The Abolitionist Movement in 18th Century American Literature

Twenty years after Woolman's Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes was published, a popular Baptist preacher and pamphleteer named John Allen, wrote a harsh condemnation of slave owners who professed Christianity. In The Watchman's Alarm to Lord N---H..., Allen inferred that the "darkness of the night" the colonists experienced against the British was appropriate retribution for their "iniquitous and disgraceful practice of keeping African slaves, a custom so evidently contradictory to the laws of God, and in direct violation of the charter of this province, and the natural and unalienable rights of mankind." He was especially critical of those who kept slaves "with the idle pretence of christianizing them," and those who freed their slaves only after they turned 50 years old, "a period which is far beyond the meridian of man's natural life". Allen longed for the day when "it never be told in the streets of America, that nursery of freedom, that there is one bond-slave dwells therein."…