Expanding Morgan Godwyn’s Corpus: Rethinking the Evolution of Early Modern Anti-Slavery Sentiment
Smith B.
2025Routledge
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
2025
This paper seeks to extend Morgan Godwyn’s bibliography by bringing to light two of his early-career letters that have not received as much attention as they deserve. While these texts have been intermittently cited in recent years, they have not yet been included in his entry with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Beyond helping to extend our biographical understanding of Godwyn, these texts also illuminate how his anti-slavery arguments evolved throughout the 1670s and 1680s. These documents reveal that his thinking developed in three phases. In the first phase of his early letters, he focused on the corruption of vestry power in Virginia, of which slave baptism was a secondary issue (1672). This subsequently gave way to criticisms of slave master absolutism after witnessing slave master brutality in Barbados (1680). Finally, after years of failed reforms, Godwyn began to attack the moral character of those in England who remained ambivalent about settler immorality (1685). This more robust accounting of Godwyn’s development helps to illuminate broader trends in anti-slavery thinking in the seventeenth century. Godwyn’s entry into the anti-slavery discourse reflected a common strategy whereby reformers sought to attack the very idea of slavery, redefining it in such a way as to make it compatible with slaves’ rights, ultimately transmuting it a lesser type of servitude.
Barbados , Morgan Godwyn , slavery , vestry corruption , Virginia
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Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan
Nazarbayev University
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