Cugoano on Redressing Slavery: The Demands of Liberty

2.1

Clarkson’s An Essay on Slavery is an expansion of his Latin dissertation ‘Anne liceat Invitos in Servitutem dare [Is it right to make slaves of others against their will]?’ originally written in 1785. He divides his An Essay on Slavery into three parts. The first part catalogs the different justifications and forms of slavery throughout history. The second part develops a social contract theory to attack the slave trade or commerce on principled grounds. The third part builds on the second dealing with the question of ‘the subsequent slavery in the colonies, as founded on the [inequity] of the commerce’ (Commerce 56; 117; 239–40). The key conclusion Clarkson defends is that transatlantic and colonial slavers possess the bodies of enslaved Africans as a matter of fact, but they do not possess a right over the enslaved. Only consent can grant rights over persons, and mentality endows Africans with liberty as a natural right. By mentality, Clarkson refers to those mental capacities that endow human beings with moral properties such as self-possession and accountability. His position revolves around what I call his anti-commodification principle: it is normatively impossible that human liberty can be bought or sold.

In the second part of his text, Clarkson develops a social contract theory to posit liberty as a natural right. He adopts this theoretical framework in answering whether natural law agrees with the slavery that European nations practice against Africans (Commerce 55–6). Clarkson claims his intention is ‘to inquire into the rise, nature, and design of government’ (Commerce 56). As Clarkson puts it in a footnote, he wants to discover the ‘foundation’ of governments (Commerce 67n). A plausible interpretation of what Clarkson means by foundation is those principles that endow any entity with legitimate political power. He communicates to any reader of the modern period that he will apply parallel principles to understanding legitimate political power and use them to distinguish between lawful servitude and unjust slavery.⁷

Clarkson frames liberty by way of a pre-social state of nature. This ‘first situation of mankind,’ he maintains, is nothing other than ‘a state of dissociation and independence,’ a ‘state of universal liberty,’ or the state of a person taken to be ‘unconnected with the rest of the world’ (Commerce 57; 62; 92). He interprets the natural to entail dissociation and independence, so the natural state of human persons is to be individuated. Clarkson charts the social progress from the first state of human persons to the formation of domestic relations, agrarian life, and finally, political hierarchy or ‘subordinate society’ (Commerce 60). The need for government is coterminous with the advent of the private property relation. ‘By the introduction of laws,’ Clarkson writes, ‘government would at once afford a security to the acquisitions of the industrious, and heal the intestine disorders of the community’ (Commerce 60). Government is the de jure power to legislate over other agents and the political community more generally.

Clarkson defines liberty and government in contrast to one another. He claims that ‘liberty is a natural [right], and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free’ (Commerce 66). Liberty is a natural right, which is to say that liberty is a congenital property of human persons. The only way to forfeit liberty temporarily is through crime (See Commerce 80–3). Government is an adventitious right, in the sense that it is politically founded upon contingent acts of consent. Legitimate power cannot be secured through compulsion. Clarkson assumes human beings in their natural state to be prudential. Humans consent to political states of affairs only if it will promote their happiness. It is accordingly rational to consent to a state of affairs that will bring about happiness, concurring with the happiness of others who are also members of the social contract. The foundation of government is consent and the end of government is the maximization of happiness.

Given Clarkson’s thoughts on the original state of human persons and the nature of government, we can turn to his key principle. Clarkson forwards his anti-commodification principle against transatlantic slavery: ‘it is impossible, in the nature of things, that liberty can be bought or sold!’ (Commerce 70). In the face of real-existing transatlantic slavery, Clarkson must intend the modality of this principle as a normative one, not an ontological one. He understands this principle to attain legitimacy for experiential facts about mentality and theological reasons.

Mentality functions as an individuating principle and the source of rational personality. It is for this reason that the ‘right to empire over brutes’ is natural for they are ‘void of reason’ (Commerce 71). The ‘right to empire over men’ on the other hand is contingent because human beings are minded, endowing them with moral properties. Mentality grants humans with two things besides rational personality: possession of our person and accountability for our actions (ibid.). Clarkson uses these moral facts to argue that treating human persons like cattle is unjust. Chattel slavery presupposes that a master can possess all that can be attributed to the slave. But this is impermissible since ‘the mind cannot be confined or bound: it will be free, though its mansion be beset with chains’ (Commerce 70). No one can possess the mind of another human being, and we stand accountable for our actions.

Clarkson defends the same conclusion also on theological grounds. Chattel slavery betrays the idea that every agent will stand accountable for their actions. ‘[If] we are assured that mankind are to exist in a future state, and to give an account of those actions,’ then this theological doctrine ‘strikes at the very root of slavery’ (Commerce 248). Clarkson puts it rhetorically: ‘how can any man be justly called to an account for his actions, whose actions are not at his own disposal?’ (ibid.). The case of chattel slavery is the case where a person’s liberty is supposed to be ‘absolutely bought and appropriated’ (ibid.). It assumes that one’s actions are not one’s own. But God judges us as individuals.

I draw out Clarkson’s conclusions from these arguments about government, mentality, and theology. Transatlantic and colonial slavers could not have the right to buy and sell African slaves. Instead, slavers merely possessed the bodies of Africans as a matter of fact. Given that Africans are minded individuals, Europeans violated their obligations to recognize the natural liberty of Africans. Moreover, chattel slavery was a practice that affronted natural religion and the idea that we will stand judged as individuals (See Commerce 115; 256). Consequently, the entire enterprise of transatlantic slavery lacked any legitimacy.

Clarkson’s theory still has its problems. His understanding of liberty presupposes a thick pre-social state of nature. He claims that European enslavers ‘invade the liberties of those, who…are in a state of nature, in a state of original dissociation, perfectly independent, perfectly free’ (Commerce 76). On one level, we can understand this claim in a minimal or basic sense: Europeans and Africans are in a state of nature relative to each other. They ought to respect each other’s natural rights. But Clarkson also uses the concept of the state of nature in an inflationary sense, couching it with notions of progress and development. By ‘inflationary,’ I mean that Clarkson conceives of the state of nature as a primitive stage that societies progress beyond. This is evident when Clarkson says that ‘Africans are torn from their country in a state of nature,’ and elaborates that Africans are ‘mostly in a savage state’ (Commerce 167–68). Clarkson mobilizes these observations to defend the natural capacity for Africans to progress and become on par with Europeans. The point is that Clarkson employs an inflationary conception of the state of nature and argues that Africans are at a more primitive stage of social development.

To summarize, Clarkson develops a social contract theory to argue that liberty is a natural right. He argues that mentality grants human beings with liberty. He explores the meaning of liberty in terms of individual self-possession and possession of actions. It is impermissible in his view for liberty to be commodified. Any legitimate political community is one that respects the individuation of human persons, their bodily freedom, and their capacity to consent. By focusing on liberty as a natural right grounded in a pre-social state of nature, Clarkson neglected to consider the legal and social rights Africans already had within their communities. He viewed Africans not as progressed in comparison to Europeans. In the next section, I connect these claims to Clarkson’s vision for redress.

2.2

During the same period as Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments, Clarkson reasoned that abolitionists should aim only at the legal abolition of the slave trade. He published essays that built on his 1786 work: A Summary View of the Slave Trade and the Probable Consequences of its Abolition (1787) and An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (1788). He described the main contribution of his 1786 essay to be its moral theory of ‘the injustice and inhumanity of the slave-trade’ (Summary 8; cf. Impolicy 3). Clarkson understood all his texts to support each other to favor the abolition of the slave trade for moral and political reasons.

Clarkson first defended a piecemeal approach to redressing transatlantic slavery. This position is not reducible to pragmatics. David Brion Davis has claimed that, within the British abolitionist context, ‘the tactical decision to attack the slave trade carried profound ideological meaning.’⁸ In my view, Clarkson’s focus on the slave trade also reflected principles that had philosophical import.

Clarkson framed the injustice of transatlantic slavery in terms of root causes. In An Essay on Slavery, he frames his major argument against transatlantic slavery as such. He develops a social contract theory to attack the slave trade and uses this conclusion to assess colonial slavery (Commerce 56; 117; 239–40). The injustice of the slave trade included direct acts of murder, kidnapping, and captivity. Colonial slavery was the morally illegitimate but legally tolerated institution founded upon transatlantic enslavement.

Clarkson motivated redressing transatlantic slavery by focusing on the slave trade, positing that the abolition of the slave trade would be striking at the root of the whole evil (History of Abolition 1: 286–87; Ultimate Emancipation 1). William Wilberforce would adopt the same view and would claim in a speech from 1789 that the slave trade was the spring of all the evils of transatlantic slavery.⁹ Davis makes the point that Clarkson and other abolitionists focused on the commission of injustice rather than the institutional occasions for injustice.¹⁰ In other words, in the case of Clarkson, he concentrated on the root causes of transatlantic slavery but intentionally neglected engaging with the broader social and institutional injustices beyond the slave trade. I emphasize the intentional nature of this decision because Granville Sharp pressed against Clarkson and other White abolitionists for adopting these views about the slave trade in 1787.¹¹

Clarkson grounded his vision for redress in the idea of progress. He sincerely believed that abolishing the slave trade would initiate a change in morals in England and the British colonies. Emancipation would gradually happen without the need for legal intervention. In light of the end of the slave trade, he thought that slave-masters would be naturally incentivized to emancipate their slaves. Clarkson described emancipation as a plant that would naturally arise from the ashes of the abolished slave trade (History of Abolition 2: 586).

Later, Clarkson came to regret his views about the natural progress of emancipation, and his reasons are illuminating for interpreting Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments:

Clarkson was forced to abandon his original view that placed hope in the abolition of the slave trade as sparking progress. Progress, as an idea, was of no emancipatory use. Liberation from Caribbean slavery would not happen naturally.

2.3

Clarkson’s thoughts evolved on the issue of the permissibility of resistance. In his An Essay on Slavery from 1786, he defended principles that authorized slave resistance. In a key passage from 1786, he gives the following argument:

Let us suppose then, that in consequence of the commerce you were forced into a ship; that you were conveyed to another country; that you were sold there; that you were confined to incessant labour…would you not think that you had a right to resist their treatment? Would you not resist it with a safe conscience? And would you not be surprised, if your resistance should be termed rebellion?—By the former premises you must answer, yes. —Such then is the case with the wretched Africans. They have a right to resist your proceedings. They can resist them, and yet they cannot justly be considered as rebellious. For though we suppose them to have been guilty of crimes to one another; though we suppose them to have been the most abandoned and execrable of men, yet are they perfectly innocent with respect to you receivers (Commerce 241).

Clarkson forwards a thought experiment to justify the conclusion of his argument. He presents to his readers the case of them becoming trafficked and enslaved. He assumes that reason would lead one to assert their right to resist and secure their own corporeal freedom. What is interesting about this passage is that Clarkson is mobilizing the concept of a state of nature in a minimal sense. Even if it is the case that Africans were guilty of crimes, with respect to Europeans, Africans must be treated as entitled to their liberty as a natural right. The conclusion of his argument is that slave resistance is morally permissible. His claim about slave resistance is that it is a negative natural right and not a positive obligatory claim; i.e., Clarkson’s conclusion is not that the enslaved ought to resist. Later, in 1792, within The True State of the Case, Respecting the Insurrection at St. Domingo, Clarkson distanced himself and the abolitionist movement from political endorsement of the Haitian slave insurrection, which sparked fear in the European imagination (Insurrection 2, 8). He used this fear to press the abolition of the slave trade (Insurrection 8). Much later, once Clarkson adopted pacifism in response to the Napoleonic wars, he advocated for non-resistance in ending colonial slavery. In his last published work on Caribbean slavery from 1823, Clarkson argued that emancipation ought to be enacted the first moment it is practicable, practicable without danger, and such that it is beneficial for all parties involved (Ultimate Emancipation 15–6). While going through examples of emancipation, he uses the Haitian insurrection as a negative model to define his vision for safe and gradual emancipation (See Ultimate Emancipation 22–33). Clarkson attempted to reassure Caribbean planters that gradual legal emancipation would be beneficial for them, appealing to the fact that Africans were ‘malleable at the European will’ (Ultimate Emancipation 42).¹⁸

Clarkson never defended principles that obligated colonial overthrow. He claimed privately that slave owners and colonial legislatures needed to be forced to listen to reason. But his intended claim was that both legal intervention and ‘the public Voice’ needed to be the forces for emancipatory change.¹⁹

3.1

The beginning of Thoughts and Sentiments presents justice as restoring to diasporic Africans ‘the common rights of nature’ (Thoughts 9). Cugoano theorizes his arguments in terms of natural rights, privileges, and common rights (See, e.g., Thoughts 11; 21–2; 28; 38; 61; 71; 91). It is God who has endowed every human creature with the natural right to liberty (Thoughts 97). I take it for granted that an uncontroversial interpretation of these passages is that Cugoano agrees with Clarkson that liberty is a natural right. Human beings have the congenital right to their corporeal freedom. I will not explore the metaphysics of liberty in Cugoano since he shows little interest in this approach. I will also not recycle what other scholars already have done and show that Cugoano is a natural rights theorist.²⁰

I focus on two underexplored points in scholarship to contrast Cugoano and Clarkson. First, Cugoano thinks Africans were socially degraded and not simply deprived of corporeal freedom. Both enslaved and free Africans were disenfranchised from their normative standing as social beings. Second, he does not rely on the idea of a pre-social state of nature.²¹ Liberty as a natural right entails not just individual bodily possession but the right to be a social being. These points of contrast will put us in a position to appreciate the significance of his 1787 demands for liberation either through redress as the legal enfranchisement of Africans or colonial overthrow.

Cugoano draws attention to the social dispossession of Africans when he reflects on the Zong massacre of 1781, describing it as ‘a very shocking, peculiar, and almost unheard of conception’ (Thoughts 85). He identifies two primary ways the British instigators of slavery treated Africans: ‘they either consider them as their own property, that they may do with as they please, in life or death; or the taking away the life of a black man is of no more account than taking away the life of a beast’ (ibid.). Cugoano highlights two aspects of oppression: alleging to possess property rights over enslaved Africans and the racial dehumanization of Africans. It might be easily overlooked, but in discussing the first aspect, he specifically addresses the status of enslaved Africans, whereas the second concerns the social valuation of any African’s life. Racial dehumanization, was an outgrowth of property dehumanization.

Cugoano elaborates on these points to draw out a social thesis. In the context of the Zong case, he engaged the legal arguments,²² writing that ‘[their] argument was, that the slaves were to be considered the same as horses; and their plea for throwing them into the sea was nothing better than that it might be more necessary to throw them overboard to lighten their vessel [for] goods of greater value’ (Thoughts 85). He forwards a conclusion having in view how Africans were treated as goods and how those who engaged in marronage were hunted like animals: ‘our lives are accounted of no value’ (Thoughts 85). Africans were deprived of corporeal freedom through enslavement. But both enslaved and free Africans were dominated without legal and social consequences. Cugoano draws out his social thesis from observing how Africans were dispossessed of value: the liberty of Africans entails their right to be social creatures.

Cugoano’s theory of liberty extends beyond Clarkson’s focus on individual self-possession and actions to encompass the broader transatlantic social fabric. It is for this reason that Cugoano articulates his concerns for both enslaved and free Africans through the moral language of privileges and common rights and not simply natural rights. In an illuminating letter from 1791, he makes a global claim that the inhuman distinction of colors had spread itself over the geographical North (Thoughts 196). He also highlights in the same letter how free Blacks found themselves as “worse off” than slaves because Whites refused to assign proper value to their goods, barring them from trade and undermining their livelihood (ibid.). These ideas ground his position that among ‘the European seafaring people in general,’ ‘a Black Man is scarcely ever safe’ (Thoughts 106).

His social thesis encompasses how oppressive slavers were legally protected. Cugoano, as Johan Olsthoorn has argued, defends justifications of time-limited penal bondage by virtue of divine law.²³ But Cugoano also observes that the penal architecture of colonial slavery operates through a distorted application of divine law (Thoughts 57). Authorization of punishment for crimes was distorted in the sense that Africans were murderously punished, whereas oppressive European slavers went unpunished. European colonial powers extended protection through law and government over those slavers who dispossessed Africans of their social standing (Thoughts 71).

Cugoano accordingly flips the charge of savagery on its head against Clarkson and other theorists who make similar claims. The European colonial powers who practiced transatlantic slavery, not the Africans, are the ones who exhibit ‘unsociableness’ (Thoughts 22–3). Africans appreciate their social privileges and liberty just like any other people in the world (Thoughts 28). Cugoano posed to his European readers more forcefully than Clarkson that the so-called most civilized nations were also the ones with the greatest social ills. Not even the spread of Christianity can serve as a theodicean justification (Thoughts 24). Cugoano argues on the basis of African civilization that ‘we may boast of some more essential liberties than any of the civilized nations in Europe enjoy’ (Thoughts 103). He diagnosed European colonialists as degrading themselves, and that the state of political communities in the colonies was intolerably unsociable.

Cugoano does not ground his conception of liberty in a pre-social state of nature. No passage within Thoughts and Sentiments operates through the idea of a pre-social state of nature that agents leave to bring about political order. For him, there is one divine order of nature: ‘God alone… established the course of nature’ (Thoughts 29). The normative import of his claim is that humans have the right to pursue sociable relations with each other in accordance with the order of nature (See, e.g., Thoughts 29; 51). His vision for a cosmopolitan community is a community that encompasses the entire variety of human skin colors, free from all forms of dehumanization. In the one passage where Cugoano describes political transition, he narrates his social alienation from his Fante community, descending from ‘a state of innocence and freedom’ and into ‘a state of horror and slavery’ (Thoughts 15). He goes from a sociable condition to one that lacks any consideration for his normative standing as a social creature. His conception of liberty entails the positive right to be a social entity.

3.2

Cugoano disagrees with Clarkson’s piecemeal approach to redressing transatlantic slavery, defending his own vision for redress for principled reasons. In this section, I further develop Cugoano’s social conception of liberty, which determines his argument for legal enfranchisement.

Cugoano rejected the root cause idea for redressing transatlantic slavery. He presented transatlantic slavery to be intolerable and that ‘the whole, or any part of that iniquitous traffic of slavery, can no where, or in any degree, be admitted,’ and ‘the whole may easily appear in every part’ (Thoughts 10). Again, he reflects ‘ought not the whole of [the traffic], and all the branches of such exceeding evil and wicked traffic, and all the iniquity of it to be relinquished, and root and branches to speedily given up and put an end to?’ (Thoughts 77). Legal redress respectively ought to aim at the whole of transatlantic slavery. He did not think that abolishing the slave trade would lead to natural emancipation over time.

Cugoano presented a comprehensive vision for legal redress: ‘total abolition, and an universal emancipation of slaves, and the enfranchisement of all the Black People…without any hesitation, or delay for a moment [my emphasis]’ (Thoughts 91). Scholars have criticized the proposals at the end of Thoughts and Sentiments,²⁴ with Keith Sandiford describing them as discretionary rather than as radical.²⁵ What is particularly objectionable to some scholars is Cugoano’s seven-year plan to transform the slave plantation community into a free-laboring one. These scholars neglect to appreciate his abolitionist demands in his context. Today, we simply take for granted political insights from the abolitionist tradition, but these insights were fiercely debated in Cugoano’s context. His plan leaves nothing to natural progress in comparison to Clarkson. Cugoano presented a form of legal redress that would actively intervene and attempt to repair the social fabric of a community that has tolerated chattel slavery.²⁶ His plan demanded the immediate transformation of slave labor to ‘sociable servitude,’ that is to say, ‘lawful servitude’ without ‘tortures and oppression’ (Thoughts 51; 98). If any owner did not provide suitable instruction for an ex-slave, then the laborer should be taken away and assigned to another to instruct them (Thoughts 99). The point was to secure the social conditions that recognized the dignity of African labor.

What is particularly unique to Cugoano is his demands for enfranchisement. We can understand the philosophical import of this demand through his conception of liberty. Cugoano pressed more than Clarkson that liberty which rests on oppression is not the kind of liberty that is desirable nor is it secure politically. Cugoano’s vision for liberation bears not just on enslaved and free Africans but also on those Europeans who were citizens of colonial powers. His Thoughts and Sentiments directs its arguments not to ‘the Parliament of Great Britain,’ as Olaudah Equiano does in March of 1789, but to ‘the Inhabitants of Great-Britain’ (Narrative 7; Thoughts 1).

In comparison to Clarkson’s focus on the violation of natural rights in the slave trade, Cugoano pressed African enfranchisement on his British reader. If Britons remained bystanders to African unfreedom, then their liberty would be nothing other than the freedom of robbers. If Britons tolerated laws that allowed slavers to disenfranchise a whole portion of the political community, then the law of their community was ultimately Thrasymachian.

The philosophical kernel of Cugoano’s arguments is that liberty attains consistency or honesty only in so far as it is secured for the whole community as enfranchised. Liberty is merely ‘vaunted’ if one is within a community that tolerates disenfranchisement (Thoughts 10). If one finds themselves in a community that enacts ‘laws for tolerating slavery and wickedness,’ Cugoano reasons, ‘if you give it a sanction by your passive obedience, [then] it manifests that you have gone over to those brutish enemies of mankind’ (Thoughts 95). His basic intuition on this issue is that if someone disavows their obligation by remaining passive, then that agent is ‘a conniver and confederator’ in the injustice (Thoughts 95).

It is a duty, Cugoano writes, ‘for an honest community of men to get out of the hands of rogues and villains [my emphasis]’ (Thoughts 59). The liberty of Britons was at stake if they did not fight for enfranchisement. In another passage, he elaborates why:

It may be feared that if these unconstitutional laws, reaching from Great-Britain to her colonies, be long continued in and supported, to the carrying on that horrible and wicked traffic of slavery, must at last mark out the whole of the British constitution with ruin and destruction and that the most generous and tenacious people in the world for liberty, may also at last be reduced to slaves (Thoughts 70).

While Cugoano has in mind divine judgment in this argument, he also presents a political intuition. His idea is that liberty is secure only when it is extended to all members of a community. If liberty is acquired only at the cost of disenfranchisement, then there is nothing to prevent the inverse from occurring. For a community to maintain integrity in its moral language of rights, then these rights ought to be extended to every member. Legal toleration and inaction concerning disenfranchisement entail that the entire community cannot claim itself to be free with honesty. It is rather a community that is free only as rogues and villains; i.e., ‘the laws of [such a] society is for every one to catch what he can’ (Thoughts 87). Britons and their constitution were marked out for their lack of consistency.

In comparison to Clarkson’s vision of redress, Cugoano pressed beyond the issue of the slave trade and drove the issue of slavery back to the Britons themselves. A people should aspire to be free such that their liberty is not founded upon the unfreedom of others.

3.3

Cugoano agrees with Clarkson on the question of a negative natural right to resistance. But Cugoano also defends principles that obligate the overthrow of colonial slavery. He reminded his British reader that if they failed to secure conditions that respected the liberty of Africans, then it was a moral obligation for Africans to restore their own liberty, and secure conditions such that chattel slavery in the colonies would be punished. The central passage in Thoughts and Sentiments reads:

Therefore, if there was no other way to deliver a man from slavery, but by enslaving his master, it would be lawful for him to do so if he was able, for this would be doing justice to himself, and be justice as the law requires, to chastise his master for enslaving of him wrongfully (Thoughts 59).

Cugoano starts his argument with a last-resort condition. One can enslave another agent only if there are no other means by which to escape slavery. Cugoano further moralizes the liberating action, as it cannot be for the sake of revenge (Thoughts 52). What ought to be action-guiding is justice, not simply liberation. The import of justice in this case is twofold. First, the enslaved dignifies herself by asserting her normative standing as a human being. Cugoano’s intuition seems to be that the slaver needs to recognize that the enslaved can exercise proportional power over him if the conditions allow it. Second, the enslaved is morally obligated to show that the slaver has done wrong. This second aspect of justice is meant to show the slaver that arbitrary punishment of human beings is intolerable and demands rectification. As Cugoano writes earlier in the text, ‘the laws of God and man require that [enslavers] should be suppressed, and deprived of their liberty, or perhaps their lives’ (Thoughts 51). Interestingly, Cugoano, along with the Sons of Africa, thank Granville Sharp in a letter from 1788 for his writings, and they collectively promote ‘to restrain the avaricious invaders of the rights and liberties of men’ (Thoughts 188).²⁷ The point is that Cugoano did not arrive at his moralized position in isolation.

Though overthrowing chattel slavery in the colonies does not immediately promote a free community, Cugoano believes that certain minimal moral conditions must be met. Treating persons like chattel is intolerable and cannot be gradually reformed. He did not live to witness the Haitian insurrection, but the moral principles from Thoughts and Sentiments serve as the place for his response.

3.4

In 1787, Cugoano refused to decide the future. He wrote that it was not up to him to predict the revolution that would be the end of slavery (Thoughts 61). He outlined two moral paths toward liberation: first, by Britons agitating for the enactment of legal enfranchisement and the creation of conditions for sociable servitude in the colonies; or second, through ‘the destruction and overthrow of all the transgressors’ who violate divine law (ibid.).

Cugoano arrived at a social conception of liberty in presenting these paths. Liberty has two normative conditions beyond corporeal freedom: it ought to be a social good and a common good. Cugoano thinks that liberty as a natural right entails the right to be a social creature. The transatlantic political community ought to value the liberty of Africans and address their disenfranchisement. His conception of liberty bears upon free Britons as well. Freedom that rests on disenfranchisement is not the kind of liberty that is socially desirable. It is not socially desirable because then one’s liberty is neither honest nor consistent. By a lack of honesty or consistency, Cugoano means that one is free only at the cost of the unfreedom of others. Second, he argues that liberty should be a common good in the sense that liberty ought to be secured as a common right. Freedom founded upon disenfranchisement is not politically secure. Any people undergoing disenfranchisement can assert their moral obligation to retaliate. Cugoano thought liberty ought to be a good of common security for both Africans and Europeans. For Africans, this required the security of legal and social conditions for their labor and protection against arbitrary punishment. For free Britons, it entailed the obligation to stand in solidarity with the struggle of Africans and create conditions of common security.

The positive conception of liberty that Cugoano arrives at unites several of his arguments. It brings together a cluster of arguments that not only bear upon the disenfranchisement of Africans but also pertain to his many arguments concerning the deprivation of ‘the poor and needy of their right [my emphasis]’ and the political conditions under which both Black and White laborers can live ‘without being oppressed’ (Thoughts 91). He asserts that any nation claiming to ‘boast of liberty’ is obligated to provide economic security (Thoughts 103). It is from this interpretative vantage point that one can understand his defense of African civilization against Europe because, as he writes about African civil society, ‘the poorest amongst us are never in distress for want’ (Thoughts 103). My position is that these arguments are united by Cugoano’s political philosophy.

4.1 Liberty and the State of Nature

1. In An Essay on Slavery from 1786, Clarkson develops a social contract theory to defend the liberty of Africans as a natural right. He frames liberty through a pre-social state of nature. It is impermissible in Clarkson’s view for liberty to be commodified because mentality grants human beings with liberty; liberty entails individual corporeal possession and possession of actions. God judges us as individuals, and a just political community reflects these facts.

2. Cugoano agrees with Clarkson that liberty is a natural right. But Cugoano does not ground his conception of liberty in a pre-social state of nature. Liberty entails the right to be a social creature. Liberty, he thinks, ought to have two normative features besides individual corporeal freedom: it ought to be a social good and a common good. His positive conception of liberty has in view not only enslaved Africans but also free Africans, Britons, and poor laborers.

4.2 Redressing Transatlantic Slavery

1. Clarkson adopted a piecemeal plan to end transatlantic slavery. He argued to end it by legally abolishing the slave trade. He took on a root cause approach and paired it with the belief that emancipation would happen naturally over time and without legal intervention. Clarkson regretted these views later in his life for reasons that pertained to the nature of absolute domination, racism, and plantation labor.

2. In 1787, Cugoano rejected a piecemeal approach to redressing transatlantic slavery. He did not just argue for the abolition of the slave trade and legal emancipation, but he also advocated for the legal enfranchisement of all Afro-diasporic people. He pressed upon his British readers that their liberty was also at stake in securing communal conditions for African enfranchisement.

4.3 Resistance and Overthrow

1. Clarkson’s position evolved on the issue of the permissibility of slave resistance. In his An Essay on Slavery from 1786, he defended the negative natural right to resist enslavement. In 1792, he distanced himself from the Haitian insurrection. Later, once he was a pacifist, Clarkson advocated for safe and gradual emancipation through legal means.

2. Within Thoughts and Sentiments, Cugoano agreed with Clarkson that slaves had the negative natural right to resist. But Cugoano also defended principles that positively obligated colonial overthrow. In accordance with justice and divine law, the enslaved were morally obligated to liberate themselves from chattel slavery and chastise their slavers for arbitrary punishment.

I end this article by raising problems. First, how much weight do we want to place on Cugoano’s moral principles? This is a problem for anyone who engages arguments not just from Thoughts and Sentiments but also from David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, originally published in 1829. Walker argued that African American slaves were morally obligated to secure the conditions for their own freedom: it is a ‘duty to try every scheme.’²⁸ He thought that not only slaves but free African Americans were obligated to change how they conceived of themselves and assert their dignity in the face of racial degradation. But, how far should we make moral demands of the oppressed not just to liberate themselves but also to rectify their oppressors? Such demands upon the oppressed seem supererogatory. One might also want to argue that effective resistance comes in different forms other than revolutionary action. If one prefers minimal moral premises, then Clarkson’s defense of the negative natural right of resistance is more attractive. But if one finds it more compelling that we are not simply responsible for ourselves but also for others, then Cugoano’s defense is more persuasive.²⁹

Second, Cugoano is a Christian paternalist in terms of defending what he deems to be moral civilization. Christian paternalism was a common view in the modern period, adopted not only by Clarkson but also more famously by John Locke,³⁰ so the problem of Christian paternalism is not unique to Cugoano as a Christian thinker. But, how do we reckon Cugoano’s Christian paternalism alongside his criticism of European colonialism? His seven-year proposal demands the instruction of African ex-slaves in Christianity and the laws of civilization (Thoughts 99). Cugoano has the same intention in promoting the moral education of Africans through his The Nature of Servitude, which is directed to the Sons of Africa (Thoughts 145). Is Cugoano’s Christian paternalism just as colonialist as Locke’s and Clarkson’s? Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh have claimed that Cugoano is one of the first decolonial political theorists, but more work needs to be done to substantiate this interpretation.³¹

I end with the Jamesian problem. This article brought into view radical ideas in Cugoano’s philosophy. But as C. L. R. James observes in his own work on Toussaint Louverture, ‘Ideas do not fall from heaven.’³² I believe James is right.³³ So the takeaway from this article is not that Cugoano is an isolated thinker deserving of canonization. Rather, the article views Thoughts and Sentiments as an opportunity to engage with the abolitionist political tradition and the philosophical issues raised within it. Cugoano also presents us with the possibility to reflect on the Afro-diasporic communities that he learned from, such as the Sons of Africa and the organized Black networks in London.³⁴ By reconstructing arguments from his texts, we can choose to explore issues not typically addressed in modern philosophy, such as philosophical problems arising from the African diaspora and ideas in Akan thought.³⁵ These intellectual trajectories deserve to be at the center of our reevaluation of what counts as the history of modern philosophy.³⁶