The Sewall-Saffin Dialogue on Slavery
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3598533 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lawrence W Towner (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1964 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 40 |
| Publication date | 1964-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1923355 |
| OpenAlex | W2320170801 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
B ) Y I700, the year Samuel Sewall published his now famous attack on slavery, Selling of Josepih, Negroes had been coming to Massachusetts New Englanders had been engaged in the slave trade for sixty or seventy years. Although the questions of when Negroes were enslaved in New England why they were made slaves instead of being treated as indentured servants are still troubling historians, there can be no question that by the end of the century Negro slavery had taken root there. morality of the slave trade probably of slavery itself had become a public issue as early as i645,1 but it was not until after the monopoly of the Royal African Company was broken, in i696, that enough Negroes were living in the colony to make them the subject of published controversy. Samuel Sewall's contribution to this dialogue has often been considered the beginning of the eighteenth-century antislavery movement in Massachusetts. An alternative view is that it was a seventeenth-century Puritan response to a sudden increase in the slave population, particularly in Boston, to a growing awareness that slavery was becoming important was likely to become more so. The Numerousness of Slaves at this day in the Province, Sewall wrote, and the Uneasiness of them under their Slavery, hath put many upon thinking whether the Foundation of it be firmly well laid; so as to sustain the Vast Weight that is built upon it. 2 When the brief dialogue was over between Sewall his antagonist, John Saffin, the proslavery argument seemed to have had the best of it, and, indeed, within five years New England's leading divine had put his seal of approval on the institution. way was cleared for slavery to flourish so far as the limits of Massachusetts's need for unskilled labor would permit. For some time before i700, Sewall had been troubled by the existence
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| Citations per year | 0.38 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2005 - 2025 (21) |
| Highly cited | No |