ABSTRACT
No women - either black or white - participated in the gradual abolition societies of the Revolutionary Era. But several women of that time advocated universal liberty. In 1774, Abigail Adams, the wife of Patriot leader John Adams, responded to black protest in Massachusetts by telling her husband, Tt always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have’ [104 p. 56]. A few years later, the African-born poet Phillis Wheatley declared in a letter, Tn every human breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance’ [138 p. 58]. Both Adams and Wheatley expressed these antislavery sentiments in the North and in private. But, in 1791, a white woman known only as Sister White head publicly informed a group of Methodist ministers assembled in South Carolina that their support of slavery contradicted the doctrines of Christianity. fiO! my Lord,’ she exclaimed, ‘is this the religion of my adorable master Jesus?’ [73 p. 63].
