[ExI] History of Slavery

[Lee Corbin]

gts writes

>> Moreover, the greatest minds of antiquity, e.g. Aristotle
>> and Cicero---who could normally discern with great
>> objectivity the tiniest improprieties---failed utterly and
>> completely to condemn the institution of slavery. It took
>> some kind of sea-change in Western thought.  I'm not
>> sure what.
> 
> The Quakers were instrumental in bringing about that sea-change, both in  
> the US and Britain. One might say they were the spiritual force behind  
> abolitionism.

By coincidence, the next day after reading this I came across this
passage in Sowell's "White Liberals and Black Rednecks" which
supports exactly what you have said:

     Quakers were the first religoius group to find slavery
      morally intolerable---a threat to their own eternal
      salvation, rather than simply a temporal misfortune
      of others. Yet even the Quakers did not arrive at
      this conclusion all at once. In the seventeenth and
      early eighteenth centuries, there were Quaker
      plantation owners in the West Indies and Quaker
      slave traders operating from London, Philadelphia,
      and Newport, Rhode Island. 

Sowell explains why objection to slavery broke out where and
when it did, and so why Quakers were the first:

      Slavery was one of a number of long-standing institutions and
      traditions which were being questioned in the eighteenth
      century in the West. Before then, both securlar and religious
      philosophers going back to Plato had seen the mundane
      physical world as being far less important than the ideal or
      spiritual world...

Lee

> Will Durant writes affectionately of the humble and peaceful Quakers,  
> stating words to the effect that "The Quakers surprised Christians and  
> non-Christians alike by acting like Christians".