abuse of such slavery. Appointed procurator of a black Catholic confraternity in Madrid, similar to those in the Kongo, he journeyed to Rome to personally present his petitions on behalf of enslaved Africans. In his second petition representing Christian African slaves in Brazil and Lisbon, Mendouça appealed to the bigotry of the church, citing instances of Christian slaves enslaved by Jewish masters. Combined with the petition decrying the abuses of the slave trade that Capuchin missionaries in Kongo tendered in 1685, Mendouça’s petitions in 1686 resulted in a papal denunciation of the slave trade. Early Catholic antislavery sentiment did not engender an abolition movement or prevent the expansion of American slavery with the full collusion of the church. While Spanish slave law, the Siete Partidas, and the church offered some protections to slaves, a concerted abolition movement first arose in the British Atlantic world.³

In the British colonies white indentured servants and Irish, Scottish, and Native American prisoners of war condemned to lifetimes of servitude initially suffered and labored in conditions similar to those of African slaves and servants. The use of various kinds of unfree labor, Indian slavery, and black and white servitude gradually gave way to African slavery. In the seventeenth century, when slavery, unknown to English common law but prevalent in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, emerged in British America, pioneering antislavery protests appeared in the colonies. As early as 1652, Rhode Island, inspired by Roger Williams’s objections to Indian slavery, had tried unsuccessfully to abolish slavery by limiting the term of servitude for Indians and Africans. Thirty years later William Penn similarly failed in his effort to prohibit lifetime servitude in Pennsylvania, and he came to view the slave trade as essential to the infant colony’s prosperity. By 1663 antislavery Mennonites led by Peter Cornelius Plockhoy had banned slavery in their settlement on the Delaware Bay. When the English took over the colony, the Mennonites moved to Germantown, Pennsylvania. Even as black and white servants plotted on how to gain their freedom in the tobacco plantations of Virginia and Maryland, a petition of 1688 signed by four German and Dutch Mennonite converts to Quakerism from Germantown argued, We shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are. The petition censured Quaker slaveholders for treating human beings like cattle. Early Quaker abolitionists were not just individual voices having no impact; at their meetings they inaugurated an ongoing discussion of the propriety of slaveholding: the Chester Quarterly Meeting took the lead in recommending action against slavery and the slave trade. Even earlier, Quaker slaveholders in Barbados insisted on taking their slaves with them to their meetings.

Quaker abolitionism was a reaction to emergent capitalism and the commercialization of the faith rather than an expression of it. In 1693 Quakers disowned George Keith, the main author of an antislavery pamphlet castigating the Friends for their involvement in the slave trade and slavery. Keithians condemned the New World practice of buying the Bodies of men for money. The riches of the Merchants of the Earth were based on the cruel Oppression of blacks and Taunies, who he contended were as much a part of humankind as "White Men. Three years later Cadwalader Morgan called for the abolition of slaveholding among Quakers. William Southeby, whose antislavery writings earned him several reprimands from the Philadelphia meeting, petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature to abolish slavery in 1712. Quaker meetings in New York and New England silenced William Burling, who wrote a tract against slavery, and John Farmer. If the slaves rose in rebellion, wrote another Quaker abolitionist, Robert Piles, in 1698, and if they should bee permitted to doe us harm, it was not clear whether our blood will cry innocent [or] whether it will not bee said you might have left them well alone."⁴

Not all Quakers were antislavery, but most abolitionists in the British colonies were Quakers. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, had called for the Christianization of Africans and Native Americans and expressed qualms over the permanent uncompensated nature of racial slavery. In a letter of 1657 to his followers in the colonies, Fox laid down the Christian foundation for abolition, evoking the Golden Rule and arguing that God was no "Respecter of Persons and that he hath made all Nations of One Blood. After visiting Barbados in 1671, he recommended the freeing of slaves after a term of faithful service and asked that they be compensated for their labor and not be freed empty handed. While Fox did not urge outright abolition, Quaker abolitionists used his testimony to great effect. The Irish Quaker William Edmundson, who was Fox’s traveling companion and who returned to the colonies four years later, condemned the enslavement of Africans, asking many of you count it unlawfull to make Slaves of Indians, and if so, then why the Negroes?" Alice Curwen became the first Quaker woman to call for the Christianization of slaves and for abolition.⁵

Early Quaker abolitionists in colonial America emerged from that class of colonial society which could identify with the miseries of slaves. For example, John Hepburn, a tailor from New Jersey who had immigrated to America as an indentured servant in 1684, and Elihu Coleman, a carpenter from Nantucket, were men of modest means. Hepburn, in his written dialogue between a Christian and a negro master, condemned "this Inriching Sin, in making Slaves of Men. A Quaker minister, Coleman developed a scriptural argument against slavery, writing that for all the riches and glory of this world, he would not be guilty of so great a sin. The hunchbacked, vegetarian, Quaker dwarf Benjamin Lay begged forgiveness at the end of his abolitionist book because it was written by one that was a poor common Sailor, and an Illiterate Man." Like the white servants and Indians who slept, worked, and ran away with Africans in the colonial period as well as the sailors, pirates, outlaws, and lower classes who conspired and socialized with slaves, these men, though more sober and religiously inclined, felt a sense of kinship with enslaved black people.⁶

Quaker abolitionists subsumed their opposition to slavery under a broader critique of warfare, wealth making, and commerce. Hepburn ridiculed slave owners and merchants as fine powdered Perriwigs, and great bunched Coats with wives who paint their Faces, and Puff, and powder their Hair, growing fat on the cruelties inflicted on slaves. The Gospel according to Ralph Sandiford excepts not nor despises any for their complexions. Sandiford was a shopkeeper, but he too excoriated ill-gotten wealth. Lay was convinced that Quaker elites had hurried Sandiford to an early grave because of their ostracism of him. Lay, who republished Burling’s tract, renounced all worldly materials, especially those made by slave labor, and thought no good ever came from the pursuit of Riches. Hepburn argued, Riches, gotten by wronging the Labourer, is cursed. Quaker abolitionists urged boycotts of goods made through the exploitation of slaves. Lay smashed his wife’s teacups to condemn the consumption of sugar, the first cash crop produced by large numbers of slaves. Far from justifying free trade and the advent of a capitalism based on free labor, they asserted that putting money before men contradicted their religious beliefs. Their opposition to slavery was part of a larger criticism they unleashed on the wealthy and powerful. If Quakerism perfected values well suited to the growth of a capitalist mentalité, it also engendered its most effective opponents.⁷

Other radical dissenting Protestant and antimonarchical sects who were part of Oliver Cromwell’s army during the English Civil War also gave birth to antislavery ideas. The Levellers, a radical political group, explicitly condemned all forms of servitude, including personal slavery. In 1673 the English Puritan Richard Baxter wrote against the practice of slavery for equating men with brutes and treating them as such. While he acknowledged that a limited servitude as a penalty for crimes committed may be permissible, he called the African slave trade the worst sort of thievery and held that purchasing such slaves constituted a sin against Christianity and humankind. Eleven years later the vegetarian poet Thomas Tryon, who had worked as a hatter in Barbados and whose writings were published by Quakers, decried the violence inherent in the enslavement of Africans in the colonies. Tryon wrote of their complaints against the Hard Usages and Barbarous Cruelties Inflicted upon them. He re-created a dialogue between a Negro-slave and his American master. After getting the master to enunciate the principles of Christianity, the supposedly heathen Ethiopian describes the behavior of Christian slaveholders and concludes that the "Hypocrite Christians had shed more blood than all the heathens of the world. When the master objects to white Christians being compared with black Heathenish Negroes, the slave gives him a lesson on the natural equality of all human beings: God made both blacks and whites, ’tis the Livery of our Creator suited to particular climates and soil and to despise blackness was to despise him. Tryon, whose dietary prescriptions Benjamin Franklin observed, also criticized excess in the food, luxury, and lifestyle of the wealthy, the feasting of the Rich at the expense of their Vassals."⁸

The Christianization of Africans—Portuguese priests, for instance, perfunctorily baptized slaves just before they began their terrible transatlantic passage to the Americas—had long been used as a justification for the African slave trade and slavery. Enslaving the heathen other was seen as a legitimate practice in early modern Europe, and slaveholders initially resisted the Christianization of their slaves, fearing it might lead to emancipation. Slaves themselves presumed that Christianity meant emancipation, and some brought freedom lawsuits against their masters once they had converted. In his The Negros and Indians Advocate (1680), the Anglican minister Morgan Godwyn, who was influenced by Fox’s call to Christianize Africans and Native Americans and who had ministered to slaves in Virginia and Barbados, argued that "The Negros (both Slaves and others) have naturally an equal Right with other Men to the Exercise and Privileges of Religion. He rebuked the hellish principles of slaveholders that denied the humanity of black people and mercilessly abused slaves. The real heathens, he maintained, were slave owners who kept Africans in a Soul-murthering and Brutifying-state of Bondage. An Ethiopian, could become a disciple of Christ, no longer a Slave but a Son, even Abraham’s seed." Godwyn’s Christian universalism was not respectful of African religions, but it contained a plea for black spiritual equality and vehemently rejected arguments condoning racial inferiority drawn from the Bible. The title of his last work, Trade Preferr’d before Religion and Christ Made to Give Place to Mammon (1685), said it all when it came to the treatment of slaves in the British Empire. Godwyn was murdered for his antislavery views.⁹

As the numbers of enslaved Africans in North America grew, fueled by the British domination of the African slave trade in the early eighteenth century, most divines and denominations confined Christianity’s role to that of concern for the spiritual well-being of slaves. The Anglican missionary Thomas Bacon and groups like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts made systematic attempts to convert Africans, although they were largely unsuccessful. George Whitefield, the preacher who set the colonies on fire during the First Great Awakening, assured slaveholders that the conversion of their slaves did not threaten their mastery over them or the institution of slavery itself. Some figures were active in securing colonial laws that explicitly denied that slaves’ conversion to Christianity would emancipate them. The efforts of the Anglican bishop George Berkeley led to the proslavery Yorke–Talbot decision of 1729, which clarified that Christianization does not lead to emancipation and that the rights of colonial slaveholders were respected in England.

Yet Christian missionaries, critical of some of the most horrific features of colonial slavery, promoted slave education. Whitefield excoriated the treatment of slaves in the southern colonies and preached sermons specifically geared toward slaves and African Americans, though he eventually purchased a plantation to support his orphanage in Georgia. The Anglican missionary Francis Le Jau documented the intense abuse of slave labor in South Carolina. The English Quaker John Bell recommended good treatment of slaves and servants, asking slaveholders to show mercy to their slaves, attend to their material needs, and avoid "extream Labour and severe Chastisement." The French Huguenot priest Elias Neau opened a school for African Americans and Native Americans in New York in 1704. The Virginian Presbyterian Samuel Davies was known for both the conversion of slaves and his advocacy of slave literacy. The Associates of Dr. Bray, named for Rev. Thomas Bray, who was sent to the colonies by the Anglican Church, operated the first black schools in Philadelphia, New York, and Williamsburg, Virginia. The radical printer Samuel Keimer, his protégé Franklin, and John Stephen (Jean-Etienne) Benezet, the father of the great Quaker abolitionist, supported these schools.¹⁰

Eighteenth-century Christian paternalism inspired antislavery attitudes and was not yet yoked to proslavery dogma. New England Puritan ministers such as Samuel Willard evinced a special interest in the state of the souls of Africans and Indians. John Eliot was known for his mission to the Indians and opposed their enslavement. His short-lived praying towns would fall victim to Puritan–Indian warfare. The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Body of Liberties (1641), which legalized the enslavement of Native American prisoners of war and so-called strangers sold to the colonists, also included an injunction that slaves should have some of the liberties and Christian usages of biblical and English law. Cotton Mather, an admirer of Eliot and Willard, proselytized among Africans and learned the West African technique of smallpox inoculation from his biblically named slave Onesimus. In his long pamphlet on the Christianization of the slaves, Mather dismissed arguments for racial inferiority based on skin color, the Bible, and the claim that Africans lacked a soul and the power to reason. Christian slaves become amiable spectacles, and though they remain servants they become the Children of God. Since Mather was known for his advocacy of the Christianizing of blacks, a company of poor Negroes approached him in 1693 about a design which they had, of erecting a meeting for the welfare of their miserable nation that were servants among us. Mather oversaw this first attempt to set up an organized society by people of African descent in British North America. The rules he devised for the Society of Negroes and had his slave Spaniard deliver to the antislavery judge Samuel Sewall epitomized Christian paternalism. The rules emphasized orderly and pious behavior in meetings overseen by "some Wise and Good Man of the English." An expression of cultural imperialism even in its most benevolent mode, evangelical Christianity abandoned its commitment to native and black education, especially in the southern colonies. Some of these divines were slaveholders themselves and collected Indian body parts, anticipating the insidious brew of racialist science and religious parochialism that would characterize proslavery Christianity.¹¹

Sewall, who came to regret his role in the Salem witchcraft trials and was appalled at the growth of slavery, warfare, and captivity in Massachusetts, emerged as the voice of Puritan antislavery. In his pamphlet The Selling of Joseph (1700), he wrote, How horrible is the Uncleanness, Mortality, if not Murder, that the Ships are guilty of that bring great Crouds of these miserable Men and Women. The pamphlet evoked the biblical injunction against man stealing and refuted the commonly held assumption that all Africans were descendants of Ham and therefore cursed to slavery. He emphatically rejected the Christianization of Africans as justification of slavery, noting, Evil must not be done, that good may come of it. Even though Sewall saw African slaves in our Body Politick as a kind of extravasat [foreign] Blood, he employed scriptural arguments against racial distinctions. Sewall confessed six years later that he was met with "Frowns and hard Words . . . for this Undertaking," and in 1716 he published a more conventional essay advocating the Christianizing of Indians and Africans. Sewall’s pamphlet inspired Quaker abolitionists such as Hepburn, Sandiford, and Lay, who quoted extensively from it. Slaves, in turn, had inspired Sewall. He was moved to write on reading an African couple’s petition for freedom.¹²

Antislavery sentiment among a handful of American colonists grew in tandem with black resistance to slavery. Sewall’s pamphlet elicited a proslavery response from the Boston merchant John Saffin, who had denied his slave Adam freedom despite a prior agreement to release him from bondage after seven years. Sewall filed Adam’s successful freedom suit against Saffin and presided over the case that freed him in 1703. Adam’s actions were indicative of the various antislavery strategies employed by enslaved African Americans. With the help of sympathetic whites, they brought freedom suits against their masters on various grounds: Christianization, verbal or written agreements granting freedom, self-purchase, ill-usage and brutality, or evidence of white ancestry. The same year a mulatto slave in Connecticut named Abda successfully sued to gain his freedom. Outside the realm of law, slave resistance in the form of runaways, conspiracies, and rebellions was ubiquitous throughout the colonial era. Starting with the Germantown protest of 1688, antislavery writers regularly alluded to slave resistance as evidence of the injustice of slavery. According to Hepburn, We disgrace ourselves [when] we condemn and punish our Negroes for seeking by Running away to get their freedom. Sandiford called slaveholders man stealers, who whipped naked to common view and racked and burned to death recalcitrant and rebellious slaves.¹³

The early eighteenth century witnessed the hardening of plantation slavery and an epidemic of slave resistance in the Americas from the Caribbean to the mainland colonies. Runaway slave advertisements were a mainstay of colonial newspapers. In 1739 an antislavery petition signed by eighteen Scotsmen from Darien, Georgia, gave slave rebellion or daily invasion as a prime reason for restricting the establishment of slavery in that colony, which was founded as an experiment in free labor and philanthropy by James Oglethorpe. Oglethorpe, a member of the governing board of the slave-trading Royal African Company, was fearful of the growing fugitive slave population in the Spanish-controlled settlement of St. Augustine in present-day Florida. The petitioners wrote, It is shocking to human Nature, that any Race of Mankind and their posterity should be sentenc’d to perpetual Slavery; nor in Justice can we otherwise think of it, that they are all thrown amongst us to be our Scourge one day or other for our Sins: And as Freedom must be as dear to them as to us, what a Scene of Horror it must bring about!

Colonial slave revolts led by Africans, including slave conspiracies in New York in 1712 and 1741, fomented mainly by Akans in collusion with Indians and lower-class whites, a slave conspiracy in New Jersey in 1734, and the Stono rebellion by West Central Africans in South Carolina in 1739, bolstered their argument. Some blamed the New York conspiracy of 1741 on Whitefield’s religious revivals. The Stono rebels hoped to follow the steady stream of runaway slaves to Spanish Florida, where a large free black community at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé, or Fort Mose, flourished under Francisco Menéndez, a Mandinga runaway. The South Carolinian planter Hugh Bryan, a follower of Whitefield, wrote in his journal that the repeated Insurrections of our Slaves were proof that God’s just judgments are upon us. Bryan was forced to retract his public statements against slavery by state authorities.¹⁴

Two years before the slave Jemmy led a revolt replete with Kongolese Catholic rituals and military tactics on the banks of the river Stono, Benjamin Lay published his 271-page philippic All Slave-Keepers that keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. Sickened by the brutalities of the African slave trade and slavery he had witnessed in Barbados, Lay kidnapped the son of a Quaker slaveholder to acquaint him with the grief of Africans who were torn apart from their families. He disrupted a Quaker meeting by splattering the Bible with pokeberry juice, representing the blood of slaves. Calling slavery a vile and hellish practice and slaveholders, especially slave-owning ministers, a Parcel of Hypocrites, and Deceivers . . . under the greatest appearance and Pretensions to Religion and Sanctity that ever was in the World, he charged that those who consumed sugar, molasses, and rum literally consumed the blood and flesh of slaves. Images of slaves mangled by punishment, bent from work, starving and naked dotted his book. Once he stood barefoot in the snow to draw attention to the frostbitten toes and fingers of ill-clad slaves. He wore a sackcloth and lived in exile in a cave after the death of his wife. Lay rejected plans to free slaves only after they had reached adulthood. That, he said, [will not] salve the Sore, it is too deep and rotten. Quoting the scriptures as if to justify slave rebellion, he wrote, "Its better to die by the Sword than by Famine. As a God-fearing Quaker, Lay stated that he would say no more. But the notorious lies that slaves are content will never go down well. If that were true, he asked simply, why should they be against it? He predicted that the Satanical Practice of SLAVE-KEEPING would certainly bring sudden Destruction among us."¹⁵

If Lay’s dramatic and uncompromising testimony against slavery alienated many Quakers, John Woolman made abolitionism respectable. Using the system of visiting Friends’ meetings, Woolman roamed throughout the colonies trying to convince his coreligionists of the sin of slaveholding. A self-supporting tailor and later a successful retailer, Woolman used moderate language and deferred to Quaker practice. According to his journal, published by the Quaker Committee on the Press after his death, Woolman came to his antislavery convictions on being asked by his master to write a bill of sale for a slave woman. Subsequently he refused to write wills for slaveholders who sought to bequeath their slaves to their heirs, convincing many of them on their deathbeds to free their slaves, and he acted on behalf of at least two slaves who were attempting to secure their freedom. In his travels to the plantation colonies, Woolman noted how slaves were sold separately from their families, whipped to work, and deprived of an education as well as how bondage had a corrupting effect on society. A visit to Newport, Rhode Island, likewise opened his eyes to the horrors of the slave trade.

Self-love, or self-interest, rather than devotion to the common good, Woolman reasoned, was the cause of slavery, and he gave a host of reasons for opposing slaveholding. Like earlier Quaker abolitionists, he chastised people for their pursuit of luxuries and wealth, developing an incipient critique of market society and, with Lay, pioneering the antislavery tactic of encouraging the non-consumption of goods produced by slave labor. Opposition to imperialist warfare as part of their peace testimony during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63 between England and France, which spanned North America, Europe, and Asia, pushed Quaker reformers, who had long debated the rectitude of slavery, in the direction of organized abolition. The same war inspired a massive slave revolt in Jamaica in 1760–61. In 1758 Woolman had played an important role in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s condemnation of the importing, buying, selling, and keeping of slaves. As a member of the meeting’s antislavery committee of visiting ministers and Committee of Negroes, he convinced other meetings of the iniquity of slavery, spurring a coherent approach to abolitionism through his quietist tactics and writings. That same year the London Yearly Meeting issued an epistle against the slave trade, enlarging on some early reservations about it, as well as, in 1761, a Strong Minute, or directive opposing it.¹⁶

Woolman’s antislavery built a bridge between the separatist Quaker attempt to rid their community of slavery and the revolutionary abolition movement in the Anglo-American world. In 1754 he published the first half of his antislavery pamphlet Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, which he first composed in 1746 after visiting the southern colonies. Woolman recognized that customs generally approved, opinions received by youth from their superiors, become like the natural produce of a soil, especially when they are suited to favorite inclinations. He questioned what Nathaniel Hawthorne would call custom so old that it seems like nature. In 1762 he published the second half of his pamphlet, in which he again likened slavery to Unrighteousness . . . justified from one Age to the other. He elaborated on his previous reasoning but added quintessential Enlightenment ideas that would become stock arguments of organized abolition in the 1770s, including an appeal to the natural rights of man, humanitarianism, and the attributing of physical differences to environmental causes. The Idea of Slavery being connected with the Black Colour, and Liberty with the White were false ideas . . . twisted into our Minds, ideas which with Difficulty we get fairly Disentangled. The Colour of Man, he wrote, avails nothing, in Matters of Right and Equity. He ended with an indictment of the slave trade and, at his most passionate, warned of divine vengeance against the most haughty People that would give Deliverance to the Oppressed.

In his A Plea for the Poor, published long after his death in 1793, Woolman married his antislavery to concerns about the deteriorating condition of the working classes and the destruction of the environment by early industrialization. Wealth, as he put it in his opening sentence, was the destroyer of virtue. He drew attention to the plight of the working poor and the exploitative nature of British imperialism and early capitalism. Another version of this text, A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich &c, has been dated to 1763. Like his contemporary Quaker abolitionist Joshua Evans, Woolman was a thoroughgoing reformer who combined antislavery testimony with concern for Native Americans, animal abuse, violence and war, excessive drinking, and conspicuous consumption. He died in 1772 in England before the revolutionary abolition movement came of age, but his successor in the role of the preeminent Quaker abolitionist became its founding father.¹⁷

ABOLITIONISTS BEFORE ABOLITION

If there was an eighteenth-century abolitionist who matched the pivotal role of William Lloyd Garrison in the nineteenth century, it was Anthony Benezet. Of Huguenot descent, the cosmopolitan Benezet was born in France, was educated in Belgium, and moved to Philadelphia in 1731. A schoolmaster who began teaching African Americans in his home and an indefatigable writer, Benezet orchestrated the antislavery campaign of the revolutionary era besides protesting the treatment of Native Americans and refugee French Acadians from Canada. He wrote countless letters to like-minded influential men and women in Europe and America and compiled several antislavery pamphlets. Benezet began his abolitionist career supporting Woolman’s attempts to restrict slave-holding and the buying of slaves among Quakers, building on his predecessor’s use of Quaker institutions and methods, printing, visiting, and correspondence to propagate antislavery. In 1754 he wrote the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Epistle of Caution and Advice, which drew attention to the inhumanity of the slave trade. In his first antislavery pamphlet, published five years later, Benezet, declaring that no practice was stained with a deeper Dye of Injustice, Cruelty and Oppression than the slave trade, compiled evidence from European slave traders on its brutalities.¹⁸

Benezet occupies a pride of place in early abolitionist thought, as his ideas transcended the boundaries of Quakerism. In his pamphlet A Short Account of that part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes (1762) he combined the Quaker abolitionist critique of the Love of Gain and Pleasures and Profits that blind men to the Sufferings of their Fellow Creatures with an exhaustive account of West African societies culled from the writings of European traders and factors. The investigative nature of his pamphlet, a hallmark of modern antislavery, effectively allowed Benezet not only to rebut racialist myths surrounding Africa and its inhabitants but also to highlight the Calamities the Atlantic slave trade visited on their countries. Benezet read the popular geography of North Africa written by the traveler and writer Leo Africanus and strove to write from an African perspective. Even though he did not characterize African societies in all their complexity, Benezet, in an adept reversal of imagery, made Africans appear as the civilized victims of European barbarism. The romanticization of Africa was an antidote to the poisonous caricatures that later abounded in Western literature.

Did Benezet’s interactions with people of African descent and their oral testimony influence his writings, as his most recent biographer speculates? Certainly his long descriptions of African societies reveal that his sources of antislavery inspiration lay as much in Africa as in the ideas of Quaker Christianity and the Enlightenment. Benezet’s close connections to Philadelphia’s black community and his lifelong commitment to black education undoubtedly gave birth to his strong antiracialism. Africans in the slave societies of the Americas had little opportunity to develop their natural talents, he wrote, forced as they were to be constantly employed in servile Labor. The Negroes, he concluded, are equally intitled to the common Priviledges of Mankind with the Whites, that they have the same Rational Powers; the same natural Affections, and areas susceptible to Pain and Grief as they, that therefore the bringing and keeping them in Bondage, is an Instance of Oppression and Injustice of the most grie[v]ous Nature, such as is scarcely to be paralleled by any Example in the present or former Ages. Benezet’s writings, circulated through the Quaker Anti slavery International headquartered in London and Philadelphia, laid the foundation of the first Anglo-American abolition movement.¹⁹

If Benezet was the preeminent American abolitionist of his age, then Granville Sharp surely was his British counterpart. By 1765 the English legal theorist William Blackstone had affirmed in his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England that English law did not recognize slavery but clarified in later editions of his work that a master’s right to service continued. That year a slave named Jonathan Strong solicited Sharp’s help to protect him from being returned to his abusive master, David Lisle of Barbados, who had left him bloodied and bruised in the streets of London. Sharp’s brother, a doctor, nursed him back to health. When Lisle reclaimed his slave and sold him, Sharp argued Strong’s case, and he was set free. Sharp published his conviction that slavery or human property was incompatible with English law in his A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery; Or, Of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England (1769). Other fugitive slaves such as Thomas Lewis, John and Mary Hylas, and James Somerset, who had run away from his master Charles Steuart, formerly of Virginia, recruited Sharp in their quest for freedom. Somerset was recaptured and imprisoned aboard a brig awaiting transportation to Jamaica. He and Lewis both were rescued through a writ of habeas corpus. Steuart had resided in Boston, and the colonial precedent of freedom suits may well have influenced Somerset, who sued him for freedom. In his decision in the Somerset v. Steuart case, Lord Chief Justice William Murray, Earl of Mansfield (who had adopted his nephew’s mixed-race daughter Dido), denied colonial slaveholders the right to forcibly transport their slaves from England. The decision represented a happy marriage between black resistance and English law.

Somerset was widely interpreted as having abolished slavery in Britain. It damaged slaveholders’ prerogatives and