CHAPTER I THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENTP RIOR TO THE ABO- LITION OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1641-1808) I. MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ARGUMENTS A. The Puritans and the Quakers Prior to January 1, 1808, when the Slave-Trade Act pro- hibiting the importation of slaves into the United States be- came effective, opposition to slavery as recorded in the liter- ature of America was based most often upon moral and re- ligious grounds. It appeared first in the writings of the Puritans and the Quakers. The majority of the Puritans who showed interest in the welfare of the slave were concernedp rimarily with his moral and religious instruction. Consequently, seeing in slavery a hindrance to this instruction, they opposed slavery. Few of them, however, appear to have foreseen any very serious consequences that might result from the continuance of such a system, and none of them effected any permanent plan for abolishing it.' John Eliot, one of the authors of the Bay I Between 1641 and 1652 statutes were enacted by the Puritans to limit Negro slavery in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but they were not long en- forced. See A. B. Hart, Slavery and Abolition, pp. 50-51. The Massachusetts "Body of Liberties" (1641), compiled chiefly by Nathaniel Ward, contained a provision to the effect that there should "never be any bond slaverie, villinage or captivitie amongst us unles it be lawful captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us." See Old South Leaflets, VII, 273. An attempt was made to enforce this regulation, for in 1646 the General Court ordered that certain Negroes unlawfully brought from Africa be returned at the charge of the country, and that a letter be sent with them expressing the indignation of the Court. See Records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, II, 168. In 1652 a statute was enacted in Rhode Island limiting the period during which Negroes might be held in slavery. The commissioners of Providence and Warwick ordered that no man, black or white, should be forced "to serve any man or his assighnes longer than ten yeares, or untill they come to bee twentie, from the time of their cominge within the liberties of this Collonie. . . . And that man that will not let them goe free, or shall sell them away elsewhere, to that end that they may bee enslaved to others for a long time, hee or they shall forfeit to the Collonie forty pounds. " See Records of the Colony of Bhode Island, I, 243. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, 373 374 JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY Psalm Book, lamented the fact that the Negroes were used as if they were horses or oxen, and considered it a prodigy "that any wearing the name of Christians, should so much have the heart of Devils in them, as to prevent and hinder the Instructions of the poor Blackamoores, and confinet he Souls of their miserable Slaves to a destroying ignorance, meerly for fear of thereby loosing the benefit of their Vassalage."' He offered to meet the slaves once a week for instruction, but he did not live to make much progress in the under- taking.2 Cotton Mather's views on slavery were practi- cally the same as Eliot's. In 1706 he wrote an essay entitled " The Negro Christianized," a copy of which was to be placed in every family of New England owning a Negro; and many copies were to be sent to the West Indies.' Four years later, in an essay entitled "On Doing Good in our Domestic Re- lations," he expressed the belief that God had brought the Negroes to America for a good purpose: "What if they should be the elect of God, fetched from Africa and the Indies that, by means of their situation, they may be broughth omet o the Shepherdo f Souls "4 ' He said that the Americans could not pretend to Christian- ity until they did more to Christianize their slaves; and he hoped that an act might be obtained from the British Parlia- ment for the Christianizing of the slaves in the plantations. Yet, in the meantime, the slave-trade, said he, was a specta- cle that shocked humanity: "The harmlessn atives basely they trepan, And barter baublesf or the souls of men; The wretchest hey to Christianc limes bring o'er, To serve worse heathenst han they did before." 5 A better example from the Puritans of the moral and religious argument and the first really significant one in the however, this law was no longer enforced.-DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, p. 34. 2Mather, The Life urndD eath of the Renown'2dM r. John Eliot, p. 125. 3 Diary of Cotton Mather, in Mass. Hist. Soo. Coll., 7th Ser., VII, Part I, 565. ,'Mather, Essays to Do Good, p. 94. s Ibid., p. 95. ANTI-SLAVERSYE NTIMENTIN LITERATURE 375 history of the anti-slavery movement in America was Judge Samuel Sewall's pamphlet "The Selling of Joseph," pub- lished June 24, 1700. Sewall had long intended to write something against the slave-trade. A visit from a friend who showed him a petition he intended to present to the Gen- eral Court for the freeing of a Negro and his wife unjustly held in bondage was said to be in part the occasion of his writing "The Selling of Joseph." Here his opposition to slavery was considerably in advance of any that had ap- peared previously in American literature. He referred to temptations that confronted masters "to connive at the For- nication of their Slaves; lest they should be obliged to find them Wives or pay their Fines," and said it was "most lam- entable to think, how in taking Negroes out of Africa, and selling them here, That which God has joyned together men do boldly rend asunder; Men from their Country, Husbands from their Wives, Parents from their children."6 He an- swered most of the pro-slavery arguments based upon pas- sages from the Scriptures; and in reply to the argument that the opportunity which the Negro in America had of be- coming a Christian justified his being brought from Africa, he said that evil must not be done in order that good might re- sult from it.7 In 1705 he made inquiry of the Athenian Society "Whether trading for Negroes, i.e., carrying them out of their own country into perpetual slavery, be in itself un- lawful, and especially contrary to the great Law of Christi- anity." I 8 Sewall 's moral and religious argument anticipated that of the latter eighteenth century writers, for it called attention to the detrimental effect of slavery upon the mas- ter as well as upon the slave. The anti-slavery arguments of the Quakers during this period were also based most often upon moral and religious grounds, but they revealed a more democratic spirit than those of the Puritans, for they embodied the doctrine of Sewall, "The Selling of Joseph," in Mass. Hi8t. Soo. CoU., 5th Ser., VI, 18. 7Ibid., 19. 8 ' Letter-Book of Samuel Sewall, " in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., 6th Ser., I, 322. 376 JOURNAL OF NEGROH ISTORY human brotherhood and frequently contained definite plans fot the emancipation of the slaves.9 The often cited John Woolman (1720-1772) was by no means the earliest of the Quakers in America who opposed slavery. In 1688 German Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, issued a protest against slavery.'0 The work of George Keith, John Hepburn, Ralph Sandiford, Benjamin Lay, and others an- tedates Woolman's and that of Anthony Benezet exerted a greater influence upon the general anti-slavery movement in America than his ;" but Woolman was the most important of the Quakers who won a place in the American literature of this period. As a traveling preacher he spent the greater part of his life in advocating the cause of the poor and op- pressed. This humanitarian spirit was manifested through- out his works, yet there was no bitterness shown toward his opponents. In his twenty-third year while employed at Mount Holly, New Jersey, he was asked by his employer, who had sold a slave, to write a bill of sale. The request was sudden and came from one who employed him by the year; consequently, he wrote it, but told his employer that he I believed " slave-keeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion. "'2 He afterwards refused to comply with similar requests. In "Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes" (1754), he said that all nations were of one blood: "To considerm ankindo therwiset han brethren,t o think favours are peculiar to one nation, and exclude others, plainly supposes a darkness in the understanding: for as God's love is universal, so where the mind is sufficientlyi nfluencedb y it, it begets a likeness of itself, and the heart is enlarged towards all men." '13 9 See below, p. 396. 10 See Hart, Amerioan History Told by Contemporaries,I I, 291-293. = For an account of the activities of the Quakersi n the anti-slavery move- ment in America during this period, see Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Bise, Progress, and Accoi-nrplishmenotf the Abolition of the African Save- Trade (1808), I, 108-156. For an excellent account of Benezet, see also C. G. Woodson, "'Anthony Benezet," in the Journal of Negro History, II, 37-50. 1' "The Life and Travels of John Woolman," in Works, pp. 15-16. '3 Woolman, "Some Considerationso n the Keeping of Negroes,"' in Works, pp. 258-260. ANTI-SLAVERY SENTIMENT IN LITERATURE 377 Masters, he contended, were not competent to be the owners of men, for the human mind was not naturally forti- fied with that firmness in wisdom and goodness necessary to an independent ruler. Furthermore, "Placing on men the ignominioust itle slave . . . . tends gradu- ally to fix a notion in the mind, that they are a sort of people below us in nature, and leads us to considert hem as such in all our conclu- sions aboutt hem. '14 Woolman could conceive of the enslavement of persons guilty of such crimes as would unfit them to be at liberty; yet the children of such persons, he thought, ought not to be enslaved because their parents sinned.'5 With such arguments he attacked the evils of slavery without antagonizing the slave- holder or losing the respect and sympathy of any of his con- temporaries. He told the slaveholder that his wicked specu- lations in human lives should be stopped, and he was re- ceived hospitably by him. He persuaded many of his own group, the Friends, to desist from holding slaves, even though to do so was detrimental to their own interests. The success of the emancipation movement among the Quakers who in the Middle and Northern States had freed practically all of their slaves before the close of the Revolutionary War, is said to have been due very largely to his influence."' B. Latter Eighteenth Century Writers Like the Puritans and the Quakers, writens of the latter eighteenth century made frequent use of the moral and re- ligious argument, but they were more severe in their condem- nation of slavery and dwelt mote at length upon its de- moralizing effect upon the slaveholder and the slave. By this time, because of the growing complexity of the slave problem due to the rapid increase in the number of slaves, the question of the effect of slavery upon the morals of the master and the slave was one of graver concern to X Ibid., pp. 296-297. 15Ibid., p. 282. " Locke, Anti-Slavery in Amerioa, 1619-1808, pp. 30.36. 378 JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY anti-slavery writers than in the colonial period, and accord- ingly received more detailed treatment. In his Notes on the State of Virgtnia, issued at Paris in 1784 and at Philadelphia in 1788, Thomas Jefferson spoke of the commerce between master and slave as a "perpetual exercise of the most bois- terous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other."'I7 He la- mented the fact that the children of masters saw this and learned to imitate it. " The man must be a prodigy, " said he, "who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances ... . Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep for- ever!"'I7 Benjamin Franklin, Sarah Wentworth Morton, and Timothy Dwight were also greatly alarmed over these conditions. In "An Address to the Public; from the Penn- sylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes unlawfully held in Bondage" (1789), Franklin said that slavery was such an "atrocious debasement of human nature" that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, might open a source of serious evils, for " The unhappy man, who has long been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart . .. . reason and conscienceh ave but little influence over his con- duct, because he is chiefly governed by the passion of fear. "18 In Mrs. Morton's novel entitled The Power of Sympathy (1789), one of the characters (Harrington) noticed on his tour through the United States that those inhabitants "ac- customed to a habit of domineering over their slaves" were "haughtier, more tenacious of honour," and more aristo- cratic in temper'9 than those where slavery did not exist; but he anticipated the happy time when the sighs of the slave I should " no longer expire in the air of freedom. "0 Probably "IJ efferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, pp. 172-174. 18Franklin, Works, ed. Sparks, II, 515-516. 19M orton, The Power of SynmpathyI, I, 74. 0 Ibid., 30. ANTI-SLAVERY SENTIMENT IN LITERATURE 379 the most bitter attack upon slavery on moral grounds to be found in the poetry of the period was made by Timothy Dwight in Greenfield Hill (1794), in which he stressed the immoral effect of slavery upon the African youth, who "Thus, shut from honour' s path.... turns to shame, And filches the small good, he cannot claim. To sour, and stupid, sinks his active mind; Finds joy in drink, he cannote lsewheref ind; Sees from himself his sole redressm ust flow, And makes revenge the balsam of his woe. "Thus slavery's blast bids sense and virtue die; Thus lower'd to dust the sons of Afric lie. " O thou chief curse, since curses here began; First guilt, first woe, first infamy of man; Thou spot of hell, deep smirch'd on human kind, The uncur'd gangrene of the reasoningm ind; Alike in church, in state, and householda ll, Supreme memorial of the world's dread fall; 0 slavery! laurel of the infernal mind, Proud Satan 's triumph over lost mankind! X '2 1 The literature of this period contained also a great many anti-slavery arguments based upon religious grounds. Many of these were replies to the argument that slavery was not forbidden in the Scriptures; some pointed to the teachings of Christ as the strongest possible argument against slavery ;22 and others were directed definitely toward the religion of the slaveholders. Thomas Paine, in 1775, said that Africans would be filled with abhorrence of Christians and be led to think that the Christian religion would make them more in- human savages if they embraced it.23 In a novel by Mrs. Susanna Rowson, called The Inquisitor; or, Invisible Ram- bler (1794), the leading character possessed a ring which, when on his finger, rendered him invisible, so that he could visit at will habitations of vice and luxury and give aid and 21 Dwight, Greenfield Hill, pp. 37-38. " Rush, Ain Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America upon Slave-Keeping (pub. 1773), pp. 2-3. 23 Paine, "African Slavery in America," in Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Conway, I, 6, 7. 380 JOURNAL OF NEGROH ISTORY protection to persons in distress. Among those for whom he had great sympathy was the slave. After describing a scene in Africa where a native was stolen by the European slave- trader, he followed the enslaved African to the West Indies; saw him in his suffering there until age, sickness, and bitter grief were his only companions. The slave died, and was thrown into a grave "without one tear of effection or regret being shed upon his bier." But his soul, said the narrator, "shall appear white and spotless at the throne of Grace, to confound the man who called himself a Christian, and yet betrayed a fellow-creature into bondage.' 24 An effective attack upon the religion of the slaveholder, extremely ironical in method and apparently in imitation of Swift's "A Modest Proposal," was John Trumbull's eighth essay in " The Correspondent," published in the Connecticut Journal and New Haven Post-Boy on July 6, 1770.25 Trum- bull began by saying that since the whole world was the prop- erty of the righteous, the Africans, being infidels and here- tics, might rightly be considered lawful plunder. He spoke of the boundless charity and benevolence of the Americans who, with no other end in view than to bring "those poor creatures" within hearing of the gospel, spared no expense of time or money, and endured the greatest fatigues of body and trouble of conscience in carrying on this "pious de- sign"; and asked if the Africans were not, therefore, bound by the ties of gratitude to devote their whole lives to the service of their enslavers as the only reward that could be adequate to such superabundantc harity. He was aware that some persons doubted whether the sole purpose of Ameri- cans in enslaving Africans was to teach them the principles of Christianity, but he was able to prove that this was their purpose by the many instances of learned, pious Negroes; for, said he: "I myself have heard of no less than three, who know half the letters of the alphabet, and have made considerablea dvances " Rowson, The Inquisitor; or, Invisible Rambler, p. 90. `5 See Documents, pp. 493 if., for a reprint of the entire essay. ANTI-SLAVERYS ENTIMENT IN LITERATURE 381 in the Lord's prayer and catechism. In general, I confess they are scarcely so learned; which deficiency we do not charge to the fault of any one, but have the good nature to attribute it merely to their natural stupidity, and dullness of intellect."26 He called attention to many other nations in the world whom Americans had equal right to enslave, and who stood in as much need of Christianity as the Africans, and suggested, in particular, that the Turks and Papists should thus be transformed into Christians: "I propose at first and by way of trial, in this laudable scheme, that two vesselsb e sent, one to Rome,a nd the other to Constantinople, to fetch off the Pope and the Grand Signior; I make no doubt but the public, convinced of the legality of the thing, and filled to the brim with the charitable design of enslaving infidels, will readily engage in such an enterprise. For my part, would my circumstances permit, I would be ready to lead in the adventure, and should prom- ise myself certain success, with the assistance of a select company of seamen concerned in the African trade. But at present, I can only show my zeal, by promising when the affair is concluded and the captives brought ashore, to set apart several hours in every day, when their masters can spare them, for instructing the Pope in his creed, and teaching the Grand Signior to say his catechism."26 H. ARGUMENTS BASED UPON NATURAL AND INALIENABLE RIGHTS In American literature as early as 1700 the theory that all men were born free and had equal rights was used in reference to the African slave.27 Samuel Sewall contended that "all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs, and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all other outward Comforts of Life "; that Joseph was " rightfully no more a Slave to his Brethren, than they were to him"; and that they had "no more Authority to Sell him, than they had to Slay him."28 It was not until the latter part of the eighteenth 2 Trumbull, "The Correspondent, No. 8," in the Connecticut Journal and New Haven Post-Boy, July 6, 1770. For an account of the beginnings of this doctrine among English-speaking 27 peoples in the seventeenth century and of the extent to which the writings of John Locke influenced eighteenth century authors, including Americans, in their use of it, see Charles A. Beard, Th'e Economic Basis of Politics, pp. 82-85; Harold J. Laski, Political Thought in England from Looke to Bentham, pp. 29-76; and D. G. Ritchie, Natural Rights, pp. 3-19. 28 Sewall, "The Selling of Joseph," in the Mass. Hlst. Soc. Coll., 5th Ser., VI, 16-17. 382 JOURNAL OF NEGROH ISTORY century, however, that opposition to slavery based upon the theory of the natural and inalienable rights of man found fullest expression in American literature. During the period of the American Revolution, when all loyal Americans were asserting their own rights against the claims of England, this doctrine became a convenient means of advancing the cause of freedom generally. The more liberal-minded writers applied it without distinction as to race or condition; whereas others allowed considerations of expediency to de- termine the nature and extent of their defense and practical application of the theory.29 In 1764 James Otis contended that by the law of nature all men, whether white or black, were born free; and inquired whether any logical inference in favor of slavery could be drawn from a flat nose and a long or short face.30 Thomas Paine, in 1775, argued that inasmuch as the Africans were not convicted of forfeiting freedom, they had a "natural, perfect right to it"; and he entreated the Americans to consider with what " consistency or decency" they complained so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they held so many hundred thousands in slavery and annually enslaved more "without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them. '31 Again, in 1807, in William Dunlap's play entitled The Father of an Only Child,32t his 29 Patrick Henry, for instance, thought it was amazing that at a time when the rights of humanity were defined with precision, in a country above all others fond of liberty, there should be so many men (including himself) holding slaves. "I am drawn along," said he, "by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not, I cannot justify it. However culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to virtue, as to own the excellence and rectitude of her pre. cepts, and to lament my own want of conformity to them." "- 'Letter of Patrick Henry of Virginia, to Robert Pleasants, of the Society of Friends"' (1773), in L. M. Child, The Evils of Slavery and the Cure of Slavery, p. 3. Thomas Jeffer- son also advanced the theory of natural rights, but remained an owner of slaves until his death. In 1785, however, he gloried in the fact that in Virginia young men were coming into office who had "sucked in the principles of liberty, as it were, with their mother's milk," and said that it was to them that he looked with anxiety to turn the fate of slavery. See Jefferson, Writings, ed. Washing- ton, I, 377. soO tis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, p. 43. "IP aine, Writings, ed. Conway, I, 6, 7. It should be noted that the anti-slavery speech here concerning the hero did 8'