Richard Nisbet Defended Slavery

Determining to expose Rush’s errors, Nisbet opened his tract with the charge that “abuse leveled at an entire body of people, seems so contrary to reason, and every charitable maxim, that a man who undertakes it, though of the first rate genius, lays himself open to be refuted by every school boy.” Unlike Rush who thought Negro slaves were rational, Nisbet argued that they were irrational. Nisbet contended that West Indian slavery was not as heartless or as cruel as described by Rush, yet, he still thought they were “naturally inferior to whites” and slavery was economically necessary, not only because Africans had produced no art, science, or product and had worshiped no Supreme Being, but because “they seem utterly unacquainted with friendship, gratuity and every tie of the same kind.” To further support his argument, Nisbet pointed out the “stupidity of the natives” and charged that the example “of a negro girl writing a few silly poems,” presumably Phillis Wheatley, was a strong evidence that “black are not deficient in understanding.”

Nisbet believed in the Old Testament and claimed that the slavery should be existed according to it. “Slavery, like all other human institutions,” Nisbet pointed out, “may be attended with its particular abuses, but that is not sufficient totally to condemn it, and to reckon every one unworthy the society of men who owns a Negro.” Moreover, he made a quotation from the Scripture and proclaimed that slavery was supported by it. In the Scripture, Moses said that there was a relationship between bond-men and the bond maids and this relationship should be maintained. According to Moses, “both the bond-men and the bond maids, which you shall have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall you buy bond-men and bond-maids……of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you……they shall be your possession. And you shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession, they shall be your bond-men forever.” Therefore, in Nisbet’s opinion, “the scriptures, instead of forbidding it, declare it lawful.”