"While there were of course changes during the first sixty years of the eighteenth century, there was a remarkably sudden onset of self-examination among White Americans beginning with the Quakers about 1755 and among others during the gathering crisis which climaxed in the War for Independence."1
Winthrop Jordan in White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812
Despite the brilliance of Jordan's renowned work, White Over Black followed a familiarly flawed pattern in the historiography of American abolitionism. By failing to account for pre-Revolutionary antislavery ideology and action, these works miss a foundational era in the longterm struggle for human rights in America. This website provides a trove of primary sources and secondary sources that question the omission of abolitionist efforts in Colonial America.
Sources
Jordan, Winthrop D.. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. United States: Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., 1968. XXXI