Chapter VIII: Abolition and Emancipation of Slavery
8. Introduction
8.3 Fundamental Human Rights and Natural Law
An analysis of the fore-goings clearly shows that the abolition movements were inclined not only to emancipate the slaves but also to grant them equal rights and especially the right to liberty because liberty according to the abolitionist was a gift of God which is not at the disposal of anybody and therefore, no slave can dispose of it by selling himself into slavery, nor could anybody lawfully deprive anyone else of their liberty by force.
707 Bradshaw, Thomas, The Slave Trade Inconsistent with Reason and Religion, 1788, p. 13.
708 Cowper, William, The Task, 1784, book 2.
709 Id. Charity, 1782.
710 Davis, D. B., Slavery and Human Progress, 1984, pp. 130-136.
711 Caretta, V., (ed.) Unchained Voices: An Anthropology of Black Authors in the English Speaking World of the 18th Century, University of Kentucky Press, 1996.
712 Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, Caretta, V., (ed.), Penguin 2003, pp. 334, 331-32.
The claim of the slave owners that Africans as a result of slavery were now the property of Europeans was without foundation or justification in natural law and consequently constituted a violation of natural rights. “Liberty”, wrote John Wesley “is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air. And no human can deprive him of that right, which he derives from the law of nature”.713 The keeping of a human being as a slave was a seeming contradiction to 18th century Britons and Americans who saw themselves as free people living in an enlightened age.714 In the words of the centenary of the Glorious Revolution in 1788, there is a glaring contradiction between the slave trade and Britain’s boasted love of liberty and as Hannah More put it: “Shall Britain, where the sole of freedom reigns, forge changes for others she herself disdains?715 For abolitionists like Jonathan Edwards Jr., Samuel Hopkins and Benjamin Rush, slavery was incompatible with the declaration of independence, which stated inter alia that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.
In the journey to bring about the end of slavery and slave trade, the abolitionists made an analogy of the Exodus in Israel’s history and added that it revealed divine opposition to any form of human oppression and bondage.716 The African slaves saw America as a place of Egyptian bondage, and sang about deliverance in their spirituals — one historian wrote that “No single symbol captures more clearly the distinctiveness of Afro-American Christianity than the Symbol of Exodus”.717 The African American, Phillis Wheatley wrote: “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians, I will assert that the same principle lives in us.”718 Abolitionists also quoted Proverbs chapter 14 verse 31 and Job chapter 30 verse 25 to buttress their points for abolitionism 719 but above all, they quoted the mission statement of Jesus Christ himself, taken it as the text for antislavery sermons:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to
713 Wesley, John, Thoughts upon Slavery, 1774, p. 27.
714 Bradburn, S., An Address, 1792, p. 6.
715 More, H., Slavery, 1788, p.18.
716 Coffey, John, The Abolition of the Slave Trade: Christian Conscience and Political Action, Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2006, available at http://www.jubilee-centre.org/document.php?id=51.
717 Raboteau, A., African Americans, Exodus and the new Israel, in Hackett, D. G., (ed.), Religion and American Culture, Routledge, 1995, p. 81.
718 Gaustad, E. S. & Noll, M. A., (ed.), A Documentary History of Religion in America to 1877, Eerdmans, 2003, pp. 224-25.
719 Equiano, O., The Interesting Narrative, 2003, pp. 330, 334-335, 340.
the poor…to preach deliverance to the captives…to set at liberty them that are bruised” (St.
Luke 10:18).720 The emancipation of slaves, they argued, was on the agenda of Jesus, and an outworking of his Gospel of the Kingdom. The British philosopher Francis Hutcheson brought ethical and moral arguments for the abolition of slavery and postulated that moral action should increase human well-being, producing “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”.721 The notion of “benevolence” was promoted by Latitudinarian theologians, but before long Evangelicals too adopted the new language.722 The Calvinist philosopher and revivalist, Jonathan Edwards, presented “benevolence” as a key element of “true virtue”, and his followers came to see slave-owning as incompatible with
“disinterested benevolence”.723 Granville Sharp declared that “The glorious system of the gospel destroys all narrow, national partiality; and makes us citizens of the world, by obliging us to profess universal benevolence; but more especially, we are bound as Christians to commiserate and assist to the utmost of our power all persons in distress and captivity”.724 The Baptist, James Dore, wrote that Christianity was “a religion calculated to inspire universal benevolence by teaching us that all mankind are our Brethren and that they stand in the same common relation to God, the universal Parent…it is calculated for general utility”.725 If this was classical Enlightenment language, it was linked to the biblical concept of “mercy”. “That slave-holding is utterly inconsistent with Mercy”, wrote Wesley,
“is almost too plain to need a proof”.726 In Hannah More’s poem on slavery, the cherub
“Mercy” descends softly to shed “celestial dew” on “feeling hearts” until “every beast the soft contagion feels”.727
The cult of sensibility blended with Christian values helped to create a humanitarian ethos (see The Gospel according to St. Matthew chapter 7 verse 12). The Baptist preacher, Abraham Booth pictured himself, his family and thousands of his fellow countrymen “kidnapped, bought and sold into a state of cruel slavery”. He was left with a sense of outrage.728
720 The Gospel according to St. Luke chapter 10 verse 18
721
The Gospel according to Saint Luke chapter 10 verse 18
722 Davis, D. B., The Problem of Slavery in Western Thought, Cornell University Press, 1966, chaps. 11-12.
723 Minkema, K. and Stout, H., “The Edwardsean Tradition and Antebellum Slavery”, Journal of American History, 92, 2005, pp. 47-74.
724 Sharp, Granville, An Essay on Slavery, 1773, pp. 22-23.
725 Dore, James, A Sermon on the African Slave Trade. 1788, pp. 34-35.
726 Wesley, J., Thoughts upon Slavery, 1774, p. 18.
727 More, H., Slavery, 1788, p. 19
728 Booth, Abraham, Commerce in the Human Species, 1792, p. 28.
The Quaker Benjamin Lay even kidnapped a child (temporarily) from its slave-owning parents to help them see the distress their practice caused! Thinking about the Golden Rule required people to consider how their actions impacted on others, including African slaves on the other side of the Atlantic.729 The Methodist, Samuel Bradburn, observed to his horror that though he had “always abhorred slavery in every shape”, he had been “in some degree accessory to the Bondage, Torture and Death of myriads of human beings by assisting to consume the produce of their labour, their tears and their blood!” He asked God’s pardon and hoped that by boycotting sugar he could “make some restitution for my former want of attention to my duty in this respect”.730 The emotion that attended the disgust of slavery and slave trade was so loud that Wesley prayed for the deliverance of the Africans’ souls and emancipation “Oh burst thou all their chains in sunder”, more especially the chains of their sins; Thou Saviour of all, make them free that they may be free indeed”.731 Wesley and others knew that slave owners deprived the dissemination of the gospel to their slaves because of the fear that conversion to Christianity would undermine their slavery. The rise of antislavery movement was also traceable to the growth of converted Africans to Christianity. This is because in the 18th-century Africans and Europeans were involved collectively in the antislavery activism. However in the 19th -century, the white Evangelicals in the American South began to soft-peddle the social ramification of the gospel. 732