Let the Oppressed Go Free : Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America

University of Pennsylvania Press

Let the Oppressed Go FreeAbolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America\nAuthor(s): Nicholas P. Wood\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, United States\nImprint: University of Pennsylvania Press\nISBN-13: 9781512828320, 978-1512828320\nSynopsis\nTenacious activism by Quakers, African Americans, and antislavery evangelicals made antislavery central to the American Revolution\n In Let the Oppressed Go Free, Nicholas P. Wood presents the opponents of slavery who sustained and expanded the antislavery movement during the American Revolution in the face of widespread hostility. These early abolitionists were inspired by antislavery theology: the view that slavery was a sinful form of oppression that would provoke God's wrath against slaveholding societies. These principles were first advanced by a handful of Quakers and Puritans as early as the 1600s, but they did not become widespread until the second half of the eighteenth century. Quakers embraced antisla.