38 Michèle Ducket
traders and dealers prevented her from feeling the burden of those black peoples
coming to die on her plantations. A land of exile and frustration, she had
nothing to offer her slaves other than slavery. Thus the abolitionists were
constantly confronted with the eternal logic of the system. At the beginning
of the eighteenth century, the Anglican Church's only answer to the expansion
of the slave trade was a great campaign to 'christianize' slaves, thereby
shelving the issue, as it were, and resigning itself to making Christians of those
of whom it could not make free men.
Humanitarianism, the economists and the EnlightenmentA noble-minded primitivist trend had emerged from within Protestant theology
pointing out that blacks were good, and stressing the depravity of the slave-
owners who lived off their work; their corruption and 'materialism' were as
blameworthy as the 'unnatural commerce' carried on by the slave-traders.
These themes were taken up frequently in sermons during the eighteenth cen-
tury, as well as in literature, for example by Daniel Defoe and in James Thom-
son's The Seasons, which was to be Saint-Lambert's source of inspiration.
Novels, poetry and the theatre were invaded by images of the suffering slave-
victim set against those of the cold-blooded, merciless master, all of which
prepared the ground for the abolition of slavery in people's minds.^26 With their
philosophy of sentiment, Shaftesbury^27 and Hutcheson gave a rational basis
to that active compassion with which God has expressly endowed every human
being so that he may concern himself with the sufferings of his fellow-men. This
gave rise to a tendency to portray in the most gruesome detail the misfortunes of
the black people, wrested from an idyllic life to be plummeted into the hell
of the plantations, such as in John Wesley's Thoughts on slavery. But Hutcheson
had himself been distressed by his reading of the accounts of the voyages of
Sir Hans Sloane and Atkins.^28
However, the influence of Scottish moralist philosophy, of which Hut-
cheson, and then Adam Smith, were the exponents, was not only due to the
virtuous emotion which was its weapon against the insensitivity of the evil
slave-owners, but can also be attributed to the utilitarianist arguments it used
to such effect: thus Hutcheson demonstrated that slavery and slave labour,
which had every appearance of being in the interests of the slave-holder, were
not so in the long run and were in fact the reverse of the very ideal of happiness
and human progress.^29 But his disciple, Adam Smith, went much further:^30
for him, slavery was only part of a system which worked badly because it
pitted personal interest against the public welfare. The way in which slaves
were treated prevented them from working, and slavery was the most costly
and unproductive form of labour. In fact, Smith's theories revolve around the
whole relationship between free and forced labour in a changing Western