What are Sewall’s main objections to slavery and what authority does he cite to
ID: 234504 • Letter: W
Question
What are Sewall’s main objections to slavery and what authority does he cite to support his objections? or answer: How do Pontiac and Equiuano differ in the ways they address their white audiences?What are Sewall’s main objections to slavery and what authority does he cite to support his objections? or answer: How do Pontiac and Equiuano differ in the ways they address their white audiences?
What are Sewall’s main objections to slavery and what authority does he cite to support his objections? or answer: How do Pontiac and Equiuano differ in the ways they address their white audiences?
Explanation / Answer
Samuel Sewall from 1652 to 1730 was a judge, businessman, and printer in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, best known for his involvement in the Salem witch trials, for which he later apologized, and his essay The Selling of Joseph (1700), which criticized slavery. He served for many years as the chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, the province's high court.
The Puritan Judge Samuel Sewall, in his 1700 pamphlet The Selling of Joseph , also condemned slavery as “man stealing,” and hence contrary to the word of the Bible. He concluded, however, that free black people could never be incorporated into “our Body Politick” and must exist “as a kind of extravasat Blood.
Apart from his involvement in the Salem witch trials, Sewall was somewhat liberal in his views for the time. In The Selling of Joseph (1700), for instance, he came out strongly against slavery, making him one of the earliest colonial abolitionists. There he argued, "Liberty is in real value next unto Life: None ought to part with it themselves, or deprive others of it, but upon the most mature Consideration." He regarded "man-stealing as an atrocious crime which would introduce among the English settlers people who would remain forever restive and alien", but also believed that "There is such a disparity in their Conditions, Colour, Hair, that they can never embody with us, and grow up into orderly Families, to the Peopling of the Land." Although holding such segregationist views, he maintained that "These Ethiopians, as black as they are; seeing they are the Sons and Daughters of the First Adam, the Brethren and Sisters of the Last ADAM [meaning Jesus Christ], and the Offspring of God; They ought to be treated with a Respect agreeable.
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