A system of the principles of the law of Scotland is a heavily detailed, largely neglected, legal work, published in Edinburgh in 1760. Remarkably, it contains the first printed text in Britain that explicitly advocated total and immediate abolition of both slavery and the slave trade. Its author was George Wallace (1727–1805), a lawyer and writer from Edinburgh, admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1754. His father, Robert Wallace (1697–1771), was a philosopher and a leading minister in the Church of Scotland. Like his father, George Wallace was deeply connected to the intellectual circles of Scotland’s Enlightenment; he was subsequently elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh upon its founding in 1783 and appointed commissary of Edinburgh in 1792.Footnote ¹

Drawing on a variety of philosophical and legal arguments, adopted from Montesquieu and others, Wallace described slavery as ‘so horrid, and so contrary to the feelings of humanity, that it cannot be agreeable to the Law of Scotland’.Footnote ² His main demand was that the Scottish court immediately recognize the inalienable natural liberty of any person arriving from the American colonies: ‘every one of those unfortunate men, who shall happen to get into Scotland, is, and is entitled to be declared to be a free man’.Footnote ³ Thus, he anticipated by over a decade the rulings in the cases of the formerly enslaved Africans James Somerset in England (1772) and Joseph Knight in Scotland (1778), who were then freed from their British enslavers. The implication was that slavery was not recognized by English and Scots law, and these cases are therefore considered key milestones in the movement toward the abolition of slavery in Britain. As we will see later, there is some evidence to suggest that Wallace’s argument might have had a direct impact on the verdicts in these cases.

As David Armitage has shown recently, Wallace was the ‘only one person in Britain’ who ‘went further than the prince of Wales’, namely George III, ‘in deploying the full battery of Montesquieu’s antislavery arguments in print’; Wallace dedicated his book to George, though as Armitage reveals, ‘he could not have known that his princely dedicatee had already anticipated Wallace’s … arguments against slavery in the privacy of his educational essays’.Footnote ⁴ Reinforcing the notion of Wallace’s singularity, John Cairns has pointed to the ‘normality of slavery’ in eighteenth-century Scotland, where ‘[m]erchants, lawyers, carriers, and mariners all simply accepted slavery as part of the world in which they lived and traded’, whereas ‘it was indeed a rare person (though such existed) who questioned it’, thus singling out Wallace’s antislavery view as virtually unparalleled at the time.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, it is worth noting that while Scotland’s direct involvement in the slave trade was limited, many Scots were nevertheless implicated in it, for instance, through employment in English ports and service in the British army, as well as through facilitation of and reliance on Caribbean commodities such as tobacco and sugar produced by enslaved labour.Footnote ⁶ Against this background, not only was Wallace’s originality noteworthy, but so too was the fact that he directly influenced prominent writers and abolitionists in Britain, France, and the United States and thus served as a bridge between philosophical, political, and legal circles in a global context.Footnote ⁷ Yet despite all that apparent importance, Wallace has remained largely understudied if not completely forgotten, and the scholarship lacks a comprehensive study of his thought and work.

This article offers the first in-depth analysis of Wallace’s antislavery argumentation, its intellectual context, and its significant reception. In particular, it demonstrates how Wallace used and appropriated different sources to arrive at his exceptionally radical conclusion. After outlining Wallace’s main arguments in Section I, Section II discusses his engagement with Montesquieu, Section III focuses on his novel use of Roman law as well as the laws of nature and nations, and Section IV explores how his thought was influenced by – and departed from – his father, Robert Wallace, who argued, pace David Hume, that slavery had contributed to the increase of population in the ancient world. Lastly, Section V sketches the impact of this antislavery publication in and beyond eighteenth-century Scotland. George Wallace’s absolute rejection of slavery, it will be argued here, was not only a groundbreaking deduction from existing utopian and Enlightenment ideals, but it also entailed a historic shift in the interpretation of legal theories that had previously been used to justify, rather than challenge, slavery.

I

George Wallace was a young advocate when his System of the principles of the law of Scotland was published. A work of nearly 600 pages, it covers a wide range of aspects of Scots law (public and private, written and customary) and numerous practical issues concerning marriage, children, property, injuries, and more. The short section on slavery – ‘Of slavery’, Book 3.2 of 9 – is located between the sections on ‘persons’ and ‘things’; in the original manuscript, it was titled accordingly: ‘Is every man a person? or, of slave’.Footnote ⁸

Wallace’s goal was stated from the outset: ‘not to explain the doctrine of slavery … but to prove that slavery is banished by the Law out of Scotland, and that every man, who is in this country, is free’.Footnote ⁹ He immediately made it clear that his opposition to slavery was categorical, in that he referred to slavery in the ancient world as well as in colonial America. For him, slavery was ‘a cruel, an inhuman, an unlawful institution’; it was ‘a state … so unnatural, so shocking, and so contrary to any humane feelings, that I cannot think of it without detestation’.Footnote ¹⁰ The reasoning was straightforward: slavery was contrary to human nature – and dehumanizing – and so it was utterly immoral and had to be illegal.

All human beings are equal and free by nature, argued Wallace, following the natural law tradition. ‘No man has naturally dominion over another’ and hence any such dominion could be achieved through ‘political and arbitrary institutions alone’.Footnote ¹¹ Furthermore, in a typical neo-Roman language, he contrasted liberty with dependence: it is evident that ‘every man … hates to be dependant on others’ or ‘to be subjected to the imperious dictates of another’, a fact that we would do well to remember when treating others.Footnote ¹² Equality and liberty, then, are the natural state of things, whereas ‘all inequality, all dependence, all servility, all superiority, all subjection, all pre-eminence, which is not necessary to the welfare of Society, is unnatural’ and hence ‘if it could, it ought to be destroyed’.Footnote ¹³ Since slavery is the worst possible violation of both equality and liberty, there simply could be no good argument for such an atrocious institution and no valid law that would tolerate it. Even more so in Enlightenment Scotland, where the law had to reflect the ‘superior wisdom and civility of the present age’ in which past ‘cruelty is become shocking to most of us; and a Spirit of industry is growing’.Footnote ¹⁴

In sum, ‘every man has a natural right to his liberty, is born free, and is independent of every other’; enslaved people, on the other hand, are completely subjected ‘to the dominion of their masters’ and with it to ‘all the insults, torture, cruelty, and hard usage, which inhumanity, avarice, pride, and caprice can suggest’.Footnote ¹⁵ Even if the institution of slavery had some ‘accidental advantages’, added Wallace significantly, it could not possibly justify denying ‘the happiness of so many human creatures’, clarifying what had sadly not yet been fully accepted: ‘Are not slaves, as well as others, men? Have they not human souls, human faculties, and human passions? Have not they sensibility to the wretchedness of their own condition? Do not they feel as well as others?’Footnote ¹⁶

In Scotland, Wallace acknowledged that ‘the question concerning the lawfulness of slavery has been seldom debated’, and he seems to have thought that it would remain a marginal practice.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet the issue was a crucial one, especially since judges were about to determine the fate of enslaved people brought from colonial America to Britain. Indeed, precisely this would happen in 1778, when the court ruled in the case of Knight v Wedderburn that slavery was not recognized by Scots law. Knight’s plea – seeking to leave his enslaver, who had brought him from Jamaica to Scotland, and to obtain paid employment so he could support his wife – was upheld first by the sheriff court of Perth and subsequently by the court of session. Although judicial support was not unanimous, several judges articulated strong arguments in his favour, with one judge, Lord Auchinleck, echoing Wallace closely:

As Wallace predicted rightly, then, the opposition to slavery as well as to the slave trade, however intuitive to some, had to be established on firm moral and legal grounds. To this end, he used various strategies and ideas, often drawing on them and arguably driving them to their logical conclusion in order to make his case as solid as possible. For instance, it has been recently pointed out that Wallace presented ‘ideas about human affections and the general good that are reminiscent of Hutcheson’, and others of Rousseau.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet there are much deeper debts that need to be identified in order to appreciate the full complexity of Wallace’s theory. In this sense, I would like to suggest, reading his political thought is to a large extent an exercise in tracing reception, appropriation, and radicalization of ideas.

II

The most evident and apparently most significant source for Wallace’s antislavery position was Montesquieu, whom he cited at considerable length in order to invoke the authority of ‘the greatest and the most humane politician of this, or perhaps of any age’.Footnote ²⁰ In Book 15 of the Spirit of laws (1748), from which Wallace borrowed extensively, Montesquieu famously criticized slavery, arguing that it ‘is in its own nature bad’ and ‘neither useful to the master nor to the slave’.Footnote ²¹ His discussion of slavery came primarily in the context of his climate theory, which distinguished between the character of inhabitants of different climates. Accordingly, while Montesquieu’s opposition to slavery should not be underestimated, it was not entirely unconditional either. Thus, for instance, he argued that slavery was more ‘reconcilable to reason’ in ‘countries where the excess of heat enervates the body, and renders men so slothful and dispirited that nothing but the fear of chastisement can oblige them to perform any laborious duty’.Footnote ²² Correspondingly, slavery was more ‘tolerable’ in ‘despotic countries’ whose inhabitants were ‘already in a state of political servitude’.Footnote ²³ There is good reason to believe that for Montesquieu these were descriptive rather than normative observations, and yet, for someone like Wallace, such qualifications were unacceptable.

The sections that Wallace used almost fully verbatim in the System were the most explicit that could be found in the Spirit of laws, where Montesquieu surveyed and rejected various historical origins of the so-called right of slavery, based on law, culture, or religion (Book 15.2–4).Footnote ²⁴ He then borrowed the section in which Montesquieu shrewdly (and perhaps dangerously, given that some readers chose to take it literally) rehashed, exaggerated, and ultimately ridiculed possible arguments to justify slavery (Book 15.5). Some arguments in particular, such as those relying on skin colour, are phrased in such an absurd and indeed offensive way that it becomes clear – given the context if nothing else – that Montesquieu, and Wallace following him, meant this as a biting satire. For example: ‘The colour of the skin may be determined by that of the hair, which, among the Egyptians, the best philosophers in the world, was of such importance that they put to death all the red-haired men who fell into their hands’.Footnote ²⁵

Wallace, who was apologetic about having to state the obvious in his brief section on slavery, chose to conclude it with these sarcastic remarks from Montesquieu. What is particularly striking is that Montesquieu’s antislavery arguments seem to have circled indirectly, through Scotland, back to the Encyclopédie. As Devin Vartija has recently noted, Louis de Jaucourt’s article, Traite des negres (1765), follows Wallace closely and ‘even goes on to argue that the European colonies in the Americas should be destroyed because of the human suffering they cause’, making Jaucourt ‘the first French thinker to make the step from antislavery to anti-colonialism’.Footnote ²⁶ Wallace, then, was one of the very first European writers to make precisely this claim.

Wallace’s use of Montesquieu was therefore the first but certainly not the last instance in which he fulfilled the most radical potential of his source (and was followed by subsequent radicals), while omitting the more ambiguous parts in Montesquieu that could – and in fact were – used by others to justify slavery, especially on the grounds of what we may now classify as geographical, climatological, or environmental determinism.Footnote ²⁷ Even George III, who likewise adopted Montesquieu’s arguments against slavery – albeit only in a private tutorial essay – appears nonetheless to have accepted the explanatory force of such factors, noting, for example, that ‘Africa enjoys the same sultery climate & the same servile fetters with Asia’.Footnote ²⁸

As we will see in the next section, Wallace also relied heavily on theories of the laws of nature and nations, which at the time, much thanks to the influence of Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, were inherent to the study of ethics and law.Footnote ²⁹ But as with the influence of Montesquieu, here too Wallace made some important modifications and reinterpreted in some important ways both the law of nature and the law of nations. Let us move now to the theoretical account of these laws which appears at the very beginning of his book.

III

The law of nature, according to Wallace, is ‘the sum of those rules, which, it is evident immediately from the light of nature, men ought constantly to observe in regulating their voluntary actions’, as opposed, that is, to their involuntary, physically necessitated actions.Footnote ³⁰ Wallace clarified, in what might have been displeasing to some of his orthodox contemporaries, that the law of nature is intelligible by the use of reason alone, ‘without the assistance of divine revelation’, which is what distinguishes it from positive divine laws.Footnote ³¹ Discussing the relationship between natural law and moral obligation, Wallace emphasized the intuitive, self-evident principle according to which one ‘ought, in all cases, to do to others every good office, which it will not be hurtful to himself to do’, explaining that, by definition, ‘the effect of good actions is to promote the happiness of mankind’.Footnote ³²

As rational beings, we are innately inclined to be virtuous and to do good in accordance with natural law. Yet because human beings are imperfect creatures, they need governments to enforce the law of nature and ensure that it is constantly observed. Along with education and religion, law is thus crucial in teaching us our duties and guiding us in the right direction. This issue touches on the most basic point in Wallace’s legal philosophy, which he outlined at the outset of the work:

For Wallace, a ‘System therefore of law is a treatise concerning every possible contingency in human life’.Footnote ³⁴ As John Cairns explains, he thus ‘set out legal development as a part of a general, conjectural history of humanity’ which ‘reflected contemporary development in historiography in Scotland’.Footnote ³⁵ Law, on this view, is at the very core of human and social life, and natural law is the universally unerring, moral, and obliging law which supersedes any other. Wallace made this clear time and again, which is a crucial point for our discussion here. A contradiction between natural and civil law is possible, simply because the latter is made by imperfect humans, and thus ‘it may be, in some cases, one’s duty to disobey the Laws enacted by men’.Footnote ³⁶ The justification here draws, among other things, on the Roman and specifically Ciceronian notion of honestum: the emphasis on acting honourably, which implies that ‘an action might, perhaps, be permitted by human Laws to be done, which, nevertheless, ought not to be done’, that is, in cases where said action would be dishonourable.Footnote ³⁷ Wallace clarified that disobedience is wrong, but so is performing a bad action. The criterion for decision, compatible with his overall theory, is based on our individual judgement in each case, namely, ‘that one ought to disobey in all cases, in which it is a worse action to obey’.Footnote ³⁸

Thus, Wallace formulated his theory of political resistance, which is also key to our discussion. The rightfulness of a people’s resistance, he explicated, depends to a large extent on the type of regime that is resisted, as subjects need to consider if and to what extent they could be worse off, for example, following an unsuccessful rebellion. Moreover, Wallace argued in a Lockean manner, governments are constituted for the good and happiness of the people, and the people should strive to form their governments accordingly. Yet absolute monarchies, where the monarch is not bound by law and there are no ‘certain fixed and established rules’, are most certainly not conducive to happiness: the subjects depend on their ruler’s ‘caprice’, whereas ‘happiness and dependence are inconsistent’.Footnote ³⁹ Such subjects would be fully within their rights to rebel in order to improve their situation. ‘Liberty, therefore, is the most valuable Acquisition’, Wallace summarized, which is why ‘a nation has a right to seize every opportunity of acquiring it’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Liberty, he added, ‘as it is inestimable, is inalienable; mankind have a right to it so inherent, that no deed, no contract, no time, no possession can deprive them of it’.Footnote ⁴¹ Consequently, subjects should not be bound by a law which grants their sovereign an unlimited power, thereby potentially taking away their liberty entirely; what Wallace had in mind was a case, which he considered illegitimate, where ‘a legislature of a free people should … vest a supreme hereditary absolute power in the King alone’.Footnote ⁴² Perhaps most strikingly, Wallace doubted whether the people themselves have the right to accept an absolute power over them; ‘Much less have they a right to hurt their posterity by entailing slavery upon them’.Footnote ⁴³

As to the law of nations, Wallace defined it as ‘the sum of those rules, which nations ought constantly to observe in regulating their conduct towards one another’, thus essentially applying the same definition of the law of nature from the individual to the national level.Footnote ⁴⁴ In both cases, Wallace thought that reason was the ultimate guide. The difference, however, is that there is a category of ‘secondary’ law of nations, which is formulated in treatises and based on consent and in this sense ‘arbitrary’ and therefore ‘mutable’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The rules included in this category could – and in some cases perhaps should – change over time, similar to what we have seen that Wallace thought of civil and indeed all forms of man-made law.

For Wallace, none of these categories – natural law, civil law, or even the law of nations – offered any legitimate foundation for slavery. This is striking, since each had at various times been invoked to justify it: by those who, beginning with the Romans, regarded slavery as a matter of civil rather than natural law, and by certain natural law theorists, albeit to varying degrees. Wallace’s innovation lay in his radicalism: in his assertion of the unequivocal force of natural law, as revealed by universal reason and humanity, which he held should forbid slavery in every shape and form. Natural law and liberty were thus the cornerstones of his political thought, while tyranny and slavery, in all their manifestations, stood as the greatest evils he sought to oppose.

Taking into account his political theory, let us now revisit his specific arguments against slavery. Following Montesquieu, Wallace rejected all contemporary legal justifications for chattel slavery, whether based on captivity, sale, or birth. His first target here was the common argument regarding captivity – found in Roman law and accepted by early modern legal writers, including Grotius – that enslaving war prisoners was a permissible measure and a more humane choice than killing them, and so that slavery was, in fact, an act of pity.Footnote ⁴⁶ This was absurd and utterly false: ‘One would hardly believe, that it could be pity, upon which slavery was pretended to be founded’, he exclaimed: ‘An inhuman institution founded on humanity! A ruthless usage erected on compassion!’Footnote ⁴⁷ Neither killing nor enslaving war prisoners was just or lawful because no war could justify any abuse of individuals beyond what is necessary for self-defence. Enslavement of those already prisoners, who could be confined instead, would count as an unnecessary violation of their natural liberty and humanity. Furthermore, Wallace expected that a state’s conduct, even during wartime, should adhere to fundamental norms of civility, distinguishing between enemy states and the (mostly innocent) individuals who constitute them: ‘’Tis true, some nations eat their prisoners alive. But ought civilized nations to imitate the inhuman Customs of barbarians! Ought a good man to do ill, because another does it?’Footnote ⁴⁸ The larger point here, as we have seen throughout, is that slavery cannot be justified by custom; rather, the ultimate decision on the morality and lawfulness of slavery, as with any other practice, must be made ‘from the dictates of nature, and from the obvious suggestions of humanity’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Wallace went on to tackle the argument that slavery could be justified based on consent, that is, in cases where one voluntarily surrenders oneself to another. However, he argued, no one has the right to harm themselves or relinquish their liberty as doing so would harm not only the public of which they are members but also their future generations. The conclusion closely reflects, almost word for word, Wallace’s point against tyranny in the political context: ‘he cannot make himself the slave of another; for, by doing so, he makes his happiness dependent on the caprice of another, and does an irreparable injury to himself’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, he added, if one cannot lawfully be made a slave, then surely one cannot lawfully be born a slave: ‘Children unborn have all the rights, which nature gives them, preserved to them entire’, including, above all, their liberty.Footnote ⁵¹

Building on this elaborate theoretical argumentation, Wallace turned to discuss the practical case of slavery in colonial America, for which there could be even less justification. There, he argued, the enslaved people were sold by their rulers to merchants; but the former had no right to do so, as governments do not have the right to make their people unhappy. In any case, no one had the right to buy them because ‘men and their liberty are not in commercio’, that is, human beings must not be seen as commodities.Footnote ⁵² Any such sale was therefore ‘ipso jure void’ because the trade itself was ‘illicit’ and ‘prohibited by the most obvious dictates of humanity’.Footnote ⁵³ The conclusion with regard to the enslaved people in colonial America was clear:

Wallace anticipated the argument, which would indeed be made in some court cases, that the binding law is the law of the country of origin, which would mean that an enslaved status valid in America, for instance, would have to be maintained if the individual in question were brought to Britain. But here Wallace, as by now can be expected, opposed the idea that the law of any country, origin or otherwise, could be above the supreme law of nature: ‘Ought the judges of any country, out of respect to the Law of another, shew no respect to their kind and to humanity?’Footnote ⁵⁵ The judges must not, he insisted, ‘disregard the Law of Nature, which is obligatory on all men, at all times, and in all places’ only to follow some ‘arbitrary and inhuman usages, which prevail in a distant land’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, the principle of justice was to be ‘inviolably observed’ and held no less than sacred, regardless of any consideration of utility: ‘Have not these unhappy men a better right to their liberty and to their happiness, than our American merchants have to the profits, which they make by torturing their kind? Let, therefore, our colonies be ruined, but let us not render so many men miserable’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Wallace was consistent on this point throughout. Even in Scotland, there were some ancient laws that could accept slavery, such as the Regiam majestatem, on which Wallace was an expert. These laws ‘were not, however, digested with that accuracy, with which they ought to have been; they are admitted by the Legislature to have needed amendment’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Even Scottish laws could not sanction slavery in Scotland, especially when they were so outdated: ‘they may go into desuetude, and may, by disuse, lose their obligatory force’.Footnote ⁵⁹

To conclude, Wallace combined philosophical and legal arguments, building on Montesquieu, Roman law, and theories of the laws of nature and nations. He did so in order to demonstrate his main point, which is also where he departed from most of his contemporaries: that while slavery might have been allowed in some times or places by positive civil law, it should nevertheless be rejected in all times and places by natural law, which was true for all kinds of slavery, from domestic to political. It was here that his notion of the absolute force of natural law, which consisted of the essence of justice, morality, and humanity and laid the foundations for the natural rights of equality and liberty, came into play. And this entailed some novel moves of appropriation of ideas: if, for Cicero, honestum consisted of the idea of a virtuous life in principle, then Wallace extended it also to the issue of chattel slavery, the legitimacy of which the Romans were less concerned to debate; and while Grotius and others appealed to the law of nations to justify some types of slavery legally, especially on the basis of the rules of war, then Wallace invoked the law of nations to make the opposite point, namely, that war cannot justify enslavement (nor any other kind of unnecessary abuse) and that, in any case, the law of nations needs to conform to the law of nature. This large arsenal of tools served Wallace to reject slavery as categorically as possible, together with his social contract notions on the purposes and limits of governments as well as his neo-Roman conception of liberty as the lack of dependence, especially on someone’s caprice or arbitrary will. In this sense, he was unique also in applying the neo-Roman, often metaphorical language of slavery to actual, contemporary cases of slavery, emphasizing its intolerable and inhuman nature. It is for all of these reasons that his political and legal thought was philosophically rich, and that his critique of slavery and tyranny was exceptionally thorough, just as it was exceptionally bold.

IV

Robert Wallace, George’s father, is known today primarily as a writer on the world’s population, but he remains a hugely underappreciated figure in the literature, perhaps just a little less than his son. At the height of his career as a minister in the Church of Scotland, he was the moderator of the general assembly in 1743 and the dean of the chapel royal in 1744.Footnote ⁶⁰ In addition to his influential ecclesiastical work, Robert Wallace was a fascinating Enlightenment philosopher in his own right. As a self-identified ‘moderate freethinker’ – or a so-called heterodox presbyterian like his brother-in-law, George Wallace’s uncle, the theologian Gorge Turnbull – Robert Wallace was indeed committed both to moderation and to freedom of thought, conscience, and debate. He was a prominent member of the vibrant and liberal intellectual circles in Edinburgh, such as the Rankenian Club and the Philosophical Society, which Wallace the son grew to admire. A memorial article published in the Scots Magazine in 1771, most probably by George Wallace, praised Robert Wallace and his milieu for being ‘highly instrumental in disseminating through Scotland, freedom of thought, boldness of disquisition, liberality of sentiment, accuracy of reasoning, correctness of taste, and attention to composition’.Footnote ⁶¹

It is evident that George Wallace inherited some ideas that were central to his father’s thought. Both of them admired the philosophy and the aesthetics of the third earl of Shaftesbury. Robert Wallace’s uncompromising commitment to freedom of thought was fully compatible with George Wallace’s comprehensive anti-tyranny agenda: ‘it is plain’, asserted Wallace the younger, ‘that those exercise a most unlicensed tyranny, who endeavour to bind with fetters the thoughts of men, and to restrain the freedom of speculative disquisitions’ because ‘Truth will ever be consistent with itself; and the cause of virtue is too well founded to stand in need of tyranny to support it’.Footnote ⁶² Moreover, the principle of moderation, which was key to Robert Wallace’s political and religious outlook, served George Wallace’s legal thought as well, for instance in the context of criminal law: ‘mild punishments are alone suitable to that moderation, which is the principle of the British Government … Barbarities never can, never do produce any good effects’, he argued against torture and implicitly against penal slavery.Footnote ⁶³ Interestingly, it also appears that George Wallace was associated with his father’s liberal and moderate politics, a fact that seems to have caused him to suffer certain career setbacks at the hands of his father’s political rivals.Footnote ⁶⁴

Both Robert and George Wallace believed that post-1688 Britain came close to an ideal of moderation as well as freedom. Robert Wallace, for instance, claimed in 1758 that ever since the revolution, ‘The British have enjoyed greater liberty and security than were enjoyed in the preceding reigns. The great body of the people find themselves easy and safe. The administration is equitable and mild’, noting in particular the orderly relationship between king and parliament and their significant consideration for public opinion.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this generally peaceful state of affairs, he believed, ‘Every industrious man is able not only to live by his industry, but to live in much greater plenty, than in France, or under any absolute monarchy’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Underlining the mutual relationship between liberty and prosperity, he concluded that ‘every one may live happily under a gentle administration, and the protection of law’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Almost identically, in 1760, George Wallace praised George II, in whose era – which incidentally was just about to end – ‘the ends of government have been fully answered’ because ‘people have lived in peace, trade has been extended, the arts have flourished, property has been secure; and it is impossible to cite, in the annals of his reign, one attempt made by the King to extend the prerogative of the Crown’.Footnote ⁶⁸ His wish was therefore that George III, to whom he dedicated his work, would conduct himself in the same careful and liberal manner.

The link between the two writers – the father and the son – is even more intriguing in our context because Robert Wallace hypothesized that in ancient times slavery had played a positive role in the increase of the population. This was part of his broader thesis that the population of the world was decreasing in modern times, which he developed in tandem with Hume’s exact opposite thesis. The debate between Wallace and Hume quickly gathered wide attention in Europe, not only as a major philosophical topic but also as a symbol of polite enlightened disagreement, as Montesquieu, among others, remarked in appreciation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Robert Wallace’s idea about the relationship between slavery and population was conditional on the premise that often in ancient times ‘slaves were treated with equity and mildness, lived in friendship with their masters, were looked on as a part of the family’, and so on, which, for him, could explain why ‘the antient slaves were more serviceable in raising up people, than the inferior ranks of men in modern times’.Footnote ⁷⁰ At the same time, he explicitly opposed slavery, stating that ‘one can scarce ever think of it without sensible horror and deep compassion’ because ‘it is highly disgraceful to human nature’, and concluding: ‘God forbid! that I should ever be an advocate for slavery, ecclesiastic, civil, or domestic, on account of any accidental advantages which it may happen to produce’ (recall Geroge Wallace’s similar rejection of any ‘accidental advantages’ of institutional slavery).Footnote ⁷¹

In his work, George Wallace referred to his father as ‘the learned, the ingenious, and the virtuous Author’ who showed that ‘a nation may be more populous, more wealthy, more virtuous, and more happy without than with an extensive foreign trade’.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, Robert Wallace believed that modern extensive trade led people to leave Europe and thereby neglect its agriculture, which, for him, was symptomatic of a loss of ancient civic virtue and a departure from a simple, idyllic past: ‘one can scarce regard it but as a secret fascination, that so many Europeans go in quest of distant feats in America, while the lands in Europe are so poorly cultivated, and with a proper policy might plentifully maintain a much greater number of people’.Footnote ⁷³ So, George Wallace used what by now we see is a consistent strategy: he was selective in what he took from his father, leaving out the odd idea of benevolent ancient slavery, as it were, and drawing instead on another premise of his father, regarding the harm of extensive trade, to reach a different and surely more radical conclusion. That conclusion was that both America and Britain would easily survive the abolition of the slave trade – and of slavery altogether. In fact, he added, had it not been for slavery, not only would America have been more populous but also much more flourishing with art and philosophy.Footnote ⁷⁴

Additionally, Wallace sought to clarify that such a change in global trade would not necessarily harm Britain’s economy all that much. Industry, he claimed, was ‘the real source of wealth’, as it was ‘inventive’ enough and would surely afford to replace an old trade with a new one.Footnote ⁷⁵ Relying on a specific argument of Hume – who, as is well known, elsewhere expressed views supporting a racial hierarchy, though not slavery itself – Wallace added confidently: ‘As long as a nation continues to be industrious, it need not be afraid of poverty’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Wallace thus agreed with his father that modern trade was somewhat disadvantageous but agreed with Hume, his father’s friendly opponent, that modern industry was rather advantageous. In this way, the most prominent discussions in 1750s Europe on poverty and population, and the varied – even competing – theories that they produced, were integrated and employed by Wallace as yet another set of arguments against both the slave trade and chattel slavery, perhaps aimed at those who needed some more practical reassurance in addition to moral conviction.

In their strong belief in the possibility of a much better future – one that resembles some version of a harmonious golden age – the Wallaces were in some important sense utopian. In their writings from the very same years (1760–1), they both invoked Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Robert Wallace built openly on More to prescribe a perfect government for the entire world, rather than for a specific nation, where there is no private property, labour is equally divided, all males are taught agriculture, and all occupations are equally honoured (and, interestingly, where women should not marry before they turn twenty).Footnote ⁷⁷ George Wallace in turn argued explicitly that the fulfilment of More’s utopian scheme – a state of total equality – required as a first step to abolish all slavery. For him, ‘property and equality seem to be absolutely incompatible’.Footnote ⁷⁸ But whereas it would surely be hard to eliminate private property, it should not be all that difficult to put an end to slavery once and for all – and thus to ensure that humans, at least, would not be property of one another. George Wallace’s utopianism, in this sense, was slightly more pragmatic: an absolutely equal society was not entirely impossible and could still be aspired to. In any case,

Abolishing slavery was thus the most basic and immediate requirement towards an ideal future, and it was certainly feasible, Wallace believed, since slavery could not be considered necessary to sustain any society, as many nations had already proven. Furthermore, he expressed an optimistic view of history and its potential for radical transformation, seeing ‘that many unexpected revolutions have happened, and that things have existed so contrary to all expectation’.Footnote ⁸⁰

In the hands of Wallace the son, via Wallace the father, distinct features of utopianism were therefore deployed for an antislavery campaign. Wallace the father was evidently influential for his son – or in fact they may have been mutually influential – but the son engaged with his father’s theory in an admiring yet critical way and radicalized it for his own goals, as he did consistently with Cicero, Grotius, Montesquieu, Hume, and others.

V

Though the System of the principles of the law of Scotland was far from a commercial success, George Wallace’s unique position as well as his writing talent were duly recognized at the time. The Critical Review, for example, praised Wallace’s style: ‘Philosophy is admirably blended with jurisprudence; the mind charmed with the harmony between the parts; conclusions are formed with facility, because the premisses are perfectly understood; and the law improved from a dry, barren, and crabbed study, to a fertile, rational, and engaging science’.Footnote ⁸¹ Similarly, The Monthly Review remarked on the impressive achievement of the bright young author and analysed his political and legal philosophy in depth. Interestingly, the review refuted the argument in the System that ‘every virtuous man, who lives, may be happy with the estate, which he has’, precisely by using the case of slavery as a counter-example: ‘One born to slavery may be happy as a slave; but one who has felt the blessings of Liberty, would not endure slavery without uneasiness; for our Author himself allows, that it is more to be dreaded than death’.Footnote ⁸² Yet despite some nuanced disagreements, the review proclaimed: ‘we cannot but extol his generous concern for the natural rights and political liberties of mankind’, commending Wallace’s ‘sensible and benevolent’ views and especially his ‘zeal in the cause of Freedom’.Footnote ⁸³ Another contemporary review in The Annual Register described the work as ‘a piece of uncommon labour, research, and reach of thought’, comparing Wallace to nothing short of a ‘union of Lord [Edward] Coke, with Grotius and Puffendorf’, and adding:

Indeed, for the early abolitionists, whether philosophers, lawyers, or politicians, Wallace’s book provided the most useful and powerful ammunition. Its reception was fast and widespread, which makes it all the more surprising that it remains so overlooked today (or worse still, labelled as ‘a disastrous failure’).Footnote ⁸⁵ This underappreciated case of reception merits a separate in-depth study, but for now some brief remarks should suffice. For instance, Anna Foy has revealed recently how Wallace’s ideas informed James Grainger’s poem The sugar-cane (1764). By a careful examination of the poet’s draft manuscript annotations, Foy traces his close and critical engagement with Wallace. For Grainger, ‘No Author can write on this Subject, not properly, who has not been in y^e Country’, meaning the West Indies, and he added: ‘I flatter myself, Mr. Wallace, will not [be displeased to] have his Humanity shocked, when I [tell Him] … y^e Sugar Colonies could not otherwise be cultivated but by y^e Natives of Africa’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Thus, not only does Foy offer a new assessment of Grainger’s poem, known for its self-contradictory stance on slavery, but she also shows how pervasive and multifaceted the reception of Wallace’s work may have been at the time.

A better-known Scotsman whose relationship with Wallace has remained almost entirely unnoticed, despite its evident historical implications, was the lawyer and diarist James Boswell. Like Grainger, Boswell’s exact stance on slavery remains a subject of scholarly debate. Nevertheless, together with his friend and the later subject of his famous biography, the writer Samuel Johnson, Boswell was involved in preparing Joseph Knight’s plea for emancipation, and his father, Lord Auchinleck, was the most firmly antislavery judge on the 1778 case, as we have seen earlier. Boswell knew Wallace personally; they seem to have met regularly on social occasions and liked one another. Boswell especially appreciated Wallace’s ‘never-failing fund of conversation’ and ‘his variety of knowledge’, although, interestingly, he expressed reservations about Wallace’s apparent heterodox views.Footnote ⁸⁷ Most strikingly, in 1779 Boswell described Wallace’s work as ‘a law book of more than ordinary merit … which I am informed has been highly applauded by the present Lord Chief Justice, and which I am sure deserves to be applauded’, the lord in question being none other than Mansfield, the judge on the Somerset case which preceded Knight.Footnote ⁸⁸ There is therefore good reason to believe that Wallace’s exceptional antislavery text influenced at least some of those involved in these historic proto-abolitionist British cases.

While these findings may call into question David Brion Davis’s assessment that ‘Wallace’s arguments were too radical to play a major role in the later British antislavery movement’, it is certainly clear that ‘they had an immediate impact in America’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Most notably, Wallace had a visibly significant influence on Anthony Benezet, the Quaker teacher from Philadelphia whom Maurice Jackson has recently called the father of Atlantic abolitionism.Footnote ⁹⁰ For example, in A short account of that part of Africa (1762), Benezet aimed ‘to shew the iniquity of that [slave] trade, and the falsity of the arguments usually advanced in its vindication’. He reproduced large sections from Wallace, who was praised as one of some ‘Persons of Note’ and a noble ‘Gentleman of the Law’ who undertook ‘to declare against so unparallel’d an Invasion of the Rights and Liberties of Mankind’.Footnote ⁹¹ Relying on Wallace’s authority, Benezet concluded that all stages of the slave trade were equally wrongful: not only the selling or buying of human beings but also continuing to hold them enslaved and to profit from their labour. He went even further than Wallace, arguing that not only should the enslaved be freed immediately but they should also be compensated for their suffering: their previous enslavers must ‘use all reasonable Endeavours, to enable them to procure a comfortable Living, not only as an Act of Justice to the Individuals, but as a Debt due, on Account of the Oppression and Injustice perpetrated on them, or their Ancestors’.Footnote ⁹²

In later works, Benezet kept citing Wallace, ‘whose sentiments are so worthy the notice of all considerate persons’.Footnote ⁹³ His primary goal was the propagation of antislavery ideas: he wanted to make sure that recent publications that demonstrated slavery’s ‘inconsistency with every christian and moral virtue’ would find their way both to the general public and to ‘those in whose power it may be, to put a stop to any farther progress therein’.Footnote ⁹⁴ And this was indeed the case. Benezet went on to be the founder of the African Free School in Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (1775), the first of its kind in America, later headed by Benjamin Franklin. In addition, his writings were widely read and cited by writers and campaigners on the other side of the Atlantic. Benezet also corresponded with British abolitionists such as Granville Sharp, who helped reprint his Short account – including the references to Wallace – in London in 1768. A year later, Sharp himself published A representation of the injustice and dangerous tendency of tolerating slavery (1769), and he eventually became one of the founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787).Footnote ⁹⁵

In conclusion, Wallace was undeniably a crucial link in eighteenth-century antislavery radicalism in Britain and beyond. Though he acknowledged that slavery seemed less pressing in Scotland, this little-known Scottish lawyer emerged as one of the earliest vocal and influential critics of colonial slavery. Furthermore, as we have seen, he was a serious and original theorist who deserves to be reintegrated into the canon of political and legal thought. More broadly, this case underscores the need to pay attention to several often-overlooked aspects of the history of political thought: the importance of how ideas are received and appropriated in different contexts and for different goals; the contributions of so-called second-rate writers in different types of texts; and even what might be called an intergenerational history of ideas or the family as an intellectual institution and context.Footnote ⁹⁶ Finally, it urges us to continue combining local and global perspectives to recover a richer understanding of the struggles for abolition and emancipation and their complex place in the history of political thought.