“For Ought Is Known”: Hearsay, Antislavery, and the Golden Rule in Colonial North America

Abstract During the seventeenth century, European writers and scientists increasingly embraced eyewitness testimony as a means of ascertaining facts. This article describes how Protestant writers in North American colonies deployed this eyewitness epistemology in arguments over the legality of slavery. Colonial slavery laws were based on the Bible or the Roman law of nations. But as the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans increased in the latter part of the seventeenth century, so did the circulation of eyewitness reports of crimes and atrocities in the slave trade, which contradicted any notion that colonial slavery resembled ancient precedents. This article shows how early antislavery writers seized on these reports as evidence that participation in the slave trade was a violation of Christian moral duty. New forms of moral casuistry based on factual reports of atrocities lent credence to early antislavery efforts. Yet defenders of slavery also used the same reports to argue that African nations were outside of rules-based legal order and therefore eligible for perpetual enslavement.