The Quaker Ethic and the Antislavery International

The Quakers, more than any other religious group, had long expressed misgivings over the possible sinfulness of buying and selling men. During the first half of the eighteenth century, however, they had been content to issue cautionary warnings about the African slave trade; to exhort Quaker masters to treat their black servants with Christian charity; and to ignore or disown the few deviants, like Benjamin Lay, who shrilly proclaimed that “all slave-keepers” were “apostates.” The Quaker commitment to bear collective testimony against slavery came surprisingly late and coincided with the publication of secular antislavery arguments from jurists, philosophers, moralists, and men of letters.1

Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Religious studies

• Manumission Practices and the Negotiation of Labor

  Open Access•M Dantas, Mariana L R Dantas•Black Townsmen•2008

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