OK, the first abolitionist was the first slave, even if the abolition wished for was very limited.
It’s frequently assumed that no freeborn free people were abolitionists until some certain point in history when abolitionism began to take hold. I doubt this, and it seems the best way to investigate would be to find out by means of a Big GQ Discussion as to who the first abolitionist who had never been enslaved was. Was that person a member of a slaveholding society? (It’s easy to denigrate foreigners with bizarre customs, after all.) If not, who was the first abolitionist who had never been enslaved who was a member of a slaveholding society?
From the paragraph about the Anti-Slavery Act of 1793 -
There may have been earlier people to have the idea, but he was the first to do something concrete about it. He witnessed a slave who, trying to run away, dove into the Niagara River and was re-captured and brought back to the American side. Simcoe was horrified, and started work to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.
[Bartolomé de las Casas](Bartolomé de las Casas) (1484-1566) opposed slavery, though initially he only opposed the slavery of native Americans, he later recanted this position and called for the abolition of all slavery, including of Africans.
Here’s a link to the plaque which commemorates this story - Chloe Cooley.
[quote]
On March 14, 1793, Chloe Cooley – a black slave in Queenston – was forcibly taken by her owner to be sold in the United States. Black veteran Peter Martin reported the incident and Cooley’s violent protests to Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, which led him to introduce the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada – an early step in the fight to abolish slavery.
Surely when the idea of slavery was occurring to some people but not yet implemented, their approval was not unanimous. Whenever slavery started, one of the reasons it didn’t start earlier must have been that some of these people thought it a bad idea. Abolitionists must predate slavery, right?
Well, you can’t abolish something before it exists. But, if some of your hypothetical protesters knew it was about to start and had plans to stop it once it did, I guess you could call those people abolitionists.
But I have a feeling no one really thought about it at all. It’s not like slavery started with the chattel slavery we think of today. It likely was just a gradual movement from socialism to leader-subject, to outsider-insider, etc.
This is logical, if you assume the premise that all innovation is opposed, but I’m not interested in this argument for two reasons:
First, I really would like to have names. That’s why I created the thread.
Second, ‘abolitionism’ as the term is usually used implies the abolitionist knows what slavery is, knows its effects, and is morally opposed to its continuation. The people who thought slavery was wrong because it was innovative aren’t abolitionists in that sense. (Besides, you can’t abolish something that doesn’t exist, for the same reason you can demolish a building nobody’s built.)
I daresay a lot of slaves from antiquity weren’t abolistionists: They had no beef with the institution of slavery, they just wished not to be the ones who were enslaved. Offered the opportunity to trade places with their masters, they would have taken it in a New York second.
Slavery is found in pre-literate societies. It is (almost certainly) older than any recorded history. Some people thinking it is a bad idea is probably older than recorded history too.
as already noted, slavery was looked askance at by many Persians and Greeks. I think Darius the First made a big deal of having his public works being done by free men for a salary. Various ancient societies had laws restricting or preventing completely enslavement of citizens for debts, e.g. Jewish law required manumission after 7 years and (a uniquely Jewish thing) prohibiting adultery with slaves. Assyrian government was at some point very concerned with the disappearance (in part through literal enslavement and in part through land dispossession) of the free peasants class that traditionally supplied their infantry levies.
So in a sense there are some instances of truly ideological opposition to slavery, and there are many more instances of opposition to some forms of it for sound economic and policy reasons. The latter belongs to the same general category of socio-political debate as the modern discourse about implications of the conditions of the working poor. The observation that society is better off when largely composed of self-sufficient middle class rather than of slaves and “wage slaves” is not a new one.
