The Effects of Slavery on Enslaved People and Eighteenth-Century Antislavery Arguments

3.1 Effects on moral and intellectual traits

Let us now examine some eighteenth-century instances of the effects-of-slavery strategy. The earliest example I will discuss is by John Woolman, a White New Jersey tailor and an influential Quaker antislavery activist. His most relevant work is Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, which was published in two parts. The first part, on which I will focus here, was composed in 1746 and published in 1754. Woolman invokes the effects-of-slavery strategy in a passage in which he counters the error that Black people are “worse by nature” than White people:

To prevent such error let us calmly consider their circumstance, and, the better to do it, make their case ours. Suppose, then, that our [i.e., White people’s] ancestors and we had been exposed to constant servitude, . . . that we had been destitute of the help of reading and good company; . . . [that we] had generally been treated as a contemptible, ignorant part of mankind. Should we, in that case, be less abject than they now are? (1971: 202)

In this passage, Woolman seems to grant that Black people are “abject,” but insists that this is merely an effect of slavery. In particular, it is an effect of the contempt and racism experienced by enslaved Black people and of their limited access to education. Their inferiority is not innate, essential, or natural; it is merely an effect of their circumstances. Every human being in these circumstances would exhibit the same characteristics. Hence these are not racial traits, even if they occur predominantly or exclusively among Black people.

We find a slightly different version of this strategy in Anthony Benezet who, like Woolman, was a White Quaker. He was one of the most influential and prolific North American antislavery writers in this period. What is relevant for our purposes is that, unlike Woolman, Benezet focuses specifically on an alleged inferiority in moral character. In his 1762 work A Short Account of that Part of Africa, Inhabited by the Negroes, Benezet uses the effects-of-slavery strategy in the following way:

Though the natural capacity of many [enslaved Black people] be ever so good, yet they have no inducement or opportunity of exerting it to any advantage, which naturally tends to depress their minds and sink their spirits into habits of idleness and sloth, which they would in all likelihood have been free from had they stood upon an equal footing with the white people. (2013: 67–8)

He focuses on “idleness and sloth,” which are character traits—and more specifically, character vices. Incidentally, these particular vices are frequently discussed in this context: the idea that Black people are lazy or slothful was a widespread stereotype.⁸

Another noteworthy aspect of Benezet’s discussion is his explanation of why enslavement has these negative effects: enslaved people lack the “inducement or opportunity” to develop what Benezet considers a virtuous attitude toward work. Woolman makes a similar point in his posthumously published Journal, namely, that slavery removes all incentives for being industrious. He explains that “free men, whose minds were properly on their business, [find] a satisfaction in improving, cultivating, and providing for their families” (ch. 4, 1971: 61). In contrast, these inducements are absent in enslaved people, who are “labouring to support others who claim them as their property, and expecting nothing but slavery during life” (1971: 61). In short, enslaved people have no incentive to work hard because they work not for themselves and their loved ones but for a master, and no matter how hard they work, they have no prospect of gaining freedom or improving their situation. The idea is presumably that these incentives are necessary for developing virtuous habits or acquiring a good character.⁹

An anonymous English author, in a 1760 work titled Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade, discusses the causes of the alleged moral shortcomings of enslaved Black people in a notably different way. After describing them as “perverse, sullen, and mischievous,” the author argues that these character flaws are simply results of being “unjustly deprived of their liberty, banished from their native country, from all their friends and relations, and made captives and slaves for life, . . . treated worse than dogs, and made to work harder than horses” (1760: 50). Anyone in such circumstances would develop the same character traits and would indeed be “apt to mutiny and rebel,” that is, try to regain their liberty (1760: 50). This anonymous author appears to describe the negative character traits of enslaved Black people as the results of the injustice, trauma, and violence inflicted on them by White enslavers.

While many authors focus on the ways in which enslavement corrupts the moral character of enslaved people, others focus on slavery’s adverse effects on intellectual characteristics. One such author is John Wesley, a White English theologian. In his 1774 Thoughts Upon Slavery, he responds to the claim that Black people are a “miserably stupid . . . race of men” by arguing that enslavers are entirely to blame for this trait. Enslavers give enslaved people “no means, no opportunity of improving their understanding: And indeed leave them no motive, either from hope or fear, to attempt any such thing” (1774: 40, §4.8). As evidence for the claim that this intellectual disparity is simply a result of enslavement, Wesley points out that the Black inhabitants of Africa, who have the same motives and opportunities as Europeans, are not inferior to Europeans in any way. This shows that the “stupidity [of Black people] in our plantations is not natural; otherwise than it is the natural effect of their Condition” (1774: 40–1, §4.8). Hence, instead of merely engaging in a thought experiment, as Woolman did, Wesley invokes empirical evidence about the intellectual capacities of free Black people in order to support his claim that there is no natural deficiency.¹⁰

For an illustration of another way to use the effects-of-slavery strategy, let us turn to Olaudah Equiano, a prominent Afro-British abolitionist and formerly enslaved man who published his autobiographical antislavery work The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in 1789. In the first chapter of this work, Equiano asks the following series of rhetorical questions:

Are there not causes enough to which the apparent inferiority of an African may be ascribed, without limiting the goodness of God, and supposing he forbore to stamp understanding on certainly his own image, because ‘carved in ebony’? Might it not naturally be ascribed to their situation? When they come among Europeans, they are ignorant of their language, religion, manners, and customs. Are any pains taken to teach them these? Are they treated as men? Does not slavery itself depress the mind, and extinguish all its fire, and every noble sentiment? (2003: 45)

This passage forcefully attacks the racist claim that Black people are naturally inferior to White people, and it seems to focus mainly on intellectual traits. Unlike others who attack this claim, however, Equiano uses an inference to the best explanation: the best explanation for the limited intellectual abilities of enslaved Black people in European colonies is not a natural or racial inferiority but rather the adverse conditions in which they are forced to live. Equiano’s rhetorical questions are supposed to help his readers see that the latter is obviously the correct explanation. Anyone who thinks about it can understand easily what effects enslavement, dehumanization, and the lack of education has on the human mind. No other explanation is needed for the characteristics that enslaved Black people exhibit. In this passage, Equiano also mentions a theological reason to reject the racist explanation: God created human beings in his image, and the image of God includes the capacity to reason or understand. The racist position is heretical, Equiano suggests here, because it portrays God as withholding a valuable capacity from some human beings simply because they are Black. That, he states, is clearly incompatible with divine goodness.

Equiano also discusses the negative effects of enslavement on the moral characters of enslaved people in a later chapter of the same work. There too, his explanation differs from the ones we have seen so far. Addressing members of slave-owning societies, he says, “When you make men slaves, you deprive them of half their virtue,¹¹ you set them in your own conduct, an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war; and yet you complain that they are not honest or faithful!” (ch. 5, 2003: 111). Here Equiano concedes that enslaved people are less virtuous than free people but insists that this too is simply a consequence of their enslavement. Unlike the authors we examined earlier, he mentions the immoral behavior of enslavers as one of the main causes for the immorality of enslaved people. Enslavers behave extremely viciously toward enslaved people, which makes it hypocritical for the former to complain about the viciousness of the latter. It is no wonder, Equiano appears to be saying, if enslaved people follow the horrendously bad example set by their enslavers. He mentions as another factor that enslavers force enslaved people to live in a state of war with them, that is, a condition without mutually agreed-upon rules of conduct and without a legitimate ruler, in which individuals must resort to violence to defend themselves and acquire resources.¹² The idea here is that if you force someone to live in a state of war with you—instead of entering into a voluntary agreement with them—it is unreasonable to expect this person to behave virtuously toward you.

Yet another version of the effects-of-slavery strategy is found in a text by Benjamin Rush. He was a White professor of chemistry and medicine in Pennsylvania and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. In his influential 1773 tract An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements, Rush argues as follows:

Slavery is so foreign to the human mind, that the moral faculties, as well as those of the understanding are debased, and rendered torpid by it. All the vices which are charged upon the Negroes in the southern colonies and the West-Indies, such as Idleness, Treachery, Theft, and the like, are the genuine offspring of slavery, and serve as an argument to prove that they were not intended for it. (1773: 2)

The first sentence is similar to what we have already seen: Rush claims that slavery corrupts both the intellects and the moral faculties of enslaved people. He then mentions some examples of the character vices that he thinks enslavement causes in enslaved people, namely, laziness, deceitfulness, and a propensity to steal. What is most important for present purposes is how this passage ends: Rush says that these effects of slavery are proof that Black people were not intended for slavery. The basic idea seems to be that if someone were truly intended for slavery, then slavery would not have such horrific effects on their moral and intellectual faculties. In other words, his argument seems to be something like this:

1. The state of slavery corrupts the moral and intellectual faculties of Black people.

2. No state that corrupts a person’s moral and intellectual faculties is the intended state for that person.

3. Therefore, the state of slavery is not the intended state for Black people.

This argument targets the teleological version of the racial natural slavery argument that I presented earlier. More specifically, it attacks the claim that Black people are naturally intended or destined for slavery.

The second premise of Rush’s argument should appeal to many in the eighteenth century. It is part of a widely accepted teleological worldview in which what is natural for a person, or the way in which a person is meant to live, has to do with the conditions under which this person can thrive intellectually and morally. This worldview can either take the form of the theological doctrine that God wants humans to become morally virtuous and attain specific kinds of knowledge, or it can take the form of a non-theistic eudaimonist theory of well-being, such as Aristotle’s. Because this teleological worldview was so popular in this period, proponents of racial natural slavery are most likely to reject the first premise. This makes it important for antislavery writers to support the first premise with empirical evidence, like Wesley, or with philosophical theories about the ways in which enslavement affects the human mind, like some of the other authors we have encountered.

3.2 The rejection of moral differences

The texts we have examined so far appear to argue that enslavement damages the moral characters or intellectual abilities of enslaved people. A different and quite radical explanation of the allegedly immoral behavior of enslaved people comes from a surprising source: Thomas Jefferson, the White politician and slaveowner from Virginia who was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and later became the third president of the United States. He cannot be categorized as an opponent of slavery, or at least not straightforwardly. While he sometimes claimed to hope that slavery will eventually be abolished, he did not emancipate the enslaved people on his plantation during his lifetime, and he did not use his considerable political power to advocate for abolition.¹³ Moreover, he provides a deeply racist assessment of the intellectual capacities of Black people in his 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia, arguing or at least hypothesizing that Black people are intellectually inferior to White people by nature (Query 14, 1787: 235–39/1984: 267–70). Nevertheless, he argues in the same work that there are no natural differences in moral character. This is the context in which Jefferson makes an astonishing point about the ways in which enslavement affects enslaved people:

That disposition to theft with which [Blacks] have been branded, must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense. The man, in whose favor no laws of property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favor of others. When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right: that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience. (Query 14, 1787: 237–38/1984: 269)

Here, Jefferson concedes that enslaved people have less respect for laws of property than free people but argues that this is simply because these laws are made exclusively in favor of the latter. The root of the problem is that American property laws are unjust and arbitrary, “founded in force, and not in conscience,” because they are not reciprocal. Jefferson even goes on to ask rhetorically whether an enslaved person may not “as justifiably take a little from [some]one, who has taken all from him, as he may slay [some]one who would slay him” (1787: 238/1984: 269). In other words, he is claiming that stealing from one’s enslaver is as justifiable as self-defense. He adds that aside from the lack of respect for property laws, there are no moral differences between Black and White people; there is no difference with respect to character virtues like “rigid integrity, . . . benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity” (1787: 238/1984: 269).

Jefferson is arguing quite differently from the other authors encountered so far: he ascribes enslaved Black people’s alleged propensity to steal not to a moral vice or character flaw, but rather to the injustice of the property laws in the United States during the late eighteenth century.¹⁴ These laws were made solely in favor of free people, since enslaved people were not allowed to have property of their own. Quite to the contrary, these laws treated enslaved people as property. As a result, Jefferson claims, it is not just understandable but morally justifiable for enslaved Black people to disobey these laws. A propensity to break unjust or illegitimate laws is not a vice.¹⁵ Hence, while other authors concede that enslaved Black people possess moral vices and focus on arguing that these vices result from enslavement, Jefferson refuses to make this concession and argues that it is morally permissible to resist a systemic injustice or disobey an unjust law.

3.3 The intentional deterioration of enslaved people’s minds

A completely different application of the effects-of-slavery strategy is found in a fascinating text composed by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two Black American clergymen and leaders of the free Black community in Philadelphia. Both grew up enslaved but gained freedom during the American Revolution. They co-wrote a pamphlet titled A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People in 1794 in which they give advice to enslaved and free Black people as well as to White proponents of slavery. In the section that targets proponents of slavery, Jones and Allen explicitly argue against the claim that “our . . . baseness is incurable, and [that we] may therefore be held in a state of servitude” (1794: 23) and against opponents who “plead our incapacity for freedom . . . as a sufficient cause for keeping us under the grievous yoke” (1794: 25). In other words, they argue against racial natural slavery. The allegedly inferior traits they mention here are worth noting: a “baseness,” that is, an immoral character, as well as an “incapacity for freedom,” which might be a reference to an inability to make good decisions for oneself.

When they rebut racial natural slavery in the section that addresses proponents of slavery, Jones and Allen do two things that set them apart from the authors we have encountered so far. First, they propose an experiment: their White readers should cultivate the minds of some Black children “with the same care, and let them have the same prospect in view, as to living in the world, as [White readers] would wish for [their] own children” (1794: 24). This experiment would clearly show, Jones and Allen contend, that Black and White people have exactly the same natural capacities and that any differences in character or intellect that are observable in America are the results of disparate circumstances.¹⁶ One particularly intriguing aspect of this passage is its reference to the importance of one’s “prospect . . . as to living in the world.” The idea appears to be that slavery as practiced in the United States has such horrendous effects on enslaved people in part because it deprives them of all hope or prospects for a good life. In the section of this text that addresses Black readers, Jones and Allen describe the hopelessness that they experienced when they were enslaved: “the bands of bondage were so strong, that no way appeared for our release,” and even though their religious faith sometimes gave them hope, at other times “the prospect of liberty almost vanished away, and we were in darkness and perplexity” (1794: 26). Thus, their version of the effects-of-slavery strategy is based on their own experience; they know through direct experience that the hopelessness of slavery is one of the features that explain the disparity between Black and White Americans.¹⁷

The experiment that Jones and Allen propose also reveals that according to them, the effects of slavery cannot easily be undone in people who grew up enslaved. They say so explicitly: “we freely confess the vile habits often acquired in a state of servitude, are not easily thrown off. . . . It is in our posterity enjoying the same privileges with your own, that you ought to look for better things” (1794: 24). This is important in part because it means that the behavior of formerly enslaved people cannot be used as evidence for the natural inferiority of Black people.¹⁸ Differences in their behavior are likely to be due to the lasting effects of their former enslavement.

Jones and Allen make a second remarkable claim: addressing proponents of slavery, they note that “[t]he judicious part of mankind will think it unreasonable, that a superior good conduct is looked for, from our race, . . . [when] you try what you can to prevent our rising from the state of barbarism, you represent us to be in” (1794: 23). Here, they appear to be claiming that White enslavers intentionally prevent Black people from improving in order to be able to continue enslaving them. In other words, the horrendous effects of slavery on the characters of enslaved people are not unintended side-effects; they are fully intentional. This claim, too, might be based on their own experience of enslavement.

Only a few other texts from this period accuse White people of purposely making Black people inferior. One such text is Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative, which we already encountered earlier. In chapter 5, he accuses White slaveholders of thinking that it is “necessary to keep [enslaved people] in a state of ignorance” (2003: 111).¹⁹ In other words, Equiano accuses enslavers of purposely making enslaved people intellectually inferior. Like Jones and Allen, Equiano might know this from his own experience of enslavement.

Another text that makes this accusation is the 1792 prose drama Black Slavery, or the Happy Shipwreck, composed by the White French philosopher Olympe de Gouges. In the play’s first scene, Zamor—a fictional Black man who is enslaved in the West Indies and who is one of the protagonists of the play—states that White planters “take care not to instruct us. If by chance our eyes were to open, we would be horrified by the state to which they have reduced us, and we would shake off a yoke as cruel as it is shameful” (Gouges 1994: 92/237).²⁰ This passage not only accuses slaveholders of keeping enslaved people ignorant on purpose, but also explains why they do so: to prevent enslaved people from becoming fully aware of the injustice of their situation and hence to prevent revolts.

A much more detailed version of this accusation occurs in a fascinating anonymous two-part essay titled “Letters of a Negro,” which was published in a British newspaper in 1788. The author describes himself as a formerly enslaved Black man whose master granted him freedom and gave him access to education from a young age; he seems to have moved to England after gaining freedom. His main objective in the first letter is to argue against racial natural slavery, or as he puts it, against the contention that “we are . . . addicted to more and worse vices than those of any other complexion, and such is the innate perverseness of our minds, that nature seems to have marked us out for slavery” (1788: 58).²¹ When arguing against this contention, he explicitly accuses White people of producing these character vices on purpose: “It is the character I grant which our inhuman masters have agreed to give us, and which they have too industriously and too successfully propagated, in order to palliate their own guilt by blackening the helpless victims of it, and to disguise their own cruelty under the semblance of justice” (1788: 58). What is particularly noteworthy about this passage is that the anonymous author, like Gouges, describes the relevant traits not just as purposely caused but also as serving to perpetuate the institution of slavery. According to this text, causing these traits makes it easier for White enslavers to justify their power over enslaved Black people. It is one of the mechanisms that keeps oppressive power structures in place.

Later in the same text, the anonymous author elaborates on his accusation: “Cruel that you are! you make us slaves; you implant in our minds all the vices which are in some degree inseparable from that condition, and you then impiously impute to nature and to God the origin of those vices, to which you alone have given birth, and punish in us the crimes of which you are yourselves the authors” (1788: 59). This is noteworthy because it portrays the racial natural slavery argument as disingenuous, or at least an instance of hypocrisy. The author then goes on to analyze the ways in which enslavement prevents enslaved people from achieving moral excellence, theorizing that becoming virtuous requires social relations, including family relations, which enslaved people are prevented from having.²²

3.4 Internalized racism as an effect of slavery

The author of “Letters of a Negro” makes another point that we have not seen before: he describes internalized oppression or internalized racism, that is, the adverse effects of enslavement on the self-conception of enslaved people: “Would it be surprising if a slave, labouring under all these disadvantages, oppressed, insulted, scorned and trampled on, should come at last to despise himself, to believe the calumnies of his oppressors, and to persuade himself that it would be against his nature to cherish any honourable sentiment, or to attempt any virtuous action?” (1788: 60). This is an explicit description of the effects of slavery on enslaved people’s self-worth. It is similar to what W.E.B. Du Bois describes as double-consciousness more than a hundred years later: oppressed people start viewing themselves partially through the eyes of their oppressors and internalize what their oppressors believe about them. Note that the anonymous letter is making a very strong claim about internalized oppression: it claims that enslaved people are likely not only to start believing in their own inferiority but even to believe that they are so completely incapable of virtue that it does not make sense for them to attempt to act virtuously. Thus, the beliefs that they internalize affect their moral faculties.

I am familiar with only two earlier texts that invoke internalized racism. One is by the White Scottish philosopher James Dunbar. He argues in a 1780 work titled Essays on the History of Mankind that as a result of enslavement, the “Self-reverence [of enslaved people] is gone; and emancipation itself cannot restore them to the honours of human nature. In time, they view themselves almost in the light in which they are viewed by their rulers” (1780: 389). Like the passage from the anonymous letter that I quoted earlier, this is clearly a description of internalized racism. The passage is noteworthy for another reason: like Jones and Allen, Dunbar seems to hold that the effects of slavery cannot be undone simply by freeing enslaved people. He also discusses a few traits that he views as naturally resulting from enslavement which we have not encountered so far: according to him, slavery naturally causes feelings of “Hatred, envy, and revenge” in enslaved people and eventually erodes their natural appreciation for liberty (1780: 389).

Another text that invokes internalized racism is the 1780 edition of Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s History of the Two Indies. In a portion of this work that was composed by the two White French philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean-Joseph de Pechméja,²³ the authors accuse enslavers of brainwashing enslaved people into believing in their own inferiority, and indeed, into accepting the racial natural slavery argument. Because this is a different way of using the effects-of-slavery strategy, the relevant passage is worth quoting in full. In response to the proslavery argument that transatlantic slavery is justified through the alleged intellectual limitations and moral depravity of Black people, Diderot and Pechméja write,

Negroes’ intellects are limited because slavery breaks all the springs of the soul. They are mean, though not mean enough to you. They are deceitful because one does not owe the truth to one’s tyrants. They recognize the superiority of our minds because we have perpetuated their ignorance; they acknowledge the justice of our rule because we have taken advantage of their weakness. Unable to maintain our superiority by force, a criminal politics has resorted to trickery. You have almost succeeded in persuading them that they are a singular species born for abjectness and dependence, for work and punishment. You have done everything to degrade these unfortunate people, and you then reproach them for being vile. (Raynal, History bk 11, ch 24, §30, 1780: 197/2020: 176)

This passage makes some claims that we have already encountered elsewhere, for instance, that enslaved people are kept ignorant on purpose and that some of the alleged vices of enslaved Black people are not vices at all, but morally permissible responses to oppression. Being deceitful and mean to one’s enslavers is not a moral vice. What is most notable is the claim that enslavers purposely change the self-conception of enslaved Black people, convincing them that they are inferior to White people and naturally destined for slavery. The authors portray this as a ruse or as trickery, employed by enslavers to maintain their own power. This is a different type of internalized racism than the one described by Dunbar and the anonymous author of “Letters of a Negro.” Diderot and Pechméja claim that White enslavers purposely cultivate this negative self-conception in enslaved Black people; it is not merely a side-effect of oppression.

3.5 Mechanisms by which slavery deteriorates the mind

Some authors describe the mechanisms by which slavery affects the moral and intellectual faculties of enslaved people in particularly detailed ways. One of these authors is Benjamin Franklin, the White writer, scientist, and politician from Philadelphia who served on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence and was a delegate to the constitutional convention. He describes these mechanisms in a speech that he delivered when he was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1789. The speech is not strictly speaking an instance of the effects-of-slavery strategy because Franklin does not invoke the effects of slavery to argue that slavery is wrong. Rather, he invokes them as evidence that “freedom may often prove a misfortune to [a formerly enslaved person], and prejudicial to society” (2005: 431). Nevertheless, his description of the mechanisms by which enslavement affects the human mind is worth examining:

The unhappy man, who has long been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart. Accustomed to move like a mere machine, by the will of a master, reflection is suspended; he has not the power of choice; and reason and conscience have but little influence over his conduct, because he is chiefly governed by the passion of fear. (2005: 430–31)

Franklin here explains how, exactly, enslavement can damage the intellects and wills of enslaved people. They are accustomed to obeying their enslavers without thinking for themselves and, as a result, lose the habit or ability to reflect on their own actions, make their own choices, or direct their behavior through reason.²⁴ They act mainly based on fear—presumably fear of being punished if they disobey.

Noah Webster, the prominent White lexicographer and author from Connecticut, provides a somewhat similar explanation in his 1793 work Effects of Slavery, on Morals and Industry—a work that is entirely devoted to exploring the various effects of slavery. He writes,

It is evidently the will of heaven that men should be prompted to action by a regard to their own benefit and happiness. Whenever by the positive institutions of society, or by external force, men are stripped of the power of exerting themselves for their own benefit, the mind, having lost its spring or stimulus, either ceases to act, and men become mere machines, moving only when impelled by some extraneous power; or if the mind acts at all, it is at the impulse of violent passions, struggling to throw off an unnatural restraint, and to revenge the injury. Hence it is, that slaves, with few exceptions, may be divided into two classes, the indolent and the villanous. (1793: 6)

This passage combines and repackages some of the ideas we have already seen elsewhere: that enslaved people are deprived of the incentives that prompt free people to pursue an honest or industrious life, that this eventually renders them unable to act based on their own reasoning, and that they are consequently prone to either laziness or crime. Like Franklin’s speech, this text points to specific psychological mechanisms that cause these negative effects.

3.6 Reversing the effects of slavery

Proponents of the effects-of-slavery strategy disagree about whether the effects of slavery can be undone, and if so, how. As noted earlier, Jones and Allen claim that only later generations of Black Americans, who grow up without slavery and with the same privileges as White people, will be completely free of the effects of slavery (1794: 24); Dunbar seems to agree. Those who grew up in slavery will not be able to overcome its adverse effects completely. Other authors are more optimistic and argue that the effects of slavery can be undone by educating and supporting recently emancipated people. Take for instance the anonymous author of the 1795 American tract Tyrannical Libertymen:

If [enslaved Black people] are not fit for freedom, they must be fitted. . . . They must . . . be taken away from their masters, and, by direction of the magistrate, put under temporary guardians, governours, and instructors, to be educated, to be made acquainted with their rights and duties, and some honest method of acquiring a livelihood; to be prepared for citizenship. (1795: 9)

A few authors are even more optimistic and argue that many negative effects of slavery will disappear automatically at the time of emancipation. One example is Levi Hart, a White Calvinist pastor from Connecticut: in a text from 1774, he argues that emancipated people will behave far more virtuously than enslaved people because “they will be members of the community, & have a common interest with others in the support of good order & preservation [of] private property”—neither of which is the case for someone living in slavery (Some Thoughts on the Subject of Freeing the Negroes, 2002: 120). This fits well with Woolman’s and Benezet’s claims that one reason for slavery’s adverse effects is that it removes the incentives that motivate free people to develop virtuous habits.

3.7 Key features of eighteenth-century analyses of the effects of slavery

Let us take stock. According to the texts we have examined, the effects of slavery on enslaved people include the following: character vices, impaired social affections, the loss of their desire for freedom, a weak or underdeveloped intellect and will, a negative self-conception, and an unfitness for liberty. Some of these effects are clear examples of what we today call “moral damage,” that is, damage to one’s moral character that results from one’s circumstances, such as from living under oppression.²⁵ Other effects constitute damage to non-moral aspects of one’s mind, such as one’s intellectual abilities. We have also seen that eighteenth-century authors ascribe these effects to a few different aspects of enslavement: the experience of racism and dehumanization, the lack of access to education, the deprivation of a full social life and of property rights, the lack of incentives to be industrious or law-abiding, the lack of prospects, constant fear, the habit of obeying one’s enslaver without thinking for oneself, the bad example set by enslavers, and the intentional production of these effects by enslavers.