Addresses, Essays and Sermons I: Colonial and Revolutionary Beginnings, 1754–1800 (Primary Sources)

American antislavery argument begins quietly, in a Quaker meetinghouse. When John Woolman published Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes in 1754, slavery was legal in every colony and respectable nearly everywhere. Within a single generation the Revolution turned the moral question into a constitutional one: how could a people fighting for liberty hold half a million people in bondage? Every document in this era worries at that contradiction — some gently, some, like David Cooper's parallel columns setting the Declaration of Independence against American practice, with devastating directness. By the era's end the argument had produced institutions: abolition societies in New York and Philadelphia, and the first national antislavery body. The twelve documents here are the seedbed of everything in the four eras that follow.

Landmark Documents‍ ‍

John Woolman, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754/1762). The earliest entry in this bibliography, and the founding text of American antislavery literature. Woolman, a New Jersey tailor who refused to write bills of sale for enslaved people, addressed his fellow Quakers not with denunciation but with a patient moral inventory: what does slaveholding do to the holder's soul? The essay, printed by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and followed by a second part in 1762, set the Society of Friends on the path to becoming the first community in the Western world to disown slaveholding among its members. Read at the Internet Archive

Benjamin Rush, An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements (1773). Two years before the Revolution and three before he signed the Declaration of Independence, the Philadelphia physician argued that slavery corrupted the colonies' claim to liberty at its root. Rush wrote in support of a Pennsylvania duty designed to strangle the slave trade, and his pamphlet drew an immediate proslavery reply — one of the first full pamphlet exchanges on slavery in America. Read at the Internet Archive

‍Samuel Hopkins, A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans (1776). Addressed to the Continental Congress in the year of independence, from Newport, Rhode Island — the capital of the American slave trade. Hopkins, a Congregationalist theologian preaching in a port whose wealth was built on the traffic, demanded that the new nation begin with emancipation. The Dialogue is the Revolution's conscience speaking from inside its most compromised city. Read at Univ. of Michigan Evans Collection · NYPL Digital Collections

‍Samuel Miller, A Discourse Before the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves (1797). New York's abolition society — founded in 1785 with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton among its members — heard this discourse from a young Presbyterian minister while some 20,000 people remained enslaved in the state. Two years later New York passed its gradual emancipation act. Miller's discourse captures the state's antislavery establishment at the moment of its one great victory, whose slow timetable (final emancipation came only in 1827) shapes the next era of this section. Read at Univ. of Michigan Evans Collection

Liberty's Contradiction: the Revolutionary Pamphlets

Levi Hart, Liberty Described and Recommended (1775). A Connecticut election sermon that asks, on the eve of war, what the colonists' cry of liberty means for the enslaved. Read at Univ. of Michigan Evans Collection

Antibiastes, Observations on the Slaves and the Indented Servants, Inlisted in the Army, and in the Navy of the United States (1777). A pseudonymous Revolutionary pamphlet on Black soldiers and sailors already serving in the Continental forces — and what their service was owed. Read at the Library of Congress

David Cooper, A Serious Address to the Rulers of America (1783). A New Jersey Quaker prints the Declaration's promises in one column and American slaveholding practice in the other. Washington kept a copy. Read at the Internet Archive

Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea (1788). The Philadelphia Quaker schoolmaster's account of West Africa and the trade that ravaged it — the book that converted Thomas Clarkson and armed Wilberforce. The bridge between American Quaker antislavery and the British abolition campaign. Read at Project Gutenberg

Jonathan Edwards Jr., The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade (1791). The younger Edwards preaches abolition to Connecticut, extending his father's theology to a conclusion his father — a slaveholder — never drew. Read at the Library of Congress

Noah Webster, Effects of Slavery on Morals and Industry (1793). The lexicographer's economic and moral case against slavery, written for Connecticut's abolition society: slavery impoverishes everything it touches, including its beneficiaries. Read at Cornell University Library

The First Organizations

American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Minutes (1794–1837) The minutes of the first national antislavery organization, which convened delegates from the state abolition societies from 1794 into the 1830s. The Convention's long, gradualist record is the institutional bridge between the founders' societies and the immediatists who would repudiate their caution — its minutes span this era and the two that follow. Read at the Library of Congress · Internet Archive

[Amynto], Reflections on the Inconsistency of Man (1796). A pseudonymous essay on the era's central hypocrisy. No digitized copy located; retained as a citation.

About This Section

What it is. The first of five chronological pages covering the 135 addresses, essays, sermons and society publications in this bibliography: 12 documents from 1754 to 1800, 11 of them free to read in full online. Links verified July 2026.

What it is not. Not a survey of all early antislavery print. These are the entries from the project's source bibliography, which is weighted toward New York.

Why it matters. Every argument the abolitionists of the 1830s–1850s would make — moral, religious, constitutional, economic — appears here first, in embryo. And the gradualism this era invented is exactly what the immediatists of era III rebelled against.