James Otis may be said to have ushered in the antislavery debate of the revolutionary period in his 1764 pamphlet that clearly put antislavery on the radical agenda. Otis’s example was followed in 1767 when a Bostonian Son of Liberty, Nathaniel Appleton, sought to anchor the antislavery debate amid the wave of early patriot successes. “The years 1765 and 1766 will be ever memorable for the glorious stand which America has made for her liberties; how much glory will it add to use if at the same time we are establishing Liberty for ourselves and children, we show the same regard to all mankind that came among us?” (Appleton 2).
From this unctuous and flattering beginning, Nathaniel Appleton eschewed religious argument to make a place for antislavery along economic and practical lines: the slave trade only enriched its traders while preventing the white immigration that would serve to settle the continent; always expecting the slave to “throw off his burden” by revolt, the institution kept communities in constant fear; work taken over by slaves served to prevent white servants from similar work because they would not do work they associated with slavery. In an argument that offered an alternative to the religious discourse that dominated the issue, Appleton even suggested the institution promoted prostitution among lower-class girls because slaves took over the work that such girls could perform.
Appleton was a man of influence in Boston’s revolutionary circles (although not to be confused with the earlier Congregational minister of the same name), a Harvard graduate (admitted as fourth in social standing of his class), son of a Congregational minister, and eventually a successful merchant and candle manufacturer (Sibley’s 12:354–59). His position in the movement is suggested by the pamphlet publication of the essay by Edes and Gill, although it did not appear in the Gazette. The essay was undoubtedly prompted by Massachusetts’s increasing antislavery activities. In 1765 and 1766, Worcester, then Boston, instructed their representatives to seek legislation to end slavery. In 1767, a vigorous effort was made in the Massachusetts House of Representatives to restrict the importation of slaves, and Appleton’s essay, calling on the patriot fervor engendered by repudiation of the Stamp Act, was part of efforts to push the issue. As noted earlier, after much maneuvering, the antislavery bill was simply lost, disappearing suddenly and silently when legal maneuvers to kill it were exhausted (G. Moore 126–28). Appleton remained an active patriot but wrote no more antislavery essays.
Unlike Appleton’s pamphlet, the 1770 election sermon by Samuel Cooke, New Divinity pastor of Cambridge’s Second Church, was published as both a pamphlet and a newspaper insertion (MS 7/29/73). Appleton had made no excuses for American slavery, but Cooke, in the section addressing slavery, put the slave trade at British feet and was undoubtedly intended to embarrass Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Cooke’s conclusion, however, served to separate the issue from the patriots by calling upon issues of conscience: “Ethiopia has long stretched out her hands to us. Let not sordid gain, acquired by the merchandize of slaves, and the souls of men harden our hearts against her piteous moans. When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!” (Cooke 22).
It is unlikely that the sermon was heard by many Massachusetts legislators in any case. Following the Boston Massacre, Hutchinson ordered the colony’s general court to meet in Cambridge. In response, the Sons of Liberty scheduled a separate election day sermon for Boston (continuing to give a sacred air to the revolutionary cause). Their choice for the occasion was one of Boston’s revered old guard ministers, Charles Chauncy, of the Old Brick Church. In the remonstrances over the move and with blood from the Boston Massacre undoubtedly still fresh on King Street, there was no room for antislavery in Chauncy’s call for retribution (Griffin 147–49).
Yet even in this period of propagandistic fervor and after the failure of the 1771 bill, Massachusetts antislavery activists managed to maintain the pressure on the colony’s House of Representatives. As Adams and his circle sought to build a colonywide coalition against Great Britain that ignored the slavery issue, Massachusetts antislavery activists persistently brought the antislavery issue to the political forefront by means of a series of slave petitions from 1773 to 1777 and the pamphlets that called attention to them. Each time, the petitions failed, disappearing into the nether world of committee assignment. The petition barrage kept alive the discussion, insisting the issue was not simply the end of the slave trade, as the patriots argued, but abolition. In the third of a series of petitions, for example (Aptheker, And Why Not 5–10), a group of Boston slaves asked not only for an end to the slave trade, as a minimal effort, but for redress of those already in slavery.
Like Appleton’s essay, this petition made its case on a base of secular concern—the role and cost of free blacks in society. Blacks who were “vicious,” would be punished by law, but “there are many others of quite different characters, and who, if made free, would soon be able as well as willing to bear a part of the Public Charge.” Challenging the assumptions embedded in advertisements, news stories, and common wisdom, the petition addressed perceived differences. Bondsmen and women “are discreet, sober, honest, and industrious; and may it be not said of many, that they are virtuous and religious” (Aptheker, And Why Not 47–48).
The petition also attempted to confront the practical concerns of European colonists, and, in retrospect, public discussion of these issues expressed by bondsmen and women themselves would have been among the most important. But the voices of Boston’s black colonists were seldom heard in the realm of public discourse. Their circulation most often came by hand—presented personally to the legislators by the black petitioners. Although James Bowdoin was known to make public many documents that came to the council during his long tenure from 1757 to 1774, slave petitions were not among them. Nor did Adams choose to give them public voice in the Boston Gazette despite his apparent role as an intermediary between one group of black petitioners and the House, as demonstrated in a request to John Pickering to be kept abreast of the petition’s development in order to “enable me to communicate to them the general outlines of your Design” (Adams, Writings 3:78; G. Moore 136). It is not to be unnecessarily cynical to suggest that such a piece of information would also have been helpful to the revolutionary circle who wished to avoid confrontation on the issue.
The petition did find publication in the Massachusetts Spy, although how it came to be published in this patriot organ that so seldom strayed from the patriot line is unclear. The petition also found publication as part of a pamphlet of four antislavery pieces that included a rare essay by a black writer, “Felix.” Like the petition writers, Felix argued that freed bondsmen and women would not necessarily be a charge to the society but concluded on a dramatic note: “We have no Property! We have no Wives! No Children! We have no City! No Country! But we have a Father in Heaven and we are determined as far as Grace shall enable us” (Appendix 9–11; Aptheker, And Why Not 6). The pamphlet was published in the shop of Ezekiel Russell, who had already alienated much of patriot Boston by printing Thomas Hutchinson’s political organ, the Boston Censor, and whose brother, Joseph Russell, was a printer of the loyalist hybrid, the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser (Thomas 229). Since Ezekiel Russell was a publisher of most of Boston’s antislavery works, his connection to Hutchinson undoubtedly served to further attach antislavery with Toryism. Writing for posterity, his fellow Boston printer, Isaiah Thomas, dismissed him: “He published nothing of more consequence than pamphlets, most of which were small” (Thomas 153).
The petition that had encouraged so much written attention was read in the House of Representatives January 28, 1773, and recorded succinctly, probably by Adams as clerk: “A petition of a Number of Negroes, praying that they may be declared free, on certain conditions.” Once read, it was “ordered to lie,” a tabling act. A motion, whose author is not recorded, resuscitated it sufficiently for the formation of a committee to prepare a bill for preventing the “future Imports of Slaves into this Province,” an immediate dilution of the original request (Journal 195). But, as in the past, the proposed bill was never presented.
Although encumbered by continuing Tory associations Boston’s black campaign against slavery continued. In 1777 another slave petition was offered to the Massachusetts legislature that expressed “Astonishment” that slavery had not been ended by the revolutionary fervor (Aptheker, And Why Not 47–48). Signed by Prince Hall, then emerging into leadership of Boston’s black community, and five others, the petition made no headway. The Massachusetts legislative chose a delaying action, moving to obtain Congress’s view on abolition. As Philip S. Foner commented, “Since Congress never bothered to reply, the Massachusetts legislature could console itself with having acted in the nation’s interest by refusing to enact an abolition law” (351).
It was not until eleven years later, when slavery was less of a propagandistic concern, that Massachusetts ended slavery by legislative action. In 1788, spurred by the kidnapping of three black Bostonians subsequently sold into slavery in Martinique, Hall initiated a protesting petition, this time accompanied by another petition from Boston’s church leadership that argued for both an end to the slave trade and protection of Boston’s black population. The resulting legislation outlawing slavery in Massachusetts concluded a colonial and state history of delay on the subject. John Adams blamed the delay on white laborers fearing the competition of black workers (P. Foner 354), although Adams was clearly part of the revolutionary cadre that had been successful in keeping even the discussion of abolition off the patriot agenda until the Revolution was well commenced.
As Boston’s black colonists turned to petitions to catch the eye and sympathy of Boston leaders, one black American had already captured attention on both sides of the Atlantic. Phillis Wheatley, however, had no more success in breaking down patriot barriers than the petitioners. In 1770 her “An Elegaic Poem to George Whitefield” was put forward in the antislavery campaign to counter the argument of inborn racial differences that was so seldom discussed publicly. Indeed, the Boston broadside of the poem prominently displayed her name, “Phillis—a Negro” in type larger that the subject of the poem. The second edition (although not the first) of her 1773 book of collected poems, published in London, included the testament from the colony’s governor and councilors that she was both a Negro and composer of the work (W. Robinson 15).
The Whitefield elegy, the first publication of her public career, came at the hands of Boston printers known for their Tory associations, most prominently, Ezekiel Russell, less so, John Boyle, who was nonetheless copublisher of the loyalist The Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News Letter (Thomas 230). Whether by accident or design, this established an ongoing association between Wheatley and the Tory press. The 1772 advertisements for a public subscription to her first proposed book of poems was made in the Boston Censor (BC 2/29; 3/14; 4/18/72) and the Boston Post-Boy (BPB 4/1/73); a subsequent proposal for the book’s publication in London was made in the News-Letter and the Post-Boy (BNL 4/29/73; BPB 4/16/73); her “Farewell to America” poem was published in the News-Letter (4/22/73); and both newspapers published accounts of her trip to London (BNL 5/6/73; BPB 5/10/73) and the return of the “extraordinary Poetic Genius” (BNL 9/16/73; BPB 9/20/73). The Post-Boy published a letter lauding her abilities (BPB 3/21/74), and Ezekiel Russell used her famous image for his 1782 almanac (A3). Meantime, her book was published in London, her poetry in British magazines, and she became a colonial celebrity even before her collection had been published in the colonies. Benjamin Rush referenced her abilities in a footnote in his 1773 antislavery pamphlet (Rush 2n); Richard Nisbet referenced her, negatively, in his response to Rush (Nisbet 17). A Boston satirist made Wheatley the subject of attack (IC 1/29/78).
Through it all the Boston Gazette was mute, although not so the Boston Evening-Post or the Massachusetts Spy. And outside of Boston, the Whitefield poem extended her reputation. But in Philadelphia, the Tory association was furthered when her poems were published by Joseph Crukshank, the Quaker printer of most of the city’s antislavery pamphlets; still, it should be noted that William Goddard, later the most ardent of patriots, also published the Whitefield poem, as did Solomon Southwick in Newport, Rhode Island (W. Robinson 17–19).
What can explain the Gazette’s silence on this colonial phenomenon? Like Crispus Attucks, Wheatley was destined to play no role in approved revolutionary rhetoric. Adams and Edes’s refusal to acknowledge Wheatley was not out of character for the newspaper that had confused Attucks’s racial identity and misinformed readers about the Somerset decision. But it also represented the difficulty posed by the American-English connections of religious reform movements that would most affect Quaker antislavery activities.
Like the Quakers, although to a less extent, George Whitefield had established an English-American binary for evangelical Congregationalism, and Phillis Wheatley was one casualty. Influenced by her mistress, Susanna Wheatley, Phillis Wheatley was a pious follower of the New Divinity strain of Congregationalism represented by Samuel Hopkins. She was also part of the Anglo-American evangelical circle that swirled around Whitefield, which included the countess of Huntingdon and the earl of Dartmouth, both of whom became Wheatley supporters. Wheatley’s admiring tribute to the earl of Dartmouth when he was named secretary of state for the American colonies in August of 1772 was not an act to endear her to the patriots under any circumstance perhaps but was particularly “insurrectionary,” in Betsy Erkkila’s analysis, because of its direct use of her own slave experience (Erkkila 234).
Perhaps more disturbing, however, was the Wheatley connection to the British humanitarian John Thorton, a philanthropist who supported Christianization efforts through the auspices of the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Apart from any patriot desire to repress antislavery activity, her connection by way of Thorton to the feared and despised S.P.G. was sufficient reason to ignore her work and discourage its colonial dissemination.
Wheatley’s publication history in the Tory press bears some resemblance to that of her predecessor, Briton Hammon, whose work was published by Green and Russell in 1760. Although he was born a slave in Boston, Hammon’s narrative of his subsequent adventures in the West Indies and London did not reference race, constructed instead along the lines of the familiar and popular tradition established by Mary Rowlandson in her story of Indian capture. Hammon’s race was not a secret, and, indeed, the attachment “by a Negro” suggests race was a conscious element (Hammon). But printers Green and Russell had long-lived connections to the evangelical tradition and its antislavery stance. Not surprisingly, Hammon was connected, like Wheatley, to the countess of Huntingdon and the British antislavery circle. While it may seem ironical that the first narrative of a black American writer was in the frame of an Indian captivity tale, Hammon’s choice to tell his story this way might be considered an early strategy to include black colonists under the powerful mythological umbrella of the genre as described by John Sekora and provide an alternative to the rhetorical choices of the Quaker antislavery writers. By 1760, however, Adams was already a political writer, the Boston Gazette already a vehicle of demonstrated political power, and Hammon’s connection to the countess of Huntingdon and its perceived connections to the S.P.G. was no more attractive at that time than it would be fourteen years later.
One scholar believes it was Wheatley herself, as a “sagacious business woman,” who called off the Boston publication of a volume of her poems for the chance to make more money in England (Rawley 676). Another scholar argues that the move to seek British publication came after the book was rejected for “racist reasons,” although the letter he cites seems to suggest it was Wheatley’s Boston friends who wanted a London publication (Robinson 13). The collection was available in Boston in 1774 and sold by the Loyalist booksellers Cox and Berry, who advertised the book in the Tory newspaper (MG&BPB 7/4/74). By this time, any window that may have allowed Wheatley to become a spokeswoman for indigenous antislavery had closed. The sale of the book by Cox and Berry; the publications of her poems by nonpatriot printers; the attention she received in colonial loyalist publications; the much-heralded London publication and the resulting reviews in British magazines; the connection with Wheatley’s admirer, the countess of Hungtingdon; and Wheatley’s connection, even tenuously, to the S.P.G all worked to confine Wheatley to the British, rather than American, antislavery movement.
For such reasons, antislavery discussion in the 1770s remained primarily in European hands in Boston and throughout the colonies. Periodically, however, Wheatley’s succinct quatrains were reprinted in newspapers, as “By a Negro,” in the New-London Gazette.
O mighty God! let conscience seize the mind
Of inconsistent man, who wish to find
A partial god to vindicate their cause
And plead their freedom while they break its laws.
(NLG 5/1/72)
Boston’s antislavery activity of 1773 prompted revisions of two already-published Boston antislavery pamphlets, both written by British immigrants, the first being the merchant James Swan’s 1772 work. Swan called the work a “sermon,” noting that he believed himself called upon to write it upon his arrival in America. The pamphlet argued on religious, economic, and moral grounds but concluded with some rather specific recommendations for the ending of the slave trade.
How a “sermon” at the hands of a newly arrived British merchant was received by the colony legislature is unknown, but clearly more of a crowd pleaser was that of another “British Bostonian,” as he signed himself. John Allen published a best-selling pamphlet as a result of the popular reception given his sermon as a visiting preacher at Boston’s Second Baptist Church (Bumstead and Clark). Allen arrived from Great Britain shortly after the Gaspee incident, when Rhode Islanders set fire to a British revenue cutter run aground as it was chasing a colonial ship suspected of carrying smuggled cargo. Patriots sought to rekindle a slumping patriot flame by turning the incident into a new propaganda thrust. Allen’s sermon used the Rhode Island action as a call for the recognition of America’s “blood bought… native laws.” They were as much rights, he said in what was possibly a Somerset reference, as the “air they breath in or… the light in the morning when the sun rises.” In 1773, for its fourth reprinting, Allen added antislavery to the polemic because, he said, the antislavery piece had been turned down when offered individually to an unnamed newspaper (Allen 1).
Once it included the antislavery addendum, the subsequent printing history of Allen’s pamphlet evidences how the patriot fold and its printing-house followers distanced themselves from antislavery discussion. Kneeland and Davis were probably delighted to publish the first two editions of Allen’s original Oration Upon Liberty. Its accessible, popular style and patriotic theme helped promote a brisk sale—not to be eschewed by the struggling firm just established by Samuel Kneeland’s son, Daniel (Thomas 146). Allen, as a Baptist, represented a sect that had not previously committed itself to the revolutionary column. When the antislavery remarks were appended, the pamphlet— no matter its previous popularity, its Baptist connections, or the economic straits of Kneeland and Davis—found publication only in the shop of Ezekiel Russell. Its fifth edition fared slightly better, at the hands of Ebenezer Watson in Hartford, printer of many antislavery works and a patriot of moderate stripe. A sixth appeared in Wilmington, Delaware, from the shop of Irishman James Adams without the addendum.
In his next pamphlet, Allen attempted to meld the patriot ideology and a call for the freedom of slaves into one work. Despite its ostensible patriot theme, it concluded with a diatribe aimed at patriot leaders. “Blush ye pretended votaries for freedom! yet trifling Patriots! who are making a vain parade of being the advocates for the liberties of mankind who are thus making a mockery of your profession, by trampling on the sacred natural rights and privileges of the Africans; for while you are fasting, praying, non-importing, remonstrating, resolving, and pleading for a restoration of your charter rights, you are at the same time continuing this lawless, cruel, inhuman, and abominable practice of restraining your fellow creatures” (27).
No one clamored for this printing contract; once again, Allen’s antislavery work ended up in the shop of Ezekiel Russell, now seeking a fresh start in Salem. There were no republications. Russell made several more moves but never became an official loyalist and returned to Boston after the war to print ballads that were sold by peddlers (Thomas 153).
Allen disappeared from the revolutionary scene. Present-day scholars wonder how to reconcile the “almost total lack of connection between Allen and the Revolutionary leaders with the incontrovertible fact that the Oration Upon Liberty was one of the most popular pamphlets of the prewar period” (Bumstead and Clark 560). Revolutionary leaders would not have appreciated Allen’s murky past, but there clearly was no place for his revolutionary rhetoric when it was tied to antislavery.
Thus, antislavery received limited public hearing in Boston, the most influential of all colonial cities in establishing the revolutionary rhetoric. Once removed from Boston, antislavery discussion largely lost the voices of the slaves themselves. Also lost were writers like Appleton, Swan, and Allen, who were exploring antislavery discussion in ways that addressed secular concerns. Their place was primarily filled by religious reformers whose rhetoric failed in its efforts to make antislavery a revolutionary issue.
Philadelphia’s Anthony Benezet established Quaker themes in a 1767 pamphlet, a “short representation” that combined the cult of sensibility with an appeal to natural law by quotations from dozens of learned and legal references (Benezet, Caution). But it was in 1771 that another Benezet “pamphlet” (a loose term to accommodate this 153-page publication) firmly established the major Quaker theme of African innocence. Quoting early explorer Francis Moore, Benezet wrote that Africa “‘abounds with grains and fruits, cattle, poultry, etc. The earth yields all the year a fresh supply of food: Few clothes are requisite and little art necessary in making them.’” Marriage was sacred in this new world in which no corrupting serpent appeared until the arrival of the European. The Eden theme was clearly made. “‘The whole revived in my mind the idea of our first parents, and I seemed to contemplate the world in its primitive state.’”
Africa in this state of nature was compared to the capture of the natives, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the cruelty of the auction block. “Mothers are seen hanging over their daughters, bedewing their naked breasts with tears, and daughters clinging to their parents, not knowing what new stage of distress must follow their separation, or whether they shall ever meet again. If they will not separate as ready as their masters think proper, the Whipper is called for, and the lash is exercised” (Benezet, Some 16, 128).
Soon after this publication, Benezet’s Quaker printer, Joseph Crukshank, printed an antislavery tract by Methodist John Wesley that reinforced the theme of African innocence. “Guinea… far from being an horrid, dreary, barren country, is one of the most fruitfel, as well as one of the most pleasant countries in the known world.” Until the Europeans debauched the “pleasant contries,” there “were seldom any wars, but were in general quiet and peaceable. But the white man taught them drunkenness and avarice, and then hired them to fell one another” (Wesley 8, 17).
The theme of African innocence found further support in the argument of natural rights as espoused by John Locke. Whatever his real influence, Locke was certainly the most acknowledged philosophical influence of his time and, next to the Bible, may have been the most-quoted authority in colonial political writing. As antislavery writers unendingly pointed out, Locke, writing in Two Treatises on Government, pronounced that natural law entitled all men to life, liberty, and protection of property, including property in self as a right of birth. But proslavery writers could also turn to Locke. In the same work, in a passage intended to indicate opposition to slaveholding, Locke argued bondage could be justified on one basis—the capture of men in a “just war,” that is, not slave-catching expeditions, in which perpetual slavery was the only choice over certain death.
Juxtaposing European corruption to the picture of African innocence, Quaker antislavery writers claimed that Europeans had promoted African wars merely for the capture of slaves. Since the capture of men was the intrinsic purpose of such wars, the offer of slavery as an escape from death did not satisfy Locke’s ground rules. “Did Sir John Hawkins, and many others seize upon men, women, and children, who were at peace in their fields or houses, merely to save them from death?” Wesley asked. “Was it to save them from death, that they knocked out the brains of those they could not bring away?” (Wesley 37).
The New Jersey Quaker, David Cooper, another of Crukshank’s clients, carried European culpability to American shores. Although arguing a religious view, Cooper was typical of all antislavery writers in his refusal to excuse Americans from responsibility, even on the basis that slavery was an accepted practice by the African. “Every one of those unfortunate men who are pretended to be slaves has a right to be declared free, for he never lost his liberty; he could not lose it; his prince had no power to dispose of him. This right he carried around with him, and is entitled every where to get it” (Cooper 8). White colonial Americans, regardless of whether they had not participated in the original purchase, could not escape the guilt by blaming the practice on its British antecedents. In fact, the culpability of Americans was emphasized by the American system of slavery. Benezet charged that bondage in the South “was more oppressive than the most of us in the northern colonies have had an opportunity of forming any idea of” (Benezet, Some 6). Sharp was most critical. The treatment of slaves in Virginia was as barbarous as in Jamaica and in Barbados. He was appalled that escaped slaves were pursued as a matter of public policy (Benezet, Some 85).
No pamphleteer addressed American guilt as dramatically as Wesley. To plantation owners, he cried: “You therefore are guilty, yea principally guilty, of all these frauds, robberies and murders… the blood of all these wretches, who died before their time… lies upon your head” (Wesley 52).
Thus, the philosophy of natural rights, already powerful, was coupled with the lost Eden-like innocence of the African. When Africa was pictured as the Garden, the black family as the original inhabitants, and the European as the despoiler and serpent, enormous visual and religious imagery was added to philosophical theory.
In this Quaker meld of sensibility, the Golden Rule, and natural law, the role of freed slaves in a contemporary society received little attention. But William Dillwyn, a former pupil of Benezet, addressed the practical concern of support for the freed bondsman and undoubtedly would have played a larger role in the rhetoric of antislavery had he not settled in England and adopted the British antislavery movement as his primary objective.
By virtue of Benezet’s influence, however, Philadelphia produced the antislavery pamphlet of the colonial period that most approached the stature of The Selling of Joseph. Benjamin Rush’s An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America upon Slave-Keeping was published in 1773 from the shop of the patriot John Dunlap rather than Crukshank’s Quaker press. At least three other publishing houses printed it, although Dunlap was the only patriot printer to do so. It was the only pamphlet of the period other than Tom Paine’s Common Sense that was to be reprinted in a colonial newspaper (CC 3/30; 4/6; 5/4; 5/11/73).
It was not a pamphlet that sprang spontaneously from the pen of this peripatetic figure of revolutionary America. Although Rush was born and raised a Presbyterian, his family came from Quaker stock, and Quakers, including Benezet, were among his wide range of friends (Essig 22–24). In 1773, with a bill calling for the prohibition of the slave trade before the Pennsylvania General Assembly, Benezet asked him to write the pamphlet to gain support of the Presbyterian members of the assembly. The resulting pamphlet and a second edition that defended the original work were Rush’s primary antislavery publications of the period. Indeed, Rush owned a slave himself at this time, a man he did not free until 1788, soon after he (along with Benjamin Franklin) joined the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Rush was not a member of the society when it was first formed in 1774, nor did he participate directly in efforts to obtain the passage of the Pennsylvania abolition law of 1780 (Hawke).
However, late in 1772, when asked by his friend Benezet to write the essay, Rush had been back from his medical studies in Edinburgh for less than three years. Not only was he fresh from the liberalizing Scottish Empiricist influences of that city but, according to a biographer, he carried a sense of personal guilt possibly connected to a sexual incident, which may have made the abolition movement as then defined particularly meaningful (Hawke 41). Those influences converged into a major statement that brought the many threads of the discussion into an American context.
Much of the essay had discernible roots in the Quaker rhetoric, yet Rush gave them his own flavor that showed sensitivity to an emerging American nationalism. His efficient summary of antislavery rhetoric suggested the arguments were well-known enough to need no further explication: to say that the black race descended from Canaan’s curse was “absurd”; free men were much more economically productive than slave labor; if God had permitted Jews to keep slaves in the time of the Old Testament, it was for reasons that were appropriate at the time; if planters really wanted to save the souls of Africans, they would allow them to read and write; and there could be no just war when Africans had been stolen.
From this detached précis, Rush moved to sensibility. In a passage that could have been written by Benezet, he called upon his readers to imagine West Indies slavery. “Behold one covered with stripes, into which melted wax is poured— another tied down to a block or a stake—a third suspended in the air by his thumbs—a fourth obliged to set or stand upon red hot iron—a fifth I cannot relate it. See here one without a limb, whose only crime to regain his Liberty— another led to a Gallows for eating a morsel of bread… a third famishing on a gibbet—a fourth, in a flame of Fire! — his shrieks pierce the very heavens— O! God! Where is thy Vengeance!—O! Humanity—Justice—Liberty—Religion!—Where, —where are ye fled?”
Rush’s solution for ending slavery was a call to end the slave trade by petitioning colonial assemblies. In the only reference to the Somerset case, Rush noted a united strategy of petition—another point that most Quaker writing failed to make—would be more successful than an effort based on “a late decision in favor of a Virginia slave, at Westminster-Hall.”
Despite its Quaker referents, the Rush pamphlet sought new paths. The picture of horrors that Rush painted was of the West Indies, not of the slave block in Philadelphia or a South Carolina plantation, and, unlike the British writers such as Sharp and Wesley, Rush did not equate the West Indies with American slavery. Nor did Rush explore the stolen-from-paradise theme. His emphasis was on the African, not the birthplace. Rush did not ignore the theme of guilt, concluding, indeed, that “national crimes require national punishments.” But he did not make America the carrier of debauchery. Instead, Rush called upon the American sense of mission as part of his antislavery argument: “Remember the eyes of all Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country, after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the Globe” (Rush, Address 3, 22–24, 28, 26).
Rush’s second antislavery tract was a response to the reaction of a former West Indian slave owner residing in Philadelphia. Richard Nisbet, in his own thirty-page pamphlet, argued that Negroes were “naturally inferior to whites.” Although Nisbet contended that West Indian slavery was not as heartless or as cruel as pictured by Rush and that slavery was economically necessary, his major affirmation of slavery was on the question of perceived racial differences. At a time when most proslavery argument was anchored in the Old Testament, Nisbet was unabashedly a writer who believed the white race was inherently superior to the black. “There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor ever any individual eminent in either action or speculation.” Africans, Nisbet charged, had produced no art, science, or product and had worshiped no Supreme Being. Moreover, “they seem utterly unacquainted with friendship, gratuity and every tie of the same kind,” he charged, dismissing the tears of slave-block separations as “high colouring.” Finally, the unstoppable tirade referred to the “stupidity of the natives” and charged that the example “of a negro girl writing a few silly poems,” presumably Phillis Wheatley, was insufficient proof that “blacks are not deficient in understanding” (Nisbet 15, 25).
In his rebuttal, Rush absolutely refused to accept the Nisbet thesis of black inferiority, claiming any differences were environmentally related, another new argument for the time most commonly associated with Scottish Presbyterian thought. Rush refused to admit natural-born inferiority, as if quite aware that any equivocation on this issue would doom the antislavery cause: “You have aimed to established Principles, which justify the most extensive and cruel Depredations which have been made by Conquerors and Tyrants” (By a Pennsylvanian [Rush] 52). Less heartrending rhetoric exists in this pamphlet than in the previous one. The essay was a carefully focused reply, addressed to Nisbet rather than the guilt of a nation, and called upon readers’ sense rather than sensibility.
The Rush-Nisbet exchange was important in the dialogue on slavery, because, as in the Appleton pamphlet, it illustrated that the discussion could be framed in new approaches, including one of racial difference that so seldom appeared in the colonial discussion.
That argument, however, or any others, was not to come again from the Rush pen. It was a period of financial difficulty for him, and it may be that his stand on slavery contributed to a sudden drop in his patients (Hawke 108). His financial losses turned out to be transitory when he turned his writing talents to more acceptable subjects in the patriot arsenal and to regional interests, including a decided switch to Pennsylvania conservatives Whigs. Such essays received ready publication in the Pennsylvania press that had eschewed publication of his antislavery works (PJ 12/22/73; 6/22/74; 5/21/76; 6/4/76; 6/11/76).
In the summer of 1774, with the Continental Congress scheduled to begin its business in the city in August, Dunlap published a lengthy pamphlet by Philadelphian Richard Wells ostensibly devoted to a discussion of nonimportation. Upon examination, the ostensible purpose of the pamphlet seems part of yet another strategy to find a national audience for antislavery. Appearing first as a series of newspaper essays in Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, the nonimportation discussion had already drawn attention, and, if we are to believe Dunlap’s introduction to the pamphlet, had established a clamor for reprints of the whole series. In the final segment of the newspaper series, however, early in August as delegates were arriving and settling in, Wells added antislavery to his discussion, which became part of the pamphlet. Not unaware of the intercolonial nature of his readers, Wells noted how the “noble, spirited, and virtuous Assembly of Virginia” had sought to end the slave trade only to have the bill disallowed by the British (R. Wells 83). Wells proposed that only the strength of intercolonial cooperation would make such British actions more difficult. The usual Quaker flourishes were generally missing in favor of the espousal of immediate and practical ways to eliminate slavery—the reduction of substantial bonds Pennsylvania and New Jersey required for the manumission of slaves, for one. Here was no dependence on British authority, he might have added if he had been less cognizant of giving political offense.
Other non-Quaker writers similarly honed their arguments on points of sense, avoiding the Quaker and New Divinity arguments of moral outrage and guilt. But no pamphlet more avoided sentimentality than a Swiftean satire of Nisbet’s work. The author made short work of John Woolman’s writings, “the dull productions of a visionary enthusiast,” recommended intractable slaves be forced to do their work with a doorpost nailed to their ears, and finally suggested that the bodies of those who died on the Middle Passage “might be cured in pickle” for future consumption. “I have never heard that their kind of meat is deemed unwholesome, but on the contrary, that the Cannibals are a hardy robust race of people” (Personal Slavery 3; Scherer).
Further evidence that the slavery dialogue could be conducted outside the sphere of moral outrage was illustrated in the publication of the Harvard College commencement debate of 1773 and published by the Bostonian John Boyle, partner of loyalist-leaning Joseph Russell. As published in A Forensic Debate, the interpretation of natural law was the point of debate between Theodore Parsons and Eliphalet Pearson, but perceived differences quickly became part of the discussion. Indeed, for the proslavery advocate, natural law was a smoke screen preventing the discussion of perceived racial difference. The African in his natural state was already in a slavery to the “tyrannizing power of lust and passion” and thus it was unnecessary to seek permission for enslavement, any more than it was necessary to seek permission from a “child, an idiot or a madman” as the character of an African was a compound of all three (Bruns 284). His opponent responded that if the principle of natural law “lies in the quality of the hair… I would advise every person, whose hair is inclined to deviate from a right line, to be upon his guard” (Bruns 284), a line of argument that may have been picked up from the Somerset discussion reprinted from English sources (VG-Purdie and Dixon 8/20/72).
Samuel Hopkins used the form of a debate for his pamphlet dedicated to the Continental Congress in 1776. His argument was made on familiar ground, although the wrath of God was not introduced until the final paragraphs. What was less familiar in his argument was his discussion of the role of race prejudice. Why, he asked, are we not affected by the misery of the slaves before our eyes? “The reason is obvious. It is because they are negroes, and fit for nothing but slaves, and we have been used to look at them in a mean contemptible light, and our education has filled us with strong prejudice against them, and led us to consider them, not as our breathren [sic], or in any degree on a level with us, but as quite another species of animal, made only to serve us and our children, and as happy in bondage as in other state.” The answer, he concluded, was to address the underlying prejudice. “If we could only divest ourselves of these strong prejudices which have insensibly fixed on our minds… we begin to feel towards them as we should towards our children and neighbors” (Hopkins 34).
Hopkins, even as an antislavery proponent who could synthesize New Divinity and Quaker traditions, was unable to divert the stream of Quaker emotion that called for an end to slavery on the basis of empathetic feeling. As the antislavery movement continued to base itself upon feeling into the next century, proslavery advocates found they could equally support their views by the same token, the generous feelings engendered, for example, by beneficent paternalism. What Hopkins and other congregationalists shared with the Quakers, however, was the characteristic that was most damaging to the success of the antislavery position. Both sects were out of step with a revolutionary movement that refused to carry the burden of guilt. The revolutionary generation favored a birth image of innocence rising from corruption. This way of thinking was so firmly ensconced by 1775 that the Boston selectman authorized the republication of John Mein’s letters to London’s Public Ledger in which he ridiculed the hypocrisy of revolutionary ideology. Sure of the patriots’ sense of innocence betrayed, the selectmen assumed Mein’s arguments would be considered outrageous enough to enrage colonial readers. That Mein’s attacks included the continuance of slavery as an example of colonial hypocrisy was apparently not viewed as carrying sufficient weight to need censorship ([Mein]).
Nor is it surprising that the ever-increasing numbers of newspapers aligned with the patriots were not eager to carry the pamphlet war into newspapers that were expected to promote a new nation. Nonetheless, antislavery writers persisted, utilizing the distributive system offered by the colonial newspapers in their campaign that sought expurgation for the shame and guilt of slave keeping.