The Slave's Cause

A History of Abolition

Manisha Sinha

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780300182088
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

"Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s... a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America."— Florida Courier Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave's cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. "A full history of the men and women who truly made us free."—Ira Berlin, The New York Times Book Review "A stunning new history of abolitionism... [Sinha] plugs abolitionism back into the history of anticapitalist protest."— The Atlantic "Will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era."— The Wall Street Journal "A powerfully unfamiliar look at the struggle to end slavery in the United States...as multifaceted as the movement it chronicles."— The Boston Globe

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 institutio...