Distinguished by passionate eloquence, moral fervor, and joyful solidarity, and, extraordinarily for its time, embracing writers male and female, black and white, antislavery literature encompassed a dazzling variety of genres: autobiography, fiction, children’s literature, poetry, oratory, and song. In telling one of the most important stories in American history, American Antislavery Writings offers a survey of unprecedented range and depth, reclaiming many forgotten voices and casting the works of some of the greatest American writers—Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Melville, Dickinson—in a new light. The anthology reaches back to America’s colonial beginnings, when the first stirrings of the movement that would change the course of a nation emerged from the scrupulous piety of men like George Keith in Pennsylvania and Samuel Sewall in Massachusetts. Religious arguments against the sin of slavery were soon augmented by Enlightenment ideas about universal human equality and a growing awareness that the emerging American economy was dependent on an immoral labor system. With the American Revolution, Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano put forward the first published African American indictments of slavery, and slave-owners such as Arthur Lee and George Washington grappled with their own involvement in an inhuman institution. Read the full article...