Emotions, Abolition, and the Debate around Transatlantic Slavery in the German Enlightenment

Abstract This article examines the debate around transatlantic slavery in the German Enlightenment. The debate is considered in light of previous early modern notions of servitude, the interest in sympathy characteristic of the Enlightenment, and the emergent abolitionist movement. The article argues that emotion was central to German commentaries on transatlantic slavery so that, by around 1780, Enlightened Germans were expected to sympathize with the enslaved. This normative emphasis on sympathy preceded widespread support for abolitionism, which emerged only from the middle of the 1780s. The article further argues that the emotional import of slavery played a key role in both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist arguments. Abolitionists understood the feelings associated with the slave trade (and in some cases slavery itself) as reflections of its retrograde character. By contrast, anti-abolitionists praised sympathy with the enslaved as a reflection of European Enlightenment, but maintained that such feelings should be subdued to perpetuate Enlightened progress.