 This is an important contribution to the history of women philosophers. Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl has not been analysed philosophically before, and it is clear that such an analysis was both needed and fruitful. Coffee shows how Incidents makes philosophical points about how freedom, though equally desirable for all, is pursued differently by the enslaved and in particular by enslaved women than it is by white men. Coffee offers an excellent analysis of the work, its context and philosophical relevance. This element is available to download for free until 17 November.
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Huaping Lu-Adler and Julia Jorati are hosting a series of talks on 'Slavery and Early Modern Philosophy'. The talks are on zoom, but they are also posting the recordings here.
The first two talks, which I've just listened to were Carrie Shanafelt, Yeshiva University, “National Debt, Nationalized Complicity: Cugoano and Bentham on Political Economy” and Iziah Topete, Boston College, “From Experience to Concept: Equiano on Equality” Both are super clear and interesting, and the quality of the recordings is excellent, so it won't make your head ache to listen to them. I was particularly pleased to see that Topete, who has already published excellent work on Cuguano (see, for instance his Cugoano on Redressing Slavery: The Demands of Liberty, in Journal of Modern Philosophy, 2025), is now working on Equiano. I look forward to reading more about it.
Activists in Bristol have been working hard at obtaining reparations for the heirs of the city’s victims during its time as the English hub of the slave trade. While researching traces of an abolitionist history in the city, and places I might visit when I go there next month, I came across a 1788 poem by the Bristol poet Ann Yearsley, who was a milkmaid in Bristol. And then I looked at the poem this was supposedly responding to, by Hannah More, a ‘bluestocking’, and educator, also from Bristol, who was Yearsley’s patron for a few months. More’s poem had been commissioned by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Yearsley’s poem came out two months later. More’s Slavery begins by appealing to the universal and abstract value of liberty – she calls it ‘Bright intellectual Sun!’ – claiming that it makes no sense for it to shine only on part of the world. She then proceeds to write a long passage distinguishing between ‘sober’ freedom and ‘mad liberty.’ One gets the feeling she cares more about avoiding the excesses of republican liberty or licence, than she does decrying the fate of the enslaved. Thee only, sober Goddess! I attest, Yearsley’s poem is different. Whereas More’s poem has an official purpose – it is commissioned by SEAST to address the parliament – Yearsley is writing off her own bat, even more so as she is no longer, by then, under More’s patronage. Yearsley is taking it upon herself to address those who are directly involved in the slage trade: the city of Bristol, and in particular the ship owners, the merchants, slave-ship captains and their crews. And Yearsley is not appealing to cold reason, pleading with her readers to consider the matter in the abstract. She is losing it completely. As one should. Yearsley’s appeal to emotion is in part a device to maintain her carefully curated image as the ‘natural genius’ poet, and it is giving in to the prejudice that Africans are prone to be guided by emotions rather than reason: Like More, Yearsley denies African slaves full access to language and creative expression. For example, the grief of Luco’s family is felt rather than voiced; the poet articulates their grief for them. And similarly for Luco, “words / Were no relief, he stood in silent woe” (392); the poet articulates his despair for him. For the most part, Yearsley’s characters are mute. (Cairnie, J. (2005). The Ambivalence of Ann Yearsley: Laboring and Writing, Submission and Resistance. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 27(4), 353–364, 361). I sort of disagree with this interpretation – from a place of deep ignorance, I must add. If Yearsley were to hear the words of Luco’s loved ones, she would not understand them. She is putting the English language and linguistic customs into the mouths of distant others she does not know – unlike Benn did, making Oroonoko sound like an English aristocrat. Nor is she, as Olympe de Gouges did, trying to guess at what the ‘natural’ language of the Africans would be. Instead she is portraying them as silent, as people who can be seen from a distance, but not heard, distant silhouettes, whose emotions can be perceived through their body language, as anyone else’s could (not that body language is not also culturally coded, of course). Yearsley’s poem is interesting because it shows anger, her anger at the Christians who utter meaningless ‘vaporous sighs’ at church and don’t bat an eyelid at the trafficking and enslaving of fellow beings. But she is also looking for causes and solutions. For one thing, she blames social habits: ‘Custom, Law, Ye blessings, and ye curses of mankind, What evils do ye cause?’ Instead she calls for social love Oh, social love, Social love is a form of wide-spread sympathy. The social customs she criticises are the habits brought on by bad laws and practices. But she’s not exculpating those who are the product of these customs. She calls them ‘selfish Christians’, attacks them for their brutality and savagery. She can help fix the fault in society, but she won’t forgive. Other white abolitionists have expressed anger at the slave trade and slavery. But what’s unusual about Yearsley is the particularity of her emotions. She does not call on one part of humanity to allow the other part to enjoy the same benefits they do. She yells at the people of Bristol for the harm they have done to individuals she names – though fictional, and inspired by Benn’s Oroonoko – Luco, a young man kidnapped from Africa, who is transported and sold and forced to work on a plantation, then one day is hit by the overseer, Gorgon, whips him in the face, whereupon Luco strikes him with his hoe, and kills him. Luco tries to drown himself in the sea, but he is fished out and condemned to death by roasting, with a slow fire to make the torture last longer. Back home his fiancée, Incilanda, his mother, his father, his little brothers, wonder where he is, and pine for him. The story is not melodramatic, unlike Benn’s Oroonoko, or Gouges’ Zamore and Mirza. A young man is kidnapped, accidentally commits murder in self-defence and is tortured to death. His loved ones wait for him. What is shocking about the story is the thought that it could happen to anyone, at anytime. That it did happen to many, as long as they were black. So she’s not appealing to universal reason, or even the highest commands of religion, but bringing the debate down to earth, enjoining the Bristol tradesmen to sell their own wives and children. She is seeing the evil, in the way that many of her contemporaries didn’t really, blinded by the need to put religion or universal reason before the realities of the enslaved’s lives. And Yearsley tells us that she can see what they can’t, asking the people of Bristol not to ‘nor deem Lactilla's soul Lessen'd by distance’ – she can see the evil even it happens far away. There are, nonetheless, signs of racist prejudice in the poem. Cairnie (360) notes that: A typical emotive device in abolitionist texts of this period is the depiction of slavery Slavery destroyed not just families, but entire communities, countries, and even a continent which are still struggling from the aftermath of the impact of slavery and colonization. If one were to name the main reason for Haiti’s current struggles, the fact that the island had to pay reparations to the French government for ending slavery is probably more salient than the breaking up of families – though of course that was huge part of what the island’s enslaved suffered. But, Cairnie goes on to explain that Yearsley’s take of the broken families theme is different from the usual one, because she makes the family central to the trader as well as to the enslaved: What is unique about Yearsley’s poem is that she situates both her protagonist, the African slave Luco, and her target audience, British slave traders, in families. It is on the basis of domestic identification that Yearsley hopes to influence the opinions and curb the activities of the slave traders. She forces the traders to empathize across race and class differences and to imagine what it must be like to have one’s family sold into slavery. (Cairnie, 360) This is the part of the poem where Yearsley’s anger reaches its peak: she is trying to frighten the slave trader, by forcing them to see what it would be like to put their own family on the block, next to Luco: Away, thou seller of mankind! Bring on This passage shows her scorn for the trader, who is easily frightened – he ‘starts’ – by the words of a poet, when he commits such atrocities on others as a matter of course. But she is also helping him locate the source of sympathy, his ‘heart-strings’ which he will need in order to understand that what he does is wrong.
[Note that I am using ‘he’, throughout, to denote the trader, as most traders in Bristol at that time were men, and Yearsley certainly assumes so – she admonishes them to sell their wives, not their husbands. There is also a tendency to assume that all slaves were men, which could have been the result of seeing the slave population in Bristol – mostly men working as sailors. But this is worth noting as an early version of the fallacy that ‘all women are white and all black people are men’] More, Hannah. 1788. On Slavery, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51885/slavery Yearsley, Ann, 1788. A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson. https://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/yearsley1.htm Willful hermeneutical ignorance, according to Gaile Pohlhaus is: ‘refusing to learn to use epistemic resources developed from marginalized situatedness.’ ((2012). Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of “Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance.” Hypatia, 27(4), 715–735, 722) ‘I have often wondered how English people can go out into the West Indies and act in such a beastly manner. But when they go to the West Indies, they forget God and all feeling of shame, I think, since they can see and do such things. They tie up slaves like hogs-moor*them up like cattle, and they lick them, so as hogs, or cattle, or horses never were flogged; -and yet they come home and say, and make some good people believe, that slaves don't want to get out of slavery. But they put a cloak about the truth. It is not so. All slaves want to be free-to be free is very sweet. I will say the truth to English people who may read this history that my good friend, Miss S- is now writing down for me. I have been a slave myself—I know what slaves feel-I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery-that they don't want to be free-that man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so. I never heard a Buckra man say so, till I heard tell of it in England.’ 23 Who were the English people who, according to Prince, thought slavery was a happy condition? One of them was Anna Maria Falconbridge, the wife of an operative of SEAST. The Falconbridge couple had been part of the first two voyages to Sierra Leone, where Clarkson and Sharp wanted to create a colony for the previously enslaved people who were languishing in London. The project was very badly managed, and Falconbridge died there, leaving his wife to team up with a local slave owner. Having been less than enthusiastic about her husband’s anti-slavery views (and about her husband), Anna Maria Falconbridge now felt she could offer up her honest view on the matter. Not only was slavery quite a pleasant condition for the slaves, but the trade itself was more like a luxury cruise than anything that had been written by SEAST. ‘All the slaves I had an opportunity of seeing in Jamaica, seemed vastly well satisfied, their conditions appeared to be far preferable to what I expected, and they discovered more cheerfulness than I ever observed the Black shew in Africa, unless roused by liquor.’ We now find it easier (most of us, I hope) to believe the testimony of the enslaved, such as that of Mary Prince, than we do that of those who denied their perspective, such as Anna Maria Falconbridge. It’s a mystery how anyone witnessing slavery could have thought that the enslaved were happy. And one is tempted to think that, in fact, they couldn’t. Saying they could was an instance of willful ignorance, a choice to put the evidence to one side and embrace a view that was clearly false, if convenient.
In the mid 1780s, Lafayette, having read Condorcet’s book on abolition, asked his friend Washington to join him in a project designed to show the world how slavery could be abolished. They would buy some land, a plantation, populate with slaves who would be gradually liberated. Washington expressed mild interest and let it go. But two years later Lafayette and his wife, Adrienne de Noailles, purchased land in Cayenne, South America, Their intendent, Louis de Geneste, purchased the human beings that would be the subject of the experiment: there were nearly 80 of them, men, women, children and infants, parents and grandparents. They were paid for their work, offered education, allowed to spend time with their family, and there was no torture of corporeal punishment Unfortunately, Lafayette had to flee to Austria in 1792 and there he was arrested and spent five years in prison. His wife, Adrienne de Noailles, who had been very active in the project, joined him there, and there was no one left to supervise the running of the colonies.  Lafayette, his wife and daughters in prison. Clarkson and Lafayette had been friends since the days of SEAST. But Clarkson had previously been mostly concerned with the abolition of the trade, not slavery itself. In 1823, however, he co-founded a new society, the Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions. Aka the Society for letting Black people be free, but very carefully and not all at once because it will upset too many people otherwise. The manuscript of the letter is kept in Yale, in the Stuart Jackson collection, call number: GEN MSS 1458 This and other letters to Clarkson were transcribed and published in Melvin D. Kennedy’s 1950 Lafayette and Slavery. This can be consulted at the British Library on a good day, or online: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.32000011251792&seq=1 I keep the spelling and punctuation as it is reproduced in Kennedy’s book, but I decided to put everything in sentence case – Lafayette Capitalizes Every Single Word Which Gets Rather Tiresome. Lafayette’s English reads like conversational French, so that the letter, once one gets used to the odd spelling and syntax, is a pleasant read. I have kept some of Kennedy’s notes, edited some and added my own. 20th September 1823, La Grange Call for Papers: Slavery and Abolition in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy
Submission deadline: October 15, 2025 Emory University, Atlanta, GA Event dates: May 13–15, 2026 You can find full details and submit your proposal through this form: https://forms.gle/YodCMraMr34W2pA77 Olympe de Gouges wrote her first abolitionist play, Zamore et Mirza, ou l'Heureux Naufrage in 1784 (she started working on it some years earlier), before the creation of either the English or the French abolitionist societies. In 1785, the Comedie Francaise accepted it. But the actors did not perform it, perhaps for political reasons, or simply because of ongoing disputes between Gouges and some of the actors. As the actors retained the right to the performance, Gouges decided to publish the text of the play, which she reworked and renamed L'Esclavage de Nègres, ou l'Heureux naufrage. This captured the attention of Jacques-Pierre Brissot, who had just created the Societe des Amis des Noirs, the French abolitionist society. Brissot persuaded Bailly, then mayor of Paris, to put pressure on the actors to perform the play. They agreed but placed it at the end of the year, knowing that the Parisian people would be too busy with their celebrations to go to the theatre. If a play did not sell enough seats in the first three days, it was cancelled. Gouges's play was in fact cancelled after the third night. But even three good nights would have had the impact she wished for, to capture the imagination and the sympathy of her audience towards the enslaved, so that they decide to take action and relieve the sufferings of these 'victims of ambition'. Unfortunately, she did not get three good nights. The performance was plagued by hired 'claques' as much as it was by its supporters. No-one heard a thing, and critiques had to turn to the printed text. What follows are two letters Gouges wrote to the newspapers, one to announce her play, and one to reassure spectators that she was not encouraging insurrection. The third text below is a review of the play, describing the mayhem at the theatre. I include my early efforts at translating them.  Letter dated 19 December 1789, signed 'De Gouge', and published in the Chronique de Paris, 20 December 1788. TRANSLATION: It is now nine years since I first began to paint, in a play, the slavery of the black in all its severity. No one was thinking then of alleviating their condition or preparing their freedom. Only I was raising my voice in support of these men, so unhappy and maligned. In print, the significance of the topic meant that the mediocrity of the author was forgotten. This drama, presented to the Comédie Française a few years ago, and inappropriately titled The Fortunate Shipwreck, weathered a few storms. Escaped from the reefs and the opposing winds of power, it now sails freely towards the stage under this title: Black Slavery. If all I had to fear was the weakness of my talent and the power of my enemies, the current era of the re-establishment of liberty should promise some indulgence towards a piece that defends it. But am not exposed still to all the protectors and apologists of American despotism, not counting etc., etc., etc.…? Would that my sex receive, at least from the public on the first day of it performance, the same notice that was granted the author of Charles IX . I must add still that I did not draw the dialogue of this drama from current events, and that I dedicated my authorial rights to augment the patriotic fund which I first conceived of in a pamphlet printed fifteen months ago. If this play could benefit from the same fortune as Figaro or Charles IX, in truth, sirs, I would not be displeased, both for my fame and for the patriotic fund. De Gouge. Paris, this 19 December 1789.  Letter, signed 'De Gouges' dated 27 December 1789, published in Le Journal de Paris, on 28 December 1789. TRANSLATION Journal de Paris 27 December 1789 Allow me sirs, to turn to you on the subject of Black Slavery. We find ourselves in such circumstances that the greatest precautions may still be too weak: the public can only applaud my promptitude and the way I seek to reassure it. Just as it is about to performed, I learn that a formidable group is rising up against my play. French colonial correspondents, alarmed by my title, Black Slavery, are spreading unease, fearing that my play will preach insurrection and foster revolt. I have not developed in my play the kind of incendiary principles likely to arm Europe against the colonies. Please impress upon the people in question, by publishing this letter, that if they come tomorrow to the theatre they will feel that one must not always judge a play by the title given it. Your very humble servant, Signed De Gouges.  Anonymous review of Gouge's play, published in La Chronique de Paris after the first representation on 29 December 1789.
TRANSLATION Chronique de Paris 29 December 1789. The French Comedians performed yesterday Black Slavery, or the Fortunate Shipwreck, a comedy in three acts, by Madame de Gouges. We will not attempt to give an exact description of a play so full of accidents, reunitings, etc. One easily sees that the play is about showing the right of the blacks to liberty, this good common to all men, but which a wise politic prevents us yet from granting our slaves, until we can ensure they will enjoy it. All that humanity requires of us, is that we should treat them gently. Zamore, Mirza’s lover, has killed the intendant of the governor, his master, because this leader of slaves had outraged and mistreated him, and wanted to steal his mistress. Zamore and Mirza are captured, condemned to die. But the governor, moved by the prayers of his wife, and of the lost daughter he has found [6] and the entire colony, decides to grace them. The performance was very turbulent. Les friends of the blacks and of the planters alike wasted efforts that the play did not deserve. It was not a success and can be neither dangerous nor useful. Because the performance was constantly interrupted, a spectator proposed that people should only boo between the acts. We will draw no conclusion. We will only repeat, with Piron, that to write a good drama what one requires is a bearded chin.  Monday 19 May, 10:45 - 18:00, King’s Manor, K/122 - Huntingdon Room This is free to attend, but please register here by 11 May as places are limited.  Program:
10:45 Sandrine Bergès, University of York and Bilkent University. Welcome and introducing the project 11:00 Sam Rickless, UC San Diego, on behalf of Esraa Wasel (UCSD) and himself. Does Mary Astell Think that Marriage is a Form of Slavery? Abstract: In Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Mary Astell issues a famous challenge: “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?” This comment has occasioned a debate over whether Astell thinks that marriage is a form of slavery. Some (e.g., Joan Kinnaird and Patricia Springborg) argue that Astell’s comment is rhetorical or ironic, a subversive stratagem designed to expose to ridicule the tenets of contractarian liberalism. Others (e.g., Jacqueline Broad) argue that Astell adopts Locke’s account of slavery as the state of subjection to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown arbitrary will of another, and that in this sense wives are indeed the slaves of their husbands, and wrongfully so. In contradistinction to both of these interpretations, we argue that, according to Astell, there are two kinds of slavery, bodily and mental; that a wife is, by divine institution and hence permissibly, the bodily slave of her husband; and that, although mental slavery would indeed be wrongful, it is, by the very nature of the case, impossible for a wife to be her husband’s mental slave. Chair: Sandrine Bergès 12:15 lunch 13:30 Bianca Monteleone, University of Rome La Sapienza Loving In/As a Condition of Unfreedom: Mary Wollstonecraft on Women’s Affective Slavery In describing and criticising the condition of women, Mary Wollstonecraft makes extensive use of the language of slavery: women appear enslaved to their bodies, their impulses, their husbands, social customs, and reputations—rendered slaves by the education and institutions that confine them to domestic life. Interpretations differ regarding the origins and significance of Wollstonecraft’s use of this terminology: some, such as Moira Ferguson, argue that it was shaped by abolitionist discourse and the slave uprisings in the colonies, while others - including Lena Halldenius and Carol Howard - emphasise instead the influence of republican and Protestant theological traditions, in which slavery is conceived either as subjection to arbitrary power or as moral corruption and complicity in one’s own oppression. This paper adopts the latter approach, arguing that Wollstonecraft uses the term “slavery” to denote a condition of subjugation in which individuals come to embrace their own chains and to reproduce the circumstances of their oppression. Such a condition is common to all institutionalised forms of domination and finds one of its primary means of reproduction in the affective sphere—particularly in love. Central to this reading is the claim that, in Wollstonecraft’s thought, female character and subjectivity are shaped by forms of love deformed by unjust relations of power. By placing her work in dialogue with contemporary feminist theories of intersectional domination, the paper argues that it is precisely in her analysis of moral slavery that Wollstonecraft articulates the most radical features of her psychology of oppression. Chair: Sarah Hutton 14:45 break 15:00 Alan Coffee, King’s College London Harriet Jacobs, Sexual Violence and Feminist Republicanism In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs challenges two longstanding and widespread misnomers about republican theory. The first is that we should be reluctant to read historical women into this tradition because it has been written exclusively by men and from a masculine perspective. The second is the influential belief that only those who are willing to defend their own, and the collective, freedom even in the face of death are deserving of citizenship. In so doing, I argue, Jacobs lays the foundations for a distinctively feminist republicanism. To demonstrate this, I contrast her framing of the republican paradigm in her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with Frederick Douglass’s well-known account of his fight with the overseer, Covey. Whereas Douglass’s story highlights a lone individual staring down and overcoming an imminent and unjust threat to his life, marking his psychological transition from wretched slave to worthy freeman, Jacobs presents a much more nuanced account of the relationships both amongst slaves and between enslaved and free people. Freedom for Jacobs always entails support from and concern for others, particularly her own children. A second distinctive aspect of her account is the ever-present threat of sexual violence uppermost in the minds of female slaves. Chair: James Clarke 16:15 break 16:30 Roundtable led by Sarah Hutton (University of York), Mary Fairclough (University of York), Sandrine Bergès (University of York and Bilkent University): Reflecting on the ways authors used slavery in 17th to 19th century. Each participant will briefly present their thoughts on the topics raised in the talks and then the discussion will be open to the room. This workshop is organized by the department of philosophy at the University of York and funded by a British Academy Global Professorship Program 2023, Award (GP23\100202). On 28 January 2025, I went down to London from York to renew my British Library card (after the November 2023 cyber attack, all cards became invalid). I wanted to look up a manuscript that would help establish the connections I was looking for between the French and English abolitionist societies of the late eighteenth century. I had found a footnote in Vincent Carretta’s book on Olaudah Equiano, suggesting that the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST) had advised a French correspondent to attempt to create a similar society in France, (Chapter 11, loc 4767, footnote 46). So, hopeful, I took a train down to London, renewed my card, and went up to the Manuscripts room to order what I wanted. I did not in fact know what it was I wanted – all I had was a manuscript number and a date. The helpful reference desk librarian informed me that this was a ‘volume 1’ and that it would be ready in just over an hour. So down I went to meet my friend and celebrity blogger Eric for lunch in the Members’s café. Then I went back down to the cloakroom, as I had not sufficiently filled my British Library transparent bag for the day, and up again to the second floor, to pick up my manuscript. Here is what I found:
The first image is the cover of minutes book, a weather-beaten leather cover, with a gold embossed title 'Fair minute book'. The second image reads (in Clarkson's handwriting): ‘This book records the proceeding so the Committee from its formation on the 22 of May 1787 to Feby 26. 1788.’ The third, in beautiful rounded and large handwriting that is typical of the entire manuscript describes the purpose and composition of the new Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade: May 22 1787 Aside from Clarkson, Granville Sharp and Philip Sansom, who were Anglicans, the members were all quakers. They met, after business hours, at the book and printshop of James Phillips, at number 2 George Yard. Phillips is also the printer who published Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, two years later. Thomas Clarkson, while one of the founding members, was not often present at the meetings. When he gave the book to a friend for safekeeping in the 80s, he made a note of the pages he himself had written.
Most of the Society’s activity seems to be reading letters, deciding how to respond to them, deciding what to print and in what quantity, who to send books to, receiving money from donors and sending money to Clarkson so he and Falconbridge can gather evidence.
Although the minutes make the meetings sound rather sedate – and as they were attended mostly by quakers, they would have been sober and serious occasions – the correspondence they engaged in was of seditious potential, as they not only gathered support from England for their work, but encouraged other countries to do work towards the abolition of the trade. There are correspondents in Philadelphia (a Quaker foothold) about the funding of such societies, and about efforts at educating previously enslaved people.
There are also two separate correspondents in France. The first is Brissot (together with Etienne Claviere, Swiss banker, and later French revolutionary) who founded the Societe des Amis des Noirs, in February 1788. The second is the Marquis de Lafayette, who wished to encourage SEAST and assure them that similar efforts were being made in France, so that France and England would, together, set an example by abolishing the slave trade, that other countries in Europe would then have to follow. Watch this space for more! Following my last post, I've been doing more research into abolitionism in York, especially that centred on Castlegate, the street where the Tuke family lived, and where Equiano stayed. And I found that another abolitionist author visited the Tukes.  John Wollman, a Quaker from Philadelphia wrote a two-part essay entitled Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negros published in 1754, 1762. This was an abolitionist text which contained some insightful responses to outright racist, or lukewarm defenses of abolitionism common at the time. He argued that at least some of the enslaved were quite capable of taking charge of their own lives, but that even if they were not, this could not be grounds for their enslavement. This was a radical argument which Condorcet, for instance, would have benefitted from reading when he argued in 1781, that abolition could only happen (excruciatingly) slowly because the enslaved were not fit to live independent lives. Woolman was, as well as a sound thinker, a principled person, and this somewhat interfered with his desire to travel and spread the word of abolitionism. He did not travel by horse, as he thought that horse riding, or using horses to draw carriages was a form of cruelty against animals, which he did not accept. And his egalitarian principles meant he rejected any comfort that came from privilege. When he travelled to England in 1772, he decided to travel in steerage, not in a cabin, in order to experience an approximation of what kidnapped Africans had when transported across the ocean. His adherence to Quaker principles of equality also meant he did not wish to travel in better conditions than others simply because he could afford it. He travelled first to London, where he shared his enthusiasm for abolition with the London Friends. Then he went North, reaching York on foot. He was met by 17-year-old Henry Tuke, to be taken as a guest to the Tuke’s house on Castlegate – the same house where Equiano stayed twenty years later. But, perhaps because he was already sick, Woolman could not bear the noises and smells of the city so Esther Tuke arranged for him to stay instead just outside the York city walls, in the home of Thomas and Sarah Priestman, in Marygate. Offered the best room in the house, Wollman turned it down and picked for himself the smallest one. Three weeks later, he died in that room, of smallpox, nursed by Esther and her daughter Sarah. Despite his very short stay there, Wollman seems to have been a catalyst for the Tuke’s interest in abolitionism. Ann Tuke, Esther’s daughter, who was only 5 at the time of Woolman’s visit, traveled to America in 1791 to witness firsthand the evils of slavery.  Almary Garth, the home of the Priestmans, where Woolman died. Some References:
https://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/62/john-woolman https://yorkcivictrust.co.uk/heritage/civic-trust-plaques/john-woolman/ Julia Jorati, Slavery and Race. Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century OUP, 2024. The Tukes of York, Presented by William K. and E. Margaret Sessions. 1971. Sessions Book Trust. The Ebor Press, York, England. |
Recovering Marginalised Voices of the Abolitionist Debates.Between September 2024, and August 2028, I will be British Academy Global Professor at the University of York. My project is to study the abolionist debates of France and Britain in the 18th century, and in particular, to uncover marginalised voices from that debate. Here I blog about what I find out in the process. Archives
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