A 1773 edition of Phlllis Wheatley’s ‘Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.’Leading up to the American Revolution, England possessed one advantage in the heated propaganda war with its wayward colonies: American patriots, so preoccupied with their own liberty, were among the largest buyers and sellers of humans in the world. The hypocrisy was self-evident. As one English writer noted, even as Bostonians claimed that officials in London were “forging infernal chains,” they themselves “actually have in town two thousand Negroe slaves, who neither by themselves in person, nor by representatives of their own free election ever gave consent to their present state of bondage.” Samuel Johnson put it more tartly: “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”So effective was this line of attack that many revolutionaries considered slavery in the colonies the greatest obstacle to their own rights. Responses ranged from a defensive justification of slavery on grounds of racial inferiority to full-throated calls for the end of the practice altogether.

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