In 1790 Christoph Meiners, then professor of philosophy at the University of Göttingen, declared that “N****, so long as they are … N****” cannot expect “the same privileges and freedoms as the… Whites among whom they live.”Footnote 1 The enslavement of Black Africans by White Europeans, he insisted, was among the “holy laws of nature.”Footnote 2 These lines will not surprise anyone familiar with their author. Meiners is best known today for producing one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most bluntly hierarchical racial theories. By 1790 he was the most outspoken German proponent of transatlantic slavery. More surprising, then, is the fact that the very same piece begins by extolling the sympathy for the enslaved expressed by those working to abolish the slave trade: “The growing Enlightenment” and the “ever-growing humaneness” which accompanies it had, he argued, “increased by many degrees the feeling of injustice, [whether previously] suffered or on-going, indignation against all oppressors, and compassion for the oppressed.”Footnote 3 It was “no wonder… that in the very same age when too-long-abused nations and estates rise up against their tyrants… the most famous writers of all nations have formed a sort of league… to break the N**** out of the condition of contempt and servitude.”Footnote 4 Despite his support for the slave trade, Meiners was unequivocal that the “feelings of injustice,” “indignation,” and “compassion” behind abolitionism were part of the wider progress of Enlightenment. Opposition to slavery was the fruit of “noble but misguided passions.”Footnote 5
This article examines the relationship between emotion and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century German debates around transatlantic slavery and, in particular, the rise of abolitionism. Rather than a detailed analysis of a narrow selection of sources, it presents a broad cross-section of German writing on the topic to assess the overall tenor of the controversy. The debate occurred primarily within largely Protestant territories, though the confessional position of many participants is uncertain and some—including Meiners—are known to have had heterodox religious views. Importantly, both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist Germans organized their arguments around assumptions about what it meant to be Enlightened. They were convinced that Europe had achieved an unprecedented degree of progress and were committed, in John Robertson’s words, “to the betterment of life on earth regardless of the next.”Footnote 6
Thinkers across the Enlightenment took a keen interest in emotion, both as a key to understanding human nature and as a force with significant moral, social, and political implications. Most Enlightenment theorists, from David Hume to Johann Gottfried Herder, maintained that emotion was important to moral decision-making; as Ritchie Robertson has argued, Immanuel Kant’s attempt to exclude emotions from moral action made him an outlier.Footnote 7 Montesquieu’s political thought was premised on the purported emotional effects of different climates, while Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many others insisted that emotions were essential for understanding social and political order.Footnote 8 As Anne Fleig writes, in the German Enlightenment the terminology of “sentiment” (Empfindung) and “feeling” or “emotion” (Gefühl) emerged both as key concepts within aesthetic theory and as “a general valorization of emotion [Gefühl] as the foundation of individual experience, social communication, and social coexistence.”Footnote 9 In short, Emotions were a major subject of study in the Enlightenment and central to many of its most pressing debates. This centrality suggests that comments such as Meiners’ should not be dismissed merely as attempts to pacify disgusted readers, but should instead be taken seriously as constitutive features of the debate around transatlantic slavery itself.
This article focuses on the period between the 1760s, when transatlantic slavery began gaining significant attention in German-speaking Europe, and the early 1790s. By then transatlantic slavery had become a major subject of German-language debate. Support for abolishing the slave trade (if not necessarily slavery itself) probably represented the majority view among those who engaged with the topic in print. Nevertheless, the abolitionist cause became associated with revolutionary radicalism following the French National Convention’s decision to end colonial slavery in 1794. Germans continued to publish writings critical of slavery throughout the 1790s but, against a background of heightened official scrutiny and the crises triggered by the Coalition Wars, fewer Germans seem to have declared their support for abolitionism in print.Footnote 10 Critiques of slavery’s legitimacy were increasingly relegated to specialized philosophical treatises rather than polemics written for a broad readership.Footnote 11 The political coordinates of abolition would change again following Napoleon’s 1802 reintroduction of colonial slavery and, especially, British efforts to suppress the slave trade after 1807. It is beyond the scope of this article to trace the debates around slavery across all these transformations. Instead, it shows that by the 1790s Enlightened Germans already had at their disposal two related yet mutually incompatible frameworks for thinking about slavery and abolition.
This is the first scholarly contribution dedicated to the relationship between emotion and notions of Enlightenment in German debates about slavery.Footnote 12 It does not attempt to deduce subjective emotional experiences, let alone to show that such experiences impacted the legal status of slavery or the slave trade.Footnote 13 These themes are instead considered using what Peter and Carol Zisowitz Stearns term “emotionology,” namely examination of the codes, standards, and social norms associated with emotion.Footnote 14 Emotionology confers important advantages for studying both the Enlightenment as a whole and the German debate about abolition in particular. Crucially, it allows us to see how ideas about emotions were embedded within social intercourse. Many of the authors discussed over the following pages—including Meiners—took a theoretical interest in the nature and significance of emotion. An emotionological approach, however, shows that emotions were not just subject to theoretical consideration but also integrated into the discursive practices and argumentative strategies of various debates. In this way, emotionology helps scholars grapple with the often-unwritten rules that shaped exchanges within the public sphere. Indeed, it is now clear that, while Enlightenment thinkers hoped that debate would be based on impartial, presumptively meritocratic rational exchange, in reality numerous other factors shaped the form and content of debate.Footnote 15 The debate around slavery and abolition became a convergence point for a range of concerns about what it meant to be Enlightened, the role of sympathy, and the means for attaining progress (not to mention questions of racial and cultural difference). Emotionology shows how correct feeling—especially sympathy for the enslaved—represented a normative condition for participation in the controversy. While we cannot know the sincerity of their comments, it is telling that this was accepted by even the most vociferously pro-slavery writers.
The article makes four core arguments. First, it supports the view—now relatively common but long considered controversial—that transatlantic slavery was an important subject of debate within the German Enlightenment. Second, it argues that emotion, and especially sympathy, played a normative role in German discussions of transatlantic slavery. The third, more counter-intuitive argument is that although all participants agreed that sympathy with the enslaved reflected Enlightened moral progress, they differed regarding the relationship between sympathetic feeling and rational practice. Abolitionists interpreted the emotions associated with the slave trade as reflections of a deeper clarity about the system’s moral indefensibility. Anti-abolitionists meanwhile insisted that the transatlantic system stimulated human progress—and thereby happiness—so that the emotions immediately stirred by slavery, though admirable in themselves, should not form the basis of practical action. There was, in their telling, a tension between reason and feeling: Enlightenment, properly construed, meant resisting feeling to preserve long-term benefits for all humanity. Far from a matter of literary flourish, then, emotion shaped the analytical structure of the German debate around abolition itself.
The fourth argument concerns chronology and causality. Importantly, sympathizing with the enslaved was a key feature in discussions of transatlantic slavery before support for abolition became widespread. In turn, the normative status of sympathy emerged in the wake of a much longer early modern history in which certain (but not all) types of slavery acquired a particular emotive force. While slavery had long been connected with extreme emotional states, the legitimacy of transatlantic slavery only faced significant challenge within Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. The rise of European abolitionism has proven notoriously difficult to explain and this article does not attempt to resolve that problem. It does however suggest that applying sympathy to the enslaved did not invariably lead a given author to support abolitionism, even though sympathy was an important component in how the debate around abolitionism was, in the German Enlightenment at least, instantiated.
Until recently, it was widely assumed that transatlantic slavery was marginal in early modern German life and thought.Footnote 16 The Brandenburg Africa Company, the only major, state-sponsored German slave-trading operation, was founded in 1682 and liquidated several decades later. It has therefore sometimes been claimed that German discussions of abolitionism were either essentially passive—in the sense that they were not connected to demands for action among Germans—or primarily a means for reflecting upon other conditions of more obvious local salience, such as serfdom.Footnote 17 This view is no longer tenable. It rests on the anachronistic assumption that because there were no successful, state-sponsored German slave-trading companies, contemporaries could not have imagined such a company to be plausible. Central Europeans attempted to establish various overseas trading companies across the eighteenth century and, as Felicia Gottmann has shown, their failure was not considered foreordained.Footnote 18 More importantly, there was in fact significant German involvement in transatlantic slavery. Enslaved Africans were trafficked across Central Europe.Footnote 19 Germans participated in transatlantic slavery as seamen, agents, investors, merchants, and even owners of slave ships and plantations.Footnote 20 They were further implicated in slave economies as producers and consumers of goods.Footnote 21 The personal unions connecting the Electorate of Hanover to Great Britain and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to Denmark, alongside the Holy Roman Empire’s porous borders with France and the Netherlands, facilitated the circulation of goods, people, capital, and ideas between slave-trading networks and the German lands. Most famously, the Pomeranian Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann entered Danish service and began purchasing people and plantations in Danish colonies.Footnote 22 At his death in 1782, he possessed some 1,000 enslaved persons across three Caribbean islands, as well as a rifle factory and fourteen ships used to transport people, goods, and commodities as part of the so-called Triangle Trade.
Nevertheless, eighteenth-century German debates about slavery and abolition remain under-researched. Much of the literature focuses on the ideas of individual thinkers, such as the on-going debate around the views of Immanuel Kant.Footnote 23 While valuable in their own right, such studies provide only glimpses into wider currents. Conversely, Sarah Lentz’s 2020 monograph covering the period 1780–1860 offers the most thorough exploration of early German abolitionism to date. Lentz argues that until around 1810 German discussions of abolition were dominated by “armchair activists” (LehnstuhlaktivistInnen) who assumed that publicizing slavery’s horrors would suffice to bring about its demise, while only a handful of “lone warriors” (EinzelkämpferInnen) were interested in taking more active measures.Footnote 24
Lentz’s book is a major contribution. This article does not dispute her central argument but, like most scholarship on German discussions of slavery, the book tends to treat all expressions of anti-slavery sentiment as abolitionist in character. By contrast, following the work of Christopher Brown, Anglophone scholarship typically distinguishes between anti-slavery ideas and abolitionism, with abolitionism the active, explicit effort to end slave systems through public organization.Footnote 25 Anti-slavery views are thus a necessary condition for abolitionism, but not a sufficient one. While the anti-slavery/abolitionist distinction is in certain cases ambiguous—for example with individual calls for mass boycotts—it remains crucial for understanding abolition as a historical phenomenon. Anti-slavery ideas appear across European history while abolitionism emerged only in the late eighteenth century, meaning that abolitionism cannot be explained with reference to anti-slavery thought alone.Footnote 26 This article is not a comprehensive history of German abolitionism, let alone German thinking about slavery as a whole, but it does suggest that distinguishing anti-slavery comments from abolitionism proper allows for a richer understanding of both the movement’s chronology and the assumptions underpinning the debate.
Transatlantic slavery was not the only form of coerced servitude, or “asymmetrical dependency,” of interest to early modern Germans.Footnote 27 As discussed in the following section, by the early decades of the eighteenth century Sklaverei (and its assorted early modern spellings) referred to particularly severe forms of bondage, even as such forms were still sometimes subsumed within the larger concept of Leibeigenschaft. It was only around the middle of the eighteenth century, however, that German discussions of slavery began to focus on the transatlantic system. While Abschaffung and Aufhebung were used to describe efforts to end both European serfdom and transatlantic slavery, from the 1780s Abolition almost exclusively described the movement against the latter. It should also be noted that, as in Britain, early German abolitionists focused their efforts on ending the slave trade rather than slavery itself. Abolishing the slave trade was considered legislatively viable in the short term, while abolishing slavery tout court was more controversial given its purported implications regarding property rights. Germans were, like their counterparts elsewhere, divided on abolitionism’s ultimate goal. Some saw ending the trade as sufficient. Others hoped that ending the trade would lead to the gradual disappearance of slavery itself. Still others saw it as the first step towards legislative abolition of the wider slave system. Whether intentionally or not, many authors did not specify their precise views on these issues, meaning it is not always possible to indicate where they stood with regards to this aspect of the debate.
This article has a four-part structure. The first section overviews German discussions of slavery from the Reformation to around the middle of the eighteenth century. It shows that, while being enslaved was considered undesirable and in certain cases illegitimate, Germans were neither particularly interested in transatlantic slavery nor committed to ending slave systems as a whole. This overview sets out the semantic and conceptual background for later discussions of transatlantic slavery and signals the long-standing, often highly emotive interest in slavery—albeit not transatlantic slavery—within the German lands. This background is not intended to suggest that the later debates around abolition were drastically different from those abroad, but rather to show that Germans were already interested in severe forms of asymmetrical dependency by the time transatlantic slavery became a topic of public discussion. The second section traces the growth of interest in transatlantic slavery up to the late 1770s, showing that the transatlantic system was an emotionally charged topic in German writing even before the rise of abolitionism. The third section then traces the coalescence of German support for abolition up to the early 1790s. While sympathy did not lead inevitably to abolitionism, abolition’s proponents understood the movement as harmonizing feeling with practice. The fourth section then shows how German anti-abolitionists accepted the importance of sympathy for the enslaved while rejecting claims that such sympathy should entail abolition. Anti-abolitionism is and was morally indefensible, but it is only by taking anti-abolitionist ideas seriously that we can adequately reckon with the place of slavery in German, and indeed European, history.
Slavery in German Thought, c. 1520–1750
World history reveals a wide range of systems of domination, with, as David Brion Davis argued, “various types of serfdom and peonage shading off into actual slavery.”Footnote 28 Even those systems we might unambiguously call slavery appear in an array of forms, the differences between which are often obscured by sorting them into familiar categories like slavery and serfdom. This further complicates the task of interpreting pre-modern texts. Servus remains a paradigmatic example. In Classical Latin, servus primarily referred to chattel slaves but was also used for non-Roman systems closer to what is now considered serfdom.Footnote 29 Terminology also changes over time and context. The Septuagint’s rendering of the Hebrew ʿeved (עֶבֶד)—traditionally encompassing various forms of servitude—as doulos (δοῦλος)—normally chattel slaves—reflects both a complex process of cross-cultural translation and changing practices within the Hellenistic Mediterranean.Footnote 30 Similarly, doulos Christou (Romans 1:1) is routinely translated “servant of Christ,” obscuring the Greek’s starker implications. Martin Luther typically translated both ʿeved and doulos as servus in Latin and Knecht (now typically servant, vassal, or serf) or, occasionally, Leibeigen (now serf) in German. Early forms of the modern German word Sklave (Sclave, Schlav, etc.) became common in the 1600s but remained part of a complex and inconsistent semantic field. As Josef Köstlbauer has shown, Leibeigenschaft remained polysemous into the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote 31 It could refer to “strongly asymmetric feudal or tenurial labor relations characterized by a peasant population bound to the land”—i.e. serfdom—or a higher–order category that also encompassed what we now consider slavery.Footnote 32 Thus, Sklaven were sometimes called Leibeigenen even in contexts where these were legally distinct categories.Footnote 33
Despite these ambiguities, asymmetric dependency was a powerful theme in early modern writing, especially following the Reformation. Martin Luther used servus, Knecht, and Leibeigen synonymously to refer to various forms of subjection. With certain very specific exceptions—subjection to God or Jesus; occasionally Jesus’ acts on behalf of humanity—they are treated as essentially undesirable conditions. Nevertheless, insofar as mass emancipation was considered a legitimate aspiration, it was imagined exclusively in terms of conformity with true Christian doctrine. Luther cited Paul’s injunction not to become “servi of men” to criticize Roman Catholicism but defended Central Europe’s prevailing forms of social and political domination.Footnote 34 He famously responded to the German Peasants’ War with Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants (Wider die Mordischen und Reubischen Rotten der Bawren, 1525) and lamented that contemporary servi—in this case clearly peasants—“know not how to obey … scorn their masters” and show “no reverence, no fear, no faith.”Footnote 35 It is unsurprising that Luther did not comment on transatlantic slavery as, when he died in 1546, it had left little discernible footprint in Central Europe.Footnote 36 Portuguese and Spanish ships had only just begun transporting large numbers of Africans to the Americas. Luther’s example nevertheless established subjection as a powerful trope in Protestant spiritual discourse without any concomitant demand for liberation from mundane forms of domination.
While Protestants elsewhere found various ways to make sense of New World slavery, in Central Europe up to the late seventeenth century, the chief referent of servus remained the unfree European peasant.Footnote 37 Calvin, for example, insisted that contemporary servi suffered less than their ancient counterparts and should in any case accept their lot as part of God’s plan.Footnote 38 Intimations of liberation were overwhelmingly connected to religious agendas, though they were not necessarily always metaphorical. The equation of false religion with servitude remained rhetorically powerful, but in the context of religious warfare and persecution, describing certain groups using the term Sklaven could also be connected to practical demands. The seventeenth-century jurist Ahasver Fritsch used both strategies, condemning “contemptible Sclaven” who indulge in “all sorts of pleasure and worldly joys” while also criticizing those who “hate, persecute, and attack the poor Jews” by treating them “more coarsely than Sclaven.”Footnote 39 An anonymous tract of 1690 implored readers to provide practical aid to French Huguenots, whose sufferings were labeled “servitude and slavery” (Dienstbarkeit und Sclaverey).Footnote 40 Such language was more prominent among Protestant writers, but not exclusive to them. The Catholic apologist Aemilianus Naisl published a treatise attacking Protestants as “Luther-Sclaven” and married clergy as “Venus-Sclaven.”Footnote 41 These various strategies for describing religious conflicts were clearly implicated in emotional discourses, using harsh forms of servitude to denounce certain emotional states (whether sexual desire or anti-Jewish hatred) and to provoke either support or disdain for particular groups.
While the idiom of faith-as-emancipation remains common in Protestant discourse, as intra-Christian persecution declined it became less common to describe confessional relations in such terms. This did not lead to a corresponding decline of interest in slavery. That the condition of Sklaverei was harder than that of other forms of Leibeigenschaft was at least implicit in most of these earlier discussions, but in 1743 Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Great Complete Encyclopedia of all the Arts and Sciences—the most important eighteenth-century German encyclopedia—straightforwardly defined Sclaven as those subject to the severest forms of servitude. The entry “Sclave, Leibeigener, Knecht,” declared that only those “in a complete and absolute Knechtschaft” constitute Sclaven proper.Footnote 42 However, the Sclaverey (as contrasted with other forms of Leibeigenschaft and Knechtschaft) that Zedler and his contemporaries had in mind was chiefly that of Europeans to Muslims, not of Africans to Europeans.
Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century German references to Sklaverei typically appeared in highly emotive accounts of Christians suffering at the hands of either North African pirates or the Ottomans. Türkische, or sometimes barbarische, Sklaverei was a byword for cruel, intolerable, and essentially anti-Christian forms of domination. In 1694 the anonymous Theatre of Barbary—or Barbaric—Slavery catalogued the cruelties inflicted by North African “robber-cities,” while an early Robinsonade recounted a Thuringian suffering through “fourfold Türckische Sclaverey.”Footnote 43 In 1744 the Bohemian Catholic theologian Johann Thomas Adalbert Berghauer defined türckische Sclaverey as “misery above all misery.”Footnote 44 These writings consistently suggested that the severity of this type of Sklaverei was connected to the character of Islam, with the subjection of Christians to Muslims a disruption of the moral order. Indeed, as Rebekka von Mallinckrodt has shown, early modern Germans deployed various arguments based on religion, Roman law, civilizational inferiority, and even (albeit more ambiguously) darkness of skin to justify enslavement by Christian Europeans.Footnote 45 When transatlantic slavery was addressed directly as a specific type of slavery, it appeared almost as an afterthought. While Zedler’s encyclopedia contained a detailed inventory of Muslim cruelty, it mentioned European colonial slavery only briefly to state that, compared with its türkisch equivalent, the condition of “Sclaven in America is entirely tolerable.”Footnote 46
By the early eighteenth century, however, several processes were underway that would bring greater attention to transatlantic slavery. On the one hand, various political, military, and diplomatic developments steadily reduced North African piracy, while Ottoman relations with Christian Europe improved so that captivity in war no longer meant perpetual enslavement.Footnote 47 Without overstating either process, broadly speaking, fear of enslavement to Muslims declined across the century. At the same time, serfdom became more controversial. Efforts to end, or at least limit, serfdom received widespread attention and praise across the Enlightenment.Footnote 48 While they often met with limited success, such efforts suggested that systems of servitude might plausibly be curtailed or even brought to an end.
Most importantly, the transatlantic slave trade rapidly accelerated across the eighteenth century. More than three quarters of the enslaved Africans transported by Europeans between 1500 and 1810 were transported after 1700 and more than three quarters of these—over half of the total—were transported after 1750.Footnote 49 The balance of national involvement also shifted. Portugal remained a major slave-trading power, but between 1701 and 1765 slaves arriving in Spanish colonies largely did so under French and English flags.Footnote 50 French involvement grew across the century, while Britain overtook Portugal as the dominant slave-trading nation by 1750. Meanwhile, Denmark and the Netherlands had smaller but nonetheless significant presences. As discussed above—and especially following the War of Spanish Succession—these four countries had far closer personal, political, and economic ties with the German lands than either Spain or Portugal, bringing transatlantic slavery closer to the fore in German life. Greater awareness of the trade was supported by the growth and extension of commercial networks, rising literacy, the rapid expansion of print, and a lively translation culture (not to mention widespread multilingualism).Footnote 51 Around the same time that fears of interreligious violence declined, Germans had unprecedented opportunities to both learn about and participate in colonial slavery.
Learning about Transatlantic Slavery
Many Germans became directly involved in transatlantic slavery, but far more read about it. The Danish–German connection played a particularly important role in the early transmission of information about the trade to German readers. Ludvig Ferdinand Rømer, born in Elsfeth in the County of Oldenburg (now part of Lower Saxony) but active as a merchant on the Danish Gold Coast, published two Danish-language books on West Africa which appeared in German translations in 1758 and 1769 respectively.Footnote 52 These texts phlegmatically describe the practices through which Europeans bought enslaved Africans alongside detailed, largely disparaging accounts of various West African societies. Rømer argued that Christians were obliged to treat the enslaved with due regard for their wellbeing, but that slavery itself was not objectionable.Footnote 53 To underscore the point, the second book included a preface by the Lutheran bishop Erik Pontoppidan explaining the slave trade’s compatibility with Christianity.Footnote 54 Rømer’s books appear to have been popular and were referenced, excerpted, and/or paraphrased in many of the texts discussed over the following pages.
A more critical body of German-language writing on transatlantic slavery emerged in the 1760s and 1770s. Though slavery was rarely, if ever, the chief focus of a given volume, these texts typically emphasized both the cruelty of the slavers and the suffering of the enslaved. In lines possibly directed against Rømer, a 1766 German translation of a book by the Dano-Norwegian philosopher Jens Kraft noted that “no impiousness [Gottlosigkeit] and no tyranny is to be devised which has not been practiced against” Black Africans.Footnote 55 In a widely-read 1777 account of his missionary activities in the Danish West Indies, the Hildesheim-born Georg Andreas Oldendorp lamented that “one would have little to complain about with this trade, if the N**** would only have sold their prisoners of war and criminals guilty of capital crimes.”Footnote 56 Pagan Africans may “recognize no higher law than … [their] savage inclinations,” but Europeans used strong drinks and other methods to further “void almost all human and social duty,” thereby rewarding cruelty and generating endless war within Africa.Footnote 57 Indeed, Oldendorp stressed both the trade’s cruelties and the sufferings of Black Africans themselves.Footnote 58 While he argued that Africans could become just as good Christians as anyone else, he insisted that all “philanthropic souls” (menschenfreundliche Seelen) should “feel sympathy” towards them no matter their views on Africans’ spiritual capacities.Footnote 59 Neither Kraft nor Oldendorp rejected the acceptability of the slave system itself, but rather the practices through which it occurred. That system could, they implied, be modified and made acceptable. Moreover, they, like Rømer, framed these scruples in terms of the behaviors deemed proper to Christians. Mistreating the enslaved was un-Christian, while dutiful, Christian forms of domination remained legitimate.
The most famous early German discussion of transatlantic slavery is probably Matthias Christian Sprengel’s 1779 inaugural lecture at the University of Halle on the history of the slave trade, which he published as a short book the same year. Sprengel took a dim view of the trade, describing it as an “atrocious business” and detailing the suffering of its victims.Footnote 60 The lecture was even advertised with the comment that, faced with the topic, “the mind shudders to think of it and flees from sorrow.”Footnote 61 Not unreasonably, Sprengel’s critical view of the slave trade has led some to position him as an early German abolitionist, but this requires caution.Footnote 62 Not only did Sprengel insist that the trade resulted from Black Africans’ own “barbarism,” but he also suggested that “slavery was certainly among no nation so hard and cruel as among the N*****” so that, despite its horrors, the enslaved were better off on European plantations than remaining in Africa.Footnote 63 None of these statements are a priori incompatible with abolitionism, but nor does Sprengel’s sympathy with the enslaved preclude acceptance of—even support for—slavery more broadly. At no point in the text did Sprengel present abolition as either viable or desirable. Chunjie Zhang argues that Sprengel avoided prescriptions to appear impartial and thus better persuade readers of abolition’s virtues.Footnote 64 This interpretation is not wholly implausible, but without further substantiation it appears to conflate distaste for slavery with abolitionism.Footnote 65 As discussed below, Sprengel did eventually write in favor of abolition, though this appears to have represented a change of heart. As late as 1786 he accused abolitionists of having “exaggerated much … and placed much in a false light.”Footnote 66 In the same piece he argued that abolitionists mistakenly blamed the entire slave system for the acts of “individual brutes.”Footnote 67 Sprengel’s 1779 work is an important early attempt to comprehend transatlantic slavery historically while largely dispensing with the religious idioms of earlier interventions, but it was not in itself an abolitionist document.
Sprengel’s work also reflects the increasingly explicit, and indeed prominent, emotional dimension in German discussions of transatlantic slavery. Sprengel clearly encouraged sympathy with those whose suffering was so great that “the mind shudders … and flees from sorrow.” Just several years prior, Oldendorp had also insisted that readers should feel sympathy for the hardships of the enslaved. Even Rømer accepted that Christianity enjoined a basic interest in the emotional states of the enslaved to prevent severe suffering. Jens Kraft had, knowingly or not, called Rømer’s bluff, arguing that slavers engaged in flagrantly un-Christian, immoral behavior that led to profound misery. None of these writers categorically opposed either the slave trade or slavery itself, but all acknowledged a duty to identify and address suffering. All except Rømer agreed that this duty was going unfulfilled.
This interest in both the implications of moral duty and the hardships faced by the enslaved was consistent with longer-term trends in Germanophone writing. Since at least the Reformation, rule by opposing confessions had been conflated with conditions of servility in highly emotive ways. Even as German Protestants and Catholics achieved a modus vivendi, the Ottoman wars and Barbary piracy sparked terror at the prospect of Muslim slavery. The topoi of confessional relations and Christian-Muslim conflict referenced crises particularly salient to the German lands, but slavery’s place in contemporary discourse does not seem to have differed greatly from that in Britain or France. On the one hand, then, slavery was described as an undesirable-but-ultimately-legitimate position within the spectrum of early modern asymmetric dependencies. On the other, it could be illegitimate when conducted in the wrong way or by the wrong sort of person. Reports of transatlantic slavery were assessed according to the same standards. Moral conduct, properly construed, was taken as the defining characteristic of legitimate slavery so that the problem was less the category of subjection than the moral-religious relationship embodied in each instance. That many, or even most, instances fell short of these standards did not, in itself, delegitimize the practice as a whole. For abolition projects to appear viable, Germans required not just knowledge of transatlantic slavery and sympathy with the enslaved, but also the perception that actively dismantling the slave system was both legitimate and a plausible prospect.
Challenging Slavery
In 1778, one year before the launch of Sprengel’s course, the periodical Ephemerides of Humanity published an anonymous essay against the “injustice of the Whites against the Blacks” that named the slave trade as “one of humanity’s most ignominious political institutions.”Footnote 68 The author asked readers to imagine themselves in the place of the enslaved, commenting that “humanity must tremble before this inhumane [unmenschliche] process.”Footnote 69 Readers should shun tobacco and sugar, because “each piece drips from the blood of the unhappy N**** … the man of heart and conscience will sacrifice his appetite and sigh aloud at the mistreatment of his brothers!”Footnote 70 The essay later calls upon nature, which gifted humans with “susceptibility to the sweet sensations of human love [Menschenliebe]” to “guide them upon the only true path to their goal.”Footnote 71 By recommending the boycott of slave goods, the essay might reasonably claim to inaugurate German abolitionism. While it is not quite clear what the “goal” of the final words is, abolition of the trade—perhaps even slavery itself—is at least among the more plausible inferences.
While the 1778 essay is striking, it is also the work of an archetypal “lone warrior,” to borrow Lentz’s phrase. No less striking is the fact that in the late 1770s and early 1780s British abolitionist treatises were read by Germans despite—not because of—their positions on slavery. Reviewers of Granville Sharp’s work discussed his theological and philosophical claims while making little or no reference to his anti-slavery arguments.Footnote 72 Extracts from James Ramsay’s abolitionist writings sympathized with the enslaved and discoursed on Africans’ supposed mental characteristics, but did not consider the prospect of abolition.Footnote 73 Explicitly pro-slavery arguments rarely appeared in German publications of the 1770s, but abolitionism itself remained peripheral.
When it was acknowledged, abolitionist agitation was sometimes considered counterproductive. An early translation of the French Philosophical History of the Two Indies included the original’s extended critique of transatlantic slavery but appended a commentary defending European political arrangements and arguing that anti-slavery polemic was ineffective. The translator acknowledged “the cruelty and insensibility of … tyrannical masters” while arguing that demands for change only alienate the powerful.Footnote 74 Enemies of slavery should instead demonstrate that the “abolition of slavery comes with real advantages for princes, merchants, and proprietors.”Footnote 75 The translator doubted whether this was possible and was clearly skeptical of the movement generally.
Nevertheless, abolitionist gains abroad were widely celebrated in the German press. Germans contrasted Quaker efforts against slavery with the hypocrisy of slave-owning American revolutionaries.Footnote 76 Journalists took an especially favorable view of Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (1780). The Commercial Library praised it as “noble, heartfelt,” and “resting on very humane principles.”Footnote 77 The Ephemerides of Humanity went so far as to describe the Act as “a model of a truly humane [menschliche] mentality.”Footnote 78 Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Small Children’s Library meanwhile declared it an “affecting spectacle,” and applauded “the philanthropist whose voice stirred his brothers’ conscience.”Footnote 79 The “philanthropic [menschenfreundliche] Act” left “one injustice fewer in the world.” In 1779 Campe had published a pedagogical tract defending the value of “true feeling” (wahre Empfindsamkeit) in forming children into moral, Enlightened adults.Footnote 80 The essay in the Children’s Library implied that the Pennsylvania Act provided one such emotional experience—a suggestion, in turn, that young Germans should support similar measures in their own careers.
The Pennsylvania Act provoked an increased interest in the topic but, overall, publications that directly addressed abolition remained rare in the early 1780s. The most common German word for abolition, Abschaffung, more often appeared in relation to serfdom and torture. Comments on the abolitionist movement itself, though mostly positive, did not typically endorse abolitionism directly or suggest that Germans adopt anti-slavery measures themselves. Despite general agreement that the enslaved deserved sympathy, hopes for abolition appear to have largely been limited to the remote, tumultuous republic taking shape in North America. Few, if any, Germans appear to have envisioned an enforced, international slave-trading ban, let alone the end of slavery itself.
It may be tempting to interpret the relative scarcity of German abolitionist writing in this period as evidence that Germans lagged behind their counterparts in France and Britain, but this would be mistaken. While Granville Sharp had vocally supported abolition of both the trade and slavery itself since 1772, he spent the following decade largely as an Einzelkampfer himself. The movement to abolish the slave trade did not achieve widespread support in Britain until the late 1780s, with efforts against slavery as a whole only taking off some decades later.Footnote 81 French abolitionism followed a similar trajectory. The Société des Amis des Noirs was founded in 1788 by a cluster of influential French writers and political figures with the objective of abolishing the trade, although many hoped this would lead to the gradual dissolution of slavery itself. The Société was less successful than the British Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and abolition gained very little traction among French representatives during the first few years of the Revolution, not least as a result of pressure from the French pro-slavery lobby.Footnote 82 The abolition of French colonial slavery only came in 1794 under the Montagnard Committee of Public Safety. Even then it was as much an attempt to pacify the uprising in Saint-Domingue as a result of anti-slavery conviction.Footnote 83
Early German writings about abolition underscore the centrality of emotion in German attempts to comprehend both transatlantic slavery and the abolitionist movement. For the 1778 Ephemerides of Humanity author, the “man of heart and conscience” abjures slave-produced commodities, while it was the “sweet sensations of human love” that would lead humanity towards a resolution. The 1780 Pennsylvania legislation was “noble, heartfelt” and an “affecting spectacle.” Even the skeptical translator of the History of the Two Indies acknowledged slavers’ “cruelty and insensibility” towards the enslaved. The rhetorical matrix through which slavery was understood increasingly focused on the practical relevance of different forms of feeling: the trade produced negative emotions and was maintained by insensitivity; its victims deserved compassion and its curtailment admiration. The proper affective states were closely identified with Menschlichkeit—humanity or humaneness—a normative concept that contemporaries strongly associated with Enlightenment and deployed to highlight a cosmopolitan capacity for sympathetic identification with others.Footnote 84 This, in turn, signaled a shift away from traditional, religious standards of legitimation. The imperative to respond to slavery with appropriate feeling thus became a normative marker of one’s Enlightened, cosmopolitan character even before widespread German commitment to abolition. This emotional norm was an important antecedent to, rather than an outcome of, German abolitionism.
Slavery became increasingly prominent in German public debate from the mid-1780s, around the same time that anti-slavery agitation began gaining ground in Britain. By 1788 the journalist Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, then highly regarded for his expertise on British affairs, described the trade as “infamous” and among the most hotly discussed issues in Britain itself.Footnote 85 British pro-slavery writings were mocked in the German press, with one review of John Matthews’ anti-abolitionist work describing its arguments as “being of no weight, and incapable of being otherwise, for they come from a slave trader.”Footnote 86 Around the same time, some Germans established direct contacts with British abolitionists.Footnote 87
While Germans became more outspoken on the subject, their interventions continued to emphasize the importance of sympathy. In 1785 the pre-eminent philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder implored readers that “the N**** … is your brother … You shall not oppress, murder, or steal him, for he is a human, as you are.”Footnote 88 Herder’s work displays a consistent commitment to the role of emotion—and especially sympathy—as a source for moral values.Footnote 89 Indeed, this was one of the most important disagreements in his dispute with Kant. It is in this context that he supported his argument by asserting that “no witness of humane feeling [menschliche Empfindung] could express the despairing woe” felt by transported Africans.Footnote 90 Herder’s ally, the explorer Georg Forster—whose wider work also treats sympathy as a reflection of Enlightened progress—hoped that the “noble pride and resistance” of the enslaved would check the “rage” and “diabolical joy” of their oppressors.Footnote 91 Meanwhile, the anatomist Samuel Thomas Sömmerring favorably cited abolitionist essays and expressed revulsion at the transatlantic system.Footnote 92 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, then among the most important natural historians in all of Europe, wrote that slavers “must be as without heart as they are without head” for their disregard of Africans’ “natural kind-heartedness.”Footnote 93 In Bern, Johann Ernst Kolb described his edition of a collection of slave narratives as “an affecting read for people of a good nature [Menschen guter Art]” showing how “oppressively the European … treads upon humanity.”Footnote 94
Even though their authors’ sympathies were clear, these texts did not directly recommend abolition itself. Others were more forthright. In 1784, Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin’s Grey Monster supported abolition for “humanity [Menschlichkeit] and the honor of our generation.”Footnote 95 The question was not whether the “disgusting and hateful” slave trade was acceptable, but how it could be eliminated. Such proclamations became increasingly common as abolitionist efforts gained steam abroad, especially in Britain. A 1786 stage adaptation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko retained the titular character’s tragic death, but inserted a new scene in which the surviving characters, affected by his suffering, pledge to “abolish slavery from this moment on.”Footnote 96 By the end of the decade even Sprengel had aligned himself with the “friends of humanity” pursuing “the abolition of the hateful N**** trade.”Footnote 97
Among the decade’s most detailed studies of the abolition movement was an anonymous 1788 article in the Halle-based Philosophical Magazine. The periodical was edited by the professor Johann August Eberhard, a prominent aestheticist and opponent of Kant’s philosophy. In 1786 Eberhard had published a new edition of his 1776 General Theory of Thinking and Feeling arguing that sentimentality (Empfindlichkeit) ultimately “inclines the soul towards love of the good.”Footnote 98 The article on abolitionism may have been written by someone else, but it at least mirrors Eberhard’s principle that sympathy enjoins moral action. The “Brief Overview of the Origin and Progress of the Efforts towards the Abolition of the Slave Trade, especially in England” was based on a collection of abolitionist writings sent to the author from Britain and describes abolitionists as “friends of humanity” who mobilized against slavery for “reasons of human feeling [menschliches Gefühl].”Footnote 99 According to the author, slavery and the slave trade were maintained, variously, by “inhumanity” (Unmenschlichkeit), “passions, wantonness, and senseless incursions,” and the “intractable unfeelingness [Gefühllosigkeit] of self-interest.”Footnote 100 The author agreed that the slave trade could be abolished through legislation, but maintained that, to avoid violating property rights, slavery itself could only end through “a free resolution of the proprietary masters.”Footnote 101 Nevertheless, the anti-slavery movement combined “the correction of human feeling” (Berichtigung des menschlichen Gefühls) with “Enlightenment of the understanding” (Aufklärung des Verstandes) to replace “vestiges of the state of barbarism” with the “laws of justice and humanity.”Footnote 102
Three years later, in 1791, Johann Jacob Sell echoed this analysis in what appears to be the first book-length German monograph on the history of transatlantic slavery. Sell was then a professor of history at the Royal Gymnasium in Stettin, but had studied at Halle and is one possible author of the Philosophical Magazine article. Learning of the slave ships, he insisted, “sentimental human nature freely shudders, sighs at the unnatural hardness and insensibility to which avarice and greed can blunt humanity, and finds consolation and encouragement only in the thought that a large part of humanity, moved by true compassion for their brothers, hates and abominates these injustices, and are animated by ardor to eradicate this disgrace to humanity.”Footnote 103 Put simply, Sell also argued that sympathy demanded abolition.
Among the most pro-active German anti-slavery writers was Christian Ulrich Detlev von Eggers. Eggers had a long-standing interest in the social role of emotion. In a 1786 book on the history of humanity he described the preparation of the “heart for tender and noble sentiments” as an essential precondition for the emergence and progress of society.Footnote 104 The same book also signaled his opposition to slavery, but in 1791 he became an outspoken proponent of abolition, arguing that while the French and British abolitionist societies had awakened “humanity and sensibility” (Menschlichkeit und Fühlbarkeit), all should support the movement, “each where and how he can.”Footnote 105 Moving to the second person, Eggers demanded that “[you] whose breast is animated by humane feeling [menschliches Gefühl] … whom destiny has endowed with an abundance of good fortune, sacrifice your pennies to this goal upon the altar of humanity.”Footnote 106 If this represents the more activist end of German anti-slavery thought, the deployment of “humane feeling” as both a motivating and legitimizing force was by then a common line in anti-slavery argumentation.
By the end of the 1780s slavery was a major topic of discussion in German thought and one connected to a wider interest in the significance of emotion. Because the association between correct emotion, transatlantic slavery, and Enlightenment predated widespread overt support for abolition, the latter should not be treated as an inevitable effect of the former. Instead, outspoken support for abolitionism grew as anti-slavery successes within the dominant slave-trading nation—Britain—made abolition seem increasingly viable. As an objective however, abolition was legitimized by drawing on the prominent, persistent perception that to be Enlightened one required adequate Empfindsamkeit and Gefühle. Recourse to emotions was not merely about theoretical analysis, but rather the deployment of normative, cosmopolitan ideas such as Menschlichkeit to establish one’s Enlightened credentials within the public sphere. Since Enlightened cosmopolitanism was bound to sympathy, the callous affective states that drove transatlantic slavery were interpreted as antithetical to Enlightenment itself. With the rise of abolitionism abroad, many Germans came to see the movement as a logical culmination of Enlightened emotionality. Opposition to slavery thereby became, in Lentz’s words, part of their “self-construction as cosmopolitans and ‘world citizens.’”Footnote 107 Despite their differences in style, genre, and practical approach, then, the writers discussed above were united by a perceived harmony of anti-slavery reasoning with anti-slavery sensibility.
By 1794 abolitionism had won a substantial contingent of German supporters, but around the same time it also became less prominent in public debate. The French Revolution, the crises brought about by the Revolutionary Wars, and the anti-slavery revolt in what would later become Haiti not only absorbed the attention of many German writers but also heightened rulers’ vigilance against signs of subversion. As Anthony La Vopa writes, “atheism and Jacobinism, irreligion and democracy, had become virtually coterminous.”Footnote 108 When the Jacobins’ Law of 4 February 1794 ended slavery in the French colonies, many Germans no doubt feared that abolitionism would join this nexus. Anti-slavery thought never disappeared from public debate and remained an important part of philosophical discourse, but open support for abolition appears to have become less common, at least within the mainstream German press.Footnote 109
Defending Slavery
Christoph Meiners was not an obvious candidate to become the leading German anti-abolitionist. He does not seem to have had a personal stake in slavery and showed little interest in either slavery or racial difference before 1784.Footnote 110 Nor was he an especially conservative thinker on other topics. In the 1770s and 1780s he challenged various orthodoxies in contemporary German philosophy and as late as 1792 wrote in favor of the end of serfdom and the drastic reform of the German nobility.Footnote 111 Precisely how Meiners became committed to racial inequality remains unclear, but in 1785 he confidently declared that humanity is divided into two “lineages” (Hauptstämme), the Caucasian and the Mongolic, with the latter “weaker in body and spirit … much more ill-natured and devoid of virtue.”Footnote 112 These supposed facts were, he claimed, necessary for understanding human history and addressing contemporary political debates, from the colonization of the Americas to the rights of European Jews.
Over the following years he published a string of articles about racial slavery in the Göttingen Historical Magazine edited by himself and the church historian Ludwig Timotheus Spittler. Here Meiners claimed that “the N**** represents a lower race of humanity, which remains behind the White nations [Völkern] in consideration of its mental powers and the composition of its heart” so that the subordination of Black Africans to White Europeans was a law of nature.Footnote 113 According to Meiners, this subordination was legitimate on both abstract and utilitarian grounds for, as another essay argued, “notwithstanding all the abuses connected to it” transatlantic slavery “brings to the entire human species more advantages than disadvantages.”Footnote 114 He insisted that the racial status of African rulers inclined them towards despotism, meaning the enslaved are treated better under Europeans than as freepersons in Africa.Footnote 115 Elsewhere Meiners commented that Black Africans could conceivably become suitable for limited forms of freedom, but that this would take many generations of European domination and never lead to full equality.Footnote 116 Ultimately, however, Meiners concluded that “improvement” under Europeans only strengthened the case for the slave trade as it would increase the number of Africans capable of freedom. The enslaved should be treated “humanely,” but White domination, “based on wisdom and the good,” would ultimately make them “better and happier.”Footnote 117
Meiners’ essays are repulsive today and they also repulsed some (probably many) contemporaries. Forster summarized Meiners’ work as “Göttingen erudition deployed for an indefensible hypothesis.”Footnote 118 Blumenbach rejected Meiners’ claims about Black Africans as scientifically unsound.Footnote 119 Rudolph Zacharias Becker reinforced the debate’s emotional dimension by declaring not only his “disgust” (Abscheu) at the slave trade, but also that he had been “much afflicted” to see such comments from a philosopher he had previously admired.Footnote 120
The disturbing nature of Meiners’ remarks should not distract us from the fact that they operated from within the guiding assumptions of the Enlightenment rather than against them. Since the early 1770s, Meiners had described himself as “a friend of all means, [both] near and far, that may contribute even the slightest to the Enlightenment of humanity.”Footnote 121 He thus responded to the anti-slavery identification of abolition with Enlightenment by reinterpreting the material and racial benefits of transatlantic slavery as themselves facets of progress. His justifications were formulated in quintessentially Enlightened terms: transatlantic slavery was a source of earthly betterment based on the purportedly empirical fact of racial inequality.Footnote 122
Since Meiners, like his abolitionist rivals, worked within a shared, self-consciously Enlightened discursive arena, it is unsurprising that he also gave due consideration to feeling. He had long had an interest in emotions, both as characteristics worthy of study on their own terms and as possible sources of moral action. From the 1780s he, like Herder, was engaged in the controversy around Kant’s critical philosophy, arguing against Kant’s efforts to eliminate emotion from moral decision-making.Footnote 123 In the debate around abolition he nevertheless took a far more limited view regarding both the prevalence and implications of emotional experience, insisting that complex emotions such as sympathy were themselves racial characteristics. Meiners claimed that Black Africans differ from Europeans in “the facilities of the heart” and are “more unfeeling,” so that “only the greatest anger or … despair arising from fear can move” them to open confrontation.Footnote 124 They almost entirely lacked “gratitude,” let alone “sympathy or confelicity” (Mitleid oder Mit-Freude) and thus “the moral feeling [Gefühl] … the truly humane sensibility [menschliche Empfindlichkeit]” that provided the foundations of life in Enlightened Europe.Footnote 125 Meiners argued further that enslaved Africans suffered less than Europeans would in the same circumstances so that, even in the condition of slavery, Black Africans exhibit “cheerfulness and contentment.”Footnote 126 As a consequence, they merited less sympathy than abolitionists presumed. Thus, while Africans should “both do and enjoy as much good as their nature can stand,” the anti-slavery cohort’s excessive sympathy had misidentified the condition most conducive to African happiness.Footnote 127 This was, Meiners claimed, not freedom but slavery.
Meiners was emphatic that sympathy with the enslaved was a marker of “true Enlightenment and mental education.”Footnote 128 Contemporary Europeans had become uniquely “sensitive regarding the happiness and unhappiness of others,” but this was a product of racial advantage.Footnote 129 This fact, Meiners claimed, bolstered the case for European domination, since only Europeans could sufficiently sympathize with their subordinates to treat them well. While he agreed with the abolitionists regarding the emotional qualities of the truly Enlightened individual, he inverted the latter’s assessment of the significance of these qualities. Whereas the abolitionists sought to reconcile Enlightened emotionality through anti-slavery action, Meiners argued that emancipatory urges should be subordinated to supposedly rational imperatives. The truly Enlightened course of action was to persevere with the slave trade despite the feelings of sympathy and horror it provoked. Meiners thus applauded the “awakening love of freedom” and “hatred of oppression” of the early French Revolution but maintained that, if extended across racial lines, these impulses threatened to become “a feverish enthusiasm for an equality … that is as impossible as it is unjust.”Footnote 130 By attributing abolitionism to “noble but misguided passions,” Meiners suggested that the emotional subtlety which legitimized European domination contained within itself a threat to Enlightened progress.Footnote 131
It has sometimes been claimed from the denunciations by Forster, Blumenbach, and others, that Meiners’ pro-slavery writings left him intellectually isolated, but this is anachronistic.Footnote 132 Despite their prominence, Forster and Blumenbach attracted both supporters and detractors throughout their careers. It cannot be assumed that their disapproval represented all, or even most, German opinion. We cannot know how every reader responded to his work, but Meiners does not seem to have faced significant exclusions in either his personal life or his career.Footnote 133 His work on slavery may have made him enemies, but it also made him allies.
An anonymous apologia for Meiners appeared in Johann Samuel Fest’s Contributions towards Reassurance and Enlightenment Regarding Those Things which Are or May Be Unpleasant to Humans. Some years before, Fest had launched his periodical “for and about sufferers [Leidende]” in the hope that exploring difficult experiences would contribute to their relief.Footnote 134 In his introduction to the piece defending Meiners, Fest lamented the “wretched condition” of the enslaved but respected the author’s argument that we “keep our sympathy within its proper limits.”Footnote 135 The essay’s author, apparently a German resident in England, argued that the abolitionists’ writings systematically exaggerated the conditions of the enslaved so that “the sensibility of the suffering [is] raised and overstretched by the writer’s art.”Footnote 136 The author further claimed that Black Africans lack “the fine nerves of a [Lawrence] Sterne” and so have “neither knowledge nor feeling of the sentimental systems of our fashionable Werthers and Charlottes.”Footnote 137 In other words, the author agreed with Meiners’ claim that Black Africans suffer less than Europeans while suggesting that the abolitionists had erroneously universalized the emotions described in sentimental novels. Conversely, pursuing “useful deeds for the good of the world” would “evidence the justness and necessity of the trade with regards to the slaves themselves.”Footnote 138 The essayist shared Meiners’ view that slavery under Europeans was preferable to freedom in Africa, stating that slaves in English colonies “are mostly happier and more content” than day laborers in England itself.Footnote 139 Finally, the author agreed with Meiners that “the slave trade yet counts as the only path to be found towards the cultivation of the N****.”Footnote 140 Truly Enlightened sympathy, undistorted by literary flourish, therefore demanded the suppression of emancipatory impulses that were themselves the special province of novel-reading “cultivated nations.”Footnote 141
Another anonymous author writing in the Historical and Geographical Monthly regretted “the horrifying abuses” associated with the slave trade but found Meiners’ work to have “so much reason and equity that I am amazed it has received any opposition.”Footnote 142 The author’s claims rested in large part on perceived emotional experiences. The slave trade contributed to “the augmentation of the happiness of the human species,” while life in Africa saw the “nullification of all the bonds of love, friendship, even the nature of human feeling [Menschengefühl].”Footnote 143 All in all, “the diligent N****, with a good master, is far happier than the day-laboring farmer in France.”Footnote 144 Again, emotional considerations are treated as a precondition for addressing the problem of transatlantic slavery even as the author concluded that the trade itself ultimately alleviated suffering.
The case of Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann is particularly interesting. Zimmermann was a geography professor at the Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig who closely associated Enlightenment with correct emotion across his career. In 1795 he published a book defending peaceful, non-revolutionary progress as the “duty of the true Aufklärer… of every man of feeling, heart, and sense.”Footnote 145 He drew extensively on this association between emotion and Enlightenment in his comments on transatlantic slavery. In the same year he praised Granville Sharp as a “feeling-full [gefühlvoll] friend of humanity” and, despite some reservations about its strategies, described the abolitionist movement as “a glorious monument to British love of humanity” that “reduces humanity’s suffering.”Footnote 146 Indeed, at one point he even corresponded with Sharp directly.Footnote 147 Nevertheless, in 1810—after Britain had begun pushing for an international slave-trading ban—he acknowledged that the global eradication of the “tragic trade” would mean “the lesser woe of humanity,” but argued that due sympathy for Africans legitimized the slave trade’s continuation into the foreseeable future.Footnote 148 If Europeans left the slave markets, he claimed, North African and Asian peoples would simply step in to fill their place.Footnote 149 As these peoples were supposedly less cultivated than Europeans, the enslaved would experience more suffering than under Europeans. Rather than seek abolition, colonial governments should, Zimmermann argued, promote “humanity [Menschlichkeit] and morality [Moralität]” to limit the “mistreatment” of the enslaved.Footnote 150 In other words, Zimmermann appears to have changed his mind on abolition, and his justification for doing so was based on claims of sympathy, namely that the slave trade provoked less suffering under Europeans than it would under the peoples of other continents. It is unclear precisely why Zimmermann’s position on the subject changed, but it is a distinct possibility that he had read arguments like those of Meiners and found them convincing.
These various interventions were supplemented by German translations of other anti-abolitionist writings, some of which made very similar arguments.Footnote 151 A translation of the Chevalier de Chastellux’s travels in America described the “benevolence and generosity” of the abolitionist Anthony Benezet while noting that Virginians “to their credit … talk incessantly about how they want to abolish slavery.”Footnote 152 He concluded however that abolition would be unwise due to Africans’ supposedly innate lack of virtues.Footnote 153 Such comments show that arguments positing a mismatch between feeling and reason were not limited to the work of Meiners and his allies, or even to German-speaking Europe.
There is no moral equivalence between abolitionism and anti-abolitionism, but the anti-abolitionists clearly saw themselves as Enlightened cosmopolitans just as much as did the abolitionists. They, no less than the abolitionists, drew on notions of sympathy to affirm this status. However, whereas the abolitionists saw anti-slavery emotion and reason as being in harmony, the anti-abolitionists asserted that anti-slavery impulses were admirable but impracticable.
Conclusions
This article cannot offer a comprehensive census of German writing on slavery in these years, but by the time France ended slavery in its colonies in 1794, support for abolishing the slave trade probably did represent the majority view within the German lands, at least insofar as it was publicly expressed. While Meiners was not alone, it is significantly harder to find German proponents of the transatlantic slave trade than it is to find critics. It is less clear what Germans thought about hopes for abolishing slavery as a whole, though most seem to have at least had misgivings about the institution. The place of abolitionism in European—including German—public life would continue to shift over the following decades, as Napoleon reintroduced French colonial slavery and abolition of the slave trade became official policy in Britain. By the early 1790s, however, Germans had access to two incompatible, but nevertheless closely related, frameworks for thinking about the relationship between slavery and progress. Both were self-consciously Enlightened and both revealed an abiding concern with emotion.
Ann Laura Stoler has long emphasized the importance of affective states in the history of racial institutions, writing that “to whom one expressed attachment as opposed to pity, contempt, indifference, or disdain provided both cultural and legal ‘proof’ of who one was.”Footnote 154 While all Enlightenment writers were committed to some concept of reason, they differed, sometimes drastically, regarding its relationship to emotion. Both of the factions described in this article treated the sympathetic, cosmopolitan quality of Menschlichkeit as proof of their Enlightened status. They nevertheless adopted irreconcilable political positions on slavery, with one group arguing that Enlightened Menschlichkeit, properly construed, required continuing the slave trade, not abolishing it. The abolitionists identified their Enlightened status with efforts to dissolve the barriers between sympathy and action, while the anti-abolitionists identified Enlightenment with the pragmatic disregard of immediate feeling. The latter did not straightforwardly reject emotion, but instead set it at a remove by claiming abolition was no solution at all: abolishing the slave trade would cause more suffering, not less, even if that suffering became less visible to Europeans.
Using the history of emotions to approach this debate allows us to see sympathy not only as a concept for theoretical investigation but also as a norm establishing the parameters of Enlightened discourse. As discussed above, many figures in the debate about abolition—from Campe to Meiners—had serious theoretical interests in emotions, both as objects of study and as characteristics with moral, social, and political functions, but viewing a broad range of authors shows that the language of sympathy was not restricted to just these figures. We cannot know how sincere these various references to sympathy were, but the fact that they were so omnipresent in the debate suggests that they were deemed necessary for participation (or at least participation as an Aufklärer). Indeed, it is precisely this omnipresence that means we cannot know whether affirmations of sympathy conferred some sort of discursive advantage or not. Few, if any, participants felt they could wholly ignore Africans’ feelings, even when the response was to try to diminish their significance.
As intellectual historians have long argued, rhetoric should be taken seriously as the substance through which debate is instantiated, rather than dismissed as extraneous pretense.Footnote 155 Appeals to sympathy should not be dismissed as mere empty words, even when we might be inclined to doubt their sincerity. Instead, they situated the debate about abolition within the broader realm of Enlightened concerns. Sympathy identified the Enlightened credentials of participants, while also establishing norms according to which that debate was to be conducted. The German Enlightenment cannot be understood without considerations of emotion, but such considerations should be understood as part of the Enlightenment’s discursive self-construction, not just as objects of intellectual study.
Indeed, read side by side, the pro- and anti-slavery camps offer important insights into the epistemic and political character of the Enlightenment more broadly. Scholars have rightly criticized older stereotypes of the Enlightenment as overwhelmingly committed to abstract reason without regard to feeling. Nevertheless, while most Enlighten writers hoped to bring reason and emotion into accord, a competing cohort did in fact argue for a more rigorous commitment to reason that would pursue the more abstract, purportedly rational hypothesis that European slavery benefited Africans. At least among non-specialists, the Enlightenment remains strongly associated with both abstract reason and emancipatory ideals of freedom, dignity, and human rights. It is then ironic that in this context it was the apologists for transatlantic slavery who argued most vigorously to restrict the role of presently-felt sympathy in decision-making. The German debate about slavery further serves as an important reminder that the pursuit of “betterment of life on earth” that characterized the Enlightenment could be interpreted as engendering projects of subjugation just as much as projects of emancipation. If we are to understand the Enlightenment on its own terms, these latter visions also demand our attention, however troubling they may be.
That German debates about transatlantic slavery were so concerned with emotion will come as no surprise to scholars of British abolitionism. The evocation of emotion has long been recognized as a key discursive strategy among British abolitionists.Footnote 156 The Enlightenment involved extensive transnational intellectual exchange facilitated by an array of commercial, personal, political, and institutional networks. Many of the texts discussed above depended directly on these networks, which mirrored (and sometimes overlapped) those underpinning transatlantic slavery itself. However, while the impetus for abolition appears to have been inspired by efforts abroad, the valorization of emotion—especially sympathy—was already prevalent within the German Enlightenment. Germans such as Oldendorp and Sprengel appear to have considered emotions critical for thinking about transatlantic slavery even without direct input from non-German sources. The emotional dimension of their writings may well have been encouraged by similar currents elsewhere, but it seems implausible that it was not also connected both to the wider interest in emotion characteristic of the German Enlightenment and the long history of German writing about slavery in highly emotive (albeit selective) terms.
The point here is not to suggest that German discussions of abolition differed greatly from those elsewhere or had a peculiarly German character but rather to highlight that they did not appear ex nihilo. Instead, like debates around slavery elsewhere, they occurred against a complex historical background in which slavery was simultaneously considered both a source of high emotion and a legitimate type of social relation. This article cannot offer a detailed comparison of the various European abolitionist movements, let alone explain why abolitionism ultimately proved successful. The suggestion is rather that the history of slavery and abolitionism in early modern Europe is neither one of sharp national differences nor one in which ideas were simply transmitted from one nation to another. Instead, we might think of a variety of transnational processes, material and intellectual, with a wide range of participants spread across Europe. While these participants were no doubt informed by local conditions, those conditions also existed within an array of overlapping, often closely integrated European networks, traditions, and institutions. Germans were part of the history of European slavery. Their engagement with the subject during the Enlightenment cannot be understood without transnational exchange, but nor can it be reduced to it.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Michelle Pfeffer, Lucile Boucher, my dad Steven French, and the participants of the Online Enlightenment Club for their feedback on early versions of this article. Of the latter, the suggestions of Joanna Innes and Heikki Lempa were crucial to the article’s development. My thanks also to the two anonymous peer reviewers, whose thoughtful comments helped me hone and clarify my arguments in the final stages.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Funding statement
This article first began to take shape during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Leibniz Institut for European History in Mainz, was further developed during a fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, and was completed thanks to a Turin Humanities Programme junior research fellowship funded by Fondazione 1563.
Morgan Golf-French is a postdoctoral researcher working as part of the Turin Humanities Programme. He has previously held research fellowships from the DAAD, the German Historical Institute in London, the Leibniz Institute for European History, and the Herzog August Bibliothek, and spent two years as Departmental Lecturer in History at the University of Oxford. He completed his doctorate at University College London in 2020. His research has previously appeared in scholarly periodicals including The Historical Journal, Modern Intellectual History, and History of Universities. His first book, Race, Culture, and Politics in German Historical Thought, 1785–1815, will be published by Oxford University Press in April 2026.
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