MDDM Ben Franklin

[Otto]

>
>
> Otto wrote:
> >
> > What's more interesting to me is not the "pamphleteering" but the bits &
> > pieces telling me that the crime of slavery has been seen as a crime in
> > those days already, the contemporaries of Mason & Dixon *knew* that is
> was wrong, unlawful and an offense against the God they were all believing
> in, regardless of Protestant, Puritan, Roman Catholic, Jesuit or whatever:
>

Terrance:
> Some did know that slavery was wrong, unlawful, offensive to God, but
> not most.
> Most people did not know this. Even most Quakers, as my posts on the
> context of Dixon's punch have argued, did not know or believe this.
>
> It was a **gradual** (gradualism)  awakening. Not a great awakening at
> all.

I did not assume that it's been a great awakening.

Of course many common people were illiterate and hadn't read the Bible
themselves, had to rely on what the priests say. But the ones we call
educated have no such excuse. And the simple people who had fled to America
to get away from those feudal European terror regimes could not claim it
too.

Otto