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1 results

  • 6 - Antislavery in the Age of Rights

  • from Part I - A Revolution in Rights?
  • Edited by Dan Edelstein, Stanford University, California, Jennifer Pitts, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Rights
    Published online:
    22 January 2025
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024, pp 140-159

  • Summary

    This chapter draws attention to the curious ways in which rights and liberty did – and did not – overlap in the context of eighteenth-century abolitionist movements. Many eighteenth-century anti-slavery activists initially focused on improving enslaved people’s condition through legal rights rather than granting them liberty. In Spanish and French empires, there were fairly elaborate legal codes restricting slaveholders from exercising especially cruel and arbitrary punishments or practices. The British Empire was in fact an outlier in its lack of any such restrictions. At the same time, slavery was increasingly regarded as unnatural and a violation of natural rights, a view that triumphed in Somerset v. Steuart (1772). Emancipation in the northern United States also granted some rights before liberty. Conversely, the Haitian Declaration of 1804 spoke of liberty, but not rights, and even liberty was a collective, rather than individual good.