Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/173

 proper to notice a few of the more prominent and active of these harbingers in the great cause of humanity.

Morgan Godwyn, a clergyman of the established church, wrote a Treatise upon the subject, which he dedicated to the then archbishop of Canterbury. He gave it to the world, at the time mentioned, under the title of "The Negro's and Indian's Advocate." In this treatise he lays open the situation of these oppressed people, of whose sufferings he had been an eyewitness in the island of Barbadoes. He calls forth the pity of the reader in an affecting manner, and exposes with a nervous eloquence the brutal sentiments and conduct of their oppressors. This seems to have been the first work undertaken in England expressly in favor of the cause.

Richard Baxter, the celebrated divine among the Nonconformists, in his Christian Directory, published about the same time as the Negro's and Indian's Advocate, gives advice to those masters in foreign plantations, who have negroes and other slaves. In this he protests loudly against this trade. He says expressly that they, who go out as pirates, and take away poor Africans, or people of another land who never forfeited life or liberty, and make them slaves and sell them, are the worst of robbers, and ought to be considered as the common enemies of mankind; and that they, who buy them, and use them as mere beasts for their own convenience, regardless of their spiritual welfare, are fitter to be called demons than christians. He then proposes several queries, which he answers in a clear and forcible manner, showing the great inconsistency of this traffic, and the necessity of treating those then in bondage with tenderness and due regard to their spiritual concerns.

The person who seems to have noticed the subject next was Dr. Primatt. In his "Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy, and on the Sin of Cruelty to Brute-animals," he takes occasion to advert to the subject of the African slave trade. "It has pleased God," says he, "to cover some men with white skins, and others with black; but as there is neither merit nor demerit in complexion, the white man, notwithstanding the barbarity of custom and prejudice, can have no right by virtue of his color to enslave and tyrannize over the black man. For whether a man be white or black, such he is by God's appointment, and, abstractedly considered, is neither a subject for pride, nor an object of contempt."

In the year 1735, Atkins who was a surgeon in the navy, published his voyage to Guinea, Brazil, and the West Indies. In this work he describes openly the manner of making the natives slaves, such as by kidnapping, by unjust accusations and trials, and by other nefarious means. He states also the cruelties practiced upon them by the white people, and the iniquitous ways and dealings of the latter, and answers their argument, by which they insinuated that the condition of Africans was improved by their transportation to other countries.

In the year 1750 the reverend Griffith Hughes, rector of St. Lucy, in Barbadoes, published his Natural History of that island. He took an