The Character of Freedom

The Scottish Enlightenment and American Slavery

An original and deeply researched look at how Scottish Enlightenment ideals interacted with religious philosophy to inform and inspire abolitionists and enslavers alike in the founding of the American republic.

The concept of liberty—so important to the American founding—was significantly informed by Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, which was central to the the Framers’ religious and political education. This intellectual tradition offered potential support for antislavery ideology. Some founders, however, were also enslavers whose practices of bondage were in conspicuous contradiction with these professed ideals. What is the actual relationship between the Scottish Enlightenment and racial slavery? Gideon Mailer answers this question in The Character of Freedom.

Mailer examines how enlightenment and evangelical religious ideas interacted with discussions of racial slavery in the Scottish Atlantic World from the 1740s through the 1840s. From Glasgow to Philadelphia, from Edinburgh to Princeton, and from Aberdeen to Virginia, Scottish-founded religious and educational bodies encompassed competing moral philosophical systems. Moral thinkers developed conceptions of liberty that reflected their institutional and theological commitments.

In Britain, colonial America, and the United States, white thinkers were required to grapple with—or simply evade—the contradiction between their theoretical definitions of liberty and the slaveholding interests in their realm. In those same contexts, however, black Presbyterians were likelier to use Scottish moral philosophy to espouse a more radical abolitionist approach, eventually influencing white theorists to adopt bolder agendas.

The Character of Freedom is an eye-opening look at the history of abolitionist ideas in the formative period of American political life. Spanning the Atlantic and exploring both white and black thinkers, Mailer’s groundbreaking work is a major contribution to our understanding of early American political thought.

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