Why Did Few Colonists Oppose the African Slave Trade?

During the eighteenth century, the African slave trade carried more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic than ever before or since. From today’s perspective, we might expect the booming trade to have engendered numerous outspoken opponents. But before the American Revolution, critics of the African slave trade were few, far between, and not influential. Why?

Enslaved Africans universally opposed becoming commodities in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but they had little power to resist. For centuries, in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, enslavement had been considered a legitimate fate for people captured during a war. Kidnapping for the purpose of enslavement was widely thought to be illegitimate, but in practice the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate enslavement was murky and almost impossible to enforce. Africans captured other Africans, whether legitimately or illegitimately, and ultimately sold the captives to European slave traders. Slaves aboard as many as one-tenth of all ships in the African trade tried to escape their bondage by revolting. But nearly all revolts occurred while slaves and ships were in sight of the African coast, strong evidence that hopes of escape evaporated as Africa slipped beneath the eastern horizon.

The horrors of the slave trade were no secret, but most people in the colonies as well as in Britain and on the European continent considered pain and suffering a regrettable but inescapable part of life. The brutality inflicted on enslaved Africans seemed to many colonists an extreme form of the harsh conditions of life everyone confronted and took for granted. Occasionally colonists acknowledged the miseries of enslavement by referring to slaves as “poor Negroes” or “poor Africans,” terminology that reflected a measure of sympathy and a sense that slaves were unlucky victims of circumstance. But this sympathy was tempered by deeply held racial prejudices that justified vicious mistreatment of blacks, who were considered inferior to Euro-Americans.

Leading merchants who bought and sold enslaved Africans in ports such as Charleston, Philadelphia, Providence, New York, and Boston profited from the trade and did all they could to keep it going. They wanted enslaved Africans to be healthy and robust because then they could be sold for higher prices. Slave traders believed, however, that brutality was necessary to prevent revolts by enslaved Africans, who greatly outnumbered the crewmen aboard slave ships. Far from condemning or stigmatizing slave traders, other colonists respected them, bought slaves from them, borrowed money from them, and did not object to their daughters marrying them. Indeed, the slave trade was often seen as a sterling example of the great freedom colonists enjoyed as members of the British empire. Even most Christians who sought to live up to the biblical commandment to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” felt few pangs of conscience about the African slave trade.

A few renegade Quakers became outspoken antislavery activists during the first half of the eighteenth century. Although Quakers were a tiny minority of colonists, they often prospered and bought slaves. A small number of Quakers denounced slavery and the trade in slaves for promoting worldliness and luxury rather than the simple life of faith and suffering professed by Quakers. In 1738, Pennsylvania Quaker Benjamin Lay went so far as to kidnap a white child belonging to a Quaker slaveholder to demonstrate the violence of the slave trade. Lay believed owning slaves corrupted all Quakers’ faith, a point he dramatized at the 1738 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers meeting by plunging a sword into a Bible hollowed out to hold a container of pokeberry juice and splattering the blood-like fluid on his coreligionists. Beginning in the 1740s, New Jersey Quaker John Woolman visited individual Quaker slaveholders and quietly talked to them about his belief that God expected people “to exercise goodness toward every living creature,” especially those like slaves who were suffering. Like Lay, Woolman worked to persuade slaveholders to liberate their slaves and thereby purge slaveholding from the Quaker faith in order to purify their church and fulfill their divine obligation to be kind to all creatures. Anthony Benezet, another Philadelphia Quaker, proclaimed that “nothing can be more inconsistent with the Doctrines and Practice of our meek Lord and Master, nor stained with a deeper Dye or Injustice, Cruelty and Oppression . . . [than] the SLAVE TRADE.” The efforts of Lay, Woolman, Benezet, and others led the Philadelphia Quaker meeting in 1758 to encourage Quakers to free their slaves and to exclude slaveholders from participating in the affairs of the church. But for the most part, these pioneering antislavery initiatives were confined to a small number of Quakers and ignored by the vast majority of colonists, for whom the African slave trade was business as usual.

Questions for Analysis

Summarize the Argument: Why did the African slave trade engender so little opposition among colonists? What motivated a few Quakers to oppose the trade?

Analyze the Evidence: How did supporters of the African slave trade justify its cruelty and violence? What arguments did Quakers use to denounce slavery and the slave trade?

Consider the Context: What did slave traders consider the fundamental context of the African slave trade? How did their view contrast with that of antislavery Quakers? How did colonists’ attitudes toward the slave trade reflect their thinking about markets, freedom, inequality, and race?