Slavery Condemned: First Abolitionist Article Published

The first American abolitionist essay appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal on March 8, 1775, nine years before Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense. Published anonymously under the title "African Slavery in America," the essay did not just call slavery wrong. It demanded immediate emancipation and argued that freed slaves deserved land as compensation, a claim so radical that even most abolitionists would not touch it for another century. The author, widely though not definitively attributed to Paine himself, drew on Enlightenment principles of natural rights to argue that enslaving Africans was incompatible with the colonial demand for liberty from British tyranny. The essay pointed to the hypocrisy at the heart of the revolutionary project: men who declared themselves oppressed by parliamentary taxation held half a million people in hereditary bondage. Three weeks after the essay's publication, America's first abolitionist society, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, was formed in Philadelphia, directly inspired by the arguments the anonymous writer had made. The Continental Congress was already meeting in that same city, drafting protests about British tyranny while the economy of every colony south of Pennsylvania depended on enslaved labor. Benjamin Franklin joined the abolitionist society in 1787 and became its president. The essay's demand for reparations through land grants was not fulfilled during the Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction, or any subsequent period. The argument it introduced, that the abolition of slavery required material compensation for the enslaved and not merely legal freedom, has persisted in American political discourse for over 250 years without resolution.