Tag: bible

“Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness?”
Romans 6:16

Christianity teaches believers that sinners’ souls become enslaved through their disobedience to God. In the United States, legal slavery persisted until 1808—more than twenty years after the Constitution was ratified by the original thirteen states. Some early Americans likened the new nation to the Hebraic Republic described in Deuteronomy, where Moses establishes the Ten Commandments as divinely ordained law. The Israelite Sanhedrin was even invoked by some as a conceptual model for the United States Senate, a comparison strengthened by the phonetic resemblance of the names.¹ The Old Testament also contains the well‑known account of Moses liberating the Israelites from Egyptian bondage.

Anthony Benezet, a French‑born American abolitionist, lived in Philadelphia and joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) while residing in London in 1727 as a Huguenot refugee. He immigrated to America in 1731 and soon became outspoken in condemning slavery as incompatible with the Christian faith.² In his Notes on the Slave Trade &c., Benezet recounts an unsuccessful slave rebellion in 1749 aboard a ship on which he was traveling. The vessel was transporting 170 enslaved Africans from Guinea, purchased by traders from one of the so‑called “Negro Kings.”³ After two weeks at sea, the captives “formed a design of recovering their natural right, liberty, by rising and murdering every man on board; but the goodness of the Almighty rendered their scheme abortive.”⁴⁴ The sailors discovered the plot, suppressed it, and executed the ringleader through brutal torture.

Benezet’s Notes reveal a man in deep moral and religious reflection, particularly on the sinfulness of mistreating others whose souls, he reminds his readers, are “immortal as your own.” Quakers had already become a nonviolent sect, in part because some of their members had been executed by the ostensibly “Christian” authorities of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Benezet rebukes slave traders directly, urging them to abandon the practice. He warns, “Then will the great God deal with you, as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands.”⁵ This short abolitionist work exemplifies how an eighteenth‑century Quaker invoked Christian doctrine to persuade others to oppose slavery, grounded in his belief that God would ultimately repay cruelty with divine justice.

Benezet employs the theological concept of retribution to encourage moral behavior. In his view, slave traders accumulate guilt even when they delegate violence to others and merely finance the shedding of blood. He insists, “Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air. And no human law can deprive him of that right…”⁶ Opposition to the African slave trade thus resonated with the principles later invoked by the revolutionaries at Lexington and Concord, reflecting a broader Christian theological foundation for early American arguments against tyranny and bondage.

1. Shalev, Eran. American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. Yale University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt32bmxz. ↩︎
2. Armistead, Wilson. Life of Anthony Benezet. Philadelphia: Sherman and Company ↩︎
3. Benezet, Anthony. Notes on the slave trade, &c. [Philadelphia?]: n.p., [178?]. Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500-1926 (accessed May 30, 2025). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CY0101205784/SABN?u=vic_liberty&sid=bookmark-SABN&xid=242c314d&pg=3 ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎