Extract from an Address in the Virginia Gazette

This is the first page of Arthur Lee’s essay published under the pseudonym Philanthropos against the institution of slavery. The full piece appeared in William Rind’s Virginia Gazette on March 19, 1767. This extract version was printed in 1770, most likely in Philadelphia, where anti-slavery activist Anthony Benezet published it as an appendix to later editions of his 1766 book Caution and Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies, in a Short Representation of the Calamitous State of the Enslaved Negroes in the British Dominions. Lee argued in his essay that slavery was “a violation of justice and religion,” and wrote that if the institution continued in America it would lead to uprisings like the recent insurrections in Jamaica. Rind refused to publish the second part of Lee’s essay, a decision Benezet believed was due to “the general opinion, that nothing ought to be published whereby the Negroes may be acquainted with their own strength & the apprehension of danger the whites are in from them.”