Make the Case Your Own
John Wesley wondered how those involved in the slave trade would feel if the tables were ever turned on them.
1774
King George III 1760-1820
John Wesley wondered how those involved in the slave trade would feel if the tables were ever turned on them.
1774
King George III 1760-1820
In 1774, Church of England clergyman John Wesley published Thoughts on Slavery, in which he joined the chorus (or choir, since it was overwhelmingly a Christian fellowship) of those demanding an end to the trade in slaves between Africa and Great Britain’s American colonies. His song was a simple one: Do as you would be done by; and he recalled an occasion when it had touched one heart in Liverpool.
MAKE the case your own. “Master,” said a slave at Liverpool, to the merchant that owned him. “What if some of my countrymen were to come here and take away Mistress, and Tommy, and Billy, and carry them into our country, and make them slaves, how would you like it?”* His answer was worthy of a man — “I will never buy a slave more while I live.”
Let his resolution be yours. Have no more any part in this detestable business. Instantly leave it to those unfeeling wretches, “who laugh at human nature and compassion.”* Be you a man; not a wolf, a devourer of the human species! Be merciful, that you may obtain mercy.*
* This happened more often than one might suppose. The Ottoman Empire had long maintained an infamous trading centre in Algiers, whose pirates snatched Europeans and even preyed on English men and women on their own shores: see Pirates at Penzance. Samuel Pepys had heard shocking tales of Ottoman slavery from ex-slave John Dawes (February 8th, 1661), but Wesley thought that African-American slavery was much worse, and the publication of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudiah Equiano in 1789 tended to bear him out. In 1816, the Royal Navy was emboldened by the recent abolition of the slave trade across our own Empire to take a firm hand, and emancipated thousands of European slaves held there: see The Bombardment of Algiers.
* A reference to The Fair Penitent (1702), an adaptation by Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) of The Fatal Dowry (1632) by Philip Massinger and Nathan Field. The line is given to Horatio:
Sour, unrelenting, money-loving villains,
Who laugh at human nature and forgiveness,
And are like fiends, the factors of destruction.
Wesley liked this quotation. Among other places, he used it (with the same alteration) in a letter to Anthony Benezet (1713-1784), a Quaker schoolmaster in Philadelphia who played an important role in stirring Wesley to take an active part in the anti-slavery movement.
* See Matthew 5:7. Wesley’s wider argument is based on Matthew 7:12: Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.