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    Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader
    Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader
    Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader
    Ebook528 pages7 hours

    Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader

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    About this ebook

    "An invaluable resource to students, scholars, and general readers alike."—Amazon.com

    This colleciton assembles more than forty speeches, lectures, and essays critical to the abolitionist crusade, featuring writing by William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

    For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateFeb 1, 2000
    ISBN9781440672736
    Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader

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      Book preview

      Against Slavery - Mason Lowance

      THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR ANTEBELLUM ABOLITIONISM, 1700-1830

      INTRODUCTION

      The general introduction has shown how the abolitionist crusade of 1830-1865 grew out of an earlier antislavery movement that was largely religious in origin and character and that lacked the aggressive, demanding resolve of William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips. The documents that follow include representative texts from this antislavery debate during the years 1700-1800, when Judge Samuel Sewall penned The Selling of Joseph, an antislavery pamphlet that criticized American chattel slavery by invoking biblical precedents. The final documents included here are Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1776), Phillis Wheatley’s On Being Brought from Africa to America (1773), and Frederick Douglass’s What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? (1852), a critique of Jefferson’s assertion that all men are created equal in the context of chattel slavery for African Americans.

      The antebellum slavery debates intensified early in the nineteenth century, particularly following the formation of the New England Antislavery Society in 1831 and the American Antislavery Society in 1833. The publication of David Walker’s Appeal in 1830 and the commencement of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator on January 1, 1831, marked a new era in abolitionist rhetoric and thought. The early antislavery advocates had generally argued for gradualism, a deliberate evolutionary change in American society that would require the prohibition of the importation of slaves but would allow the gradual abolition of slavery through attrition and even colonization. In the eighteenth century, the religious and moral arguments that were mounted against slavery used scriptural texts to counter the biblical precedents of the Old Testament which proslavery advocates had used to support the institution. Garrisonians called for immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves, with no compensation for the slaveowners.

      The moral and religious arguments were advanced well before the abolitionist crusade of the 1830s, but these pioneering voices were often, like John the Baptist’s, voices crying in the wilderness, speaking out in a society that was either opposed to any form of emancipation or simply indifferent to the moral ramifications of the issue. Prior to 1776, when Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence argued the equality of mankind, a natural-rights principle that grew out of Enlightenment doctrine, the antislavery arguments were primarily developed out of scriptural texts or religious doctrine. The Enlightenment had effectively challenged the monarchies of Europe with a radically new view of humanity that disabled essentialist arguments concerning the nature of man, and these natural-rights views were fused with antislavery biblical reasoning to advance an early argument for emancipation. Ironically, it was this very biblical precedent, particularly the Old Testament practices of enslaving captured enemies or the practice of holding polygamous female slaves during the Age of the Patriarchs (Genesis), that gave nineteenth-century proslavery advocates examples from Scripture to use against the abolitionists who demanded an immediate end to chattel slavery in the United States. The charter documents of the new nation set individual freedoms and human rights as the highest priority; biblical precedent included not only Christ’s humane teachings but also the Old Testament slavery precedents and Saint Paul’s letter to Philemon, in which certain forms of slavery are clearly condoned. Moreover, several prominent Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were architects of the new government and authors of these charter documents were themselves slaveholders, creating an inconsistency between theory and practice that plagued the nineteenth-century Congress as well as the framers of the Constitution.

      For example, at the age of eleven, George Washington inherited ten slaves when his father died. Until the Revolutionary War, Washington really did not question slavery; there is no record of his having protested its existence or having written anything in opposition to it. He continued to hold slaves at Mount Vernon after his inauguration as president of the United States, and Martha Washington’s dowry included slaves. Like most Southern plantation owners, Washington needed slave labor to develop his land-holdings. When he was only nineteen years old, he already owned over fourteen hundred acres of Virginia farmland west of the Blue Ridge Mountains because he had received much of this land in lieu of payment for his services as a land surveyor. Washington was paternalistic toward his slaves. He often referred to them as my family and considered Mount Vernon, his palatial Potomac estate, as their home. He even saw to their health maintenance and the care of their teeth, not only because this was good business and would protect the investment in his property, but because he considered himself the patriarch of a large plantation family. It is significant that Washington did not participate in the selling of slaves, although he did purchase slaves for his estate. After the Revolution, Washington came to hate slavery and wrote, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by the Legislature by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.

      This gradualist approach to the termination of slavery was prominent in the tracts produced in the eighteenth century, such as An Oration upon the Moral and Political Evil of Slavery, and the Free Relief of Negroes, and Others Unlawfully Held in Bondage (1793) by George Buchanan (1763-1808). The antislavery writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included here used moral suasion and the Bible in different ways, but primarily to establish a moral position against the inhumanity of slavery as a societal institution. For example, Samuel Sewall argued that manstealing was morally wrong, a violation of God’s ordinances, and he cited Exodus 21.16, which reads, "He that Stealeth a man and Selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to

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