Transatlantic Factors And The Radicalism Of American Anti-slave Pioneers

From the late 17th century to the 1820s was the active period of the American anti-slave pioneers.However,the ideas and actions of the anti-slave pioneers is considered to be conservative and fail to have much impact on the abolition of slavery and slave trade.In the Transatlantic context,this article attempts to reinterpret the protest discourses of the American anti-slave pioneers,including the anti-slavery Quakers,anti-slavery Founding fathers and the colonizationists.I argue that many of the pioneers advocated the gradual abolition of slavery and slave trade,and they did not explicitly put forward the idea of the immediate abolition,but their protest discourses is radical in the corresponding historical context.The anti-slave pioneers of the United States produced a wide variety of anti-slave documents in the Atlantic world,such as pamphlets,letters,newspapers and woodprints,and relied on these literatures to develop transatlantic interactions and to consolidate the transatlantic anti-slave communities.Besides,through the Transatlantic interactions,the United States anti-slave pioneers put the issues of racial slavery into the international community,and often examined the racial slavery with a cosmopolitan view.And even some anti-slave pioneers saw themselves as the members of the world's citizens.In addition,both the anti-slave Quakers in the colonial period and the anti-slave Americans in the Atlantic Revolution,could stand at the forefront of the times and made full use of the Bibles,revolutionary ideology and other ideological resources to enrich and improve their own Anti-slave discourses,in order to expose the sins,illegality and harm of slavery and slave trade,and then advocated the full liberation of the blacks.Although the anti-slave pioneers of America tended to maintain the order and security of the society in which they are,and even to maintain the personal safety of whites and the images of America,but this crisis consciousness did be a more radical symbol of them.In short,from an international point of view,the anti-slave pioneers' ideas and actions are not conservative.Moreover,in all aspects,they laid the tone for abolitionism movement between the 1930s' to 60's,and contributed to the extinction of slavery and slave trade in the Atlantic.