Excerpt from Letters on Slavery

My original design, was to lay before the Public a free and impartial sketch of negro slavery as it now exists in the island of Barbadoes; to show how it would be affected by the abolition of the slave-trade; and to prove by arguments, founded on facts, the natural equality of the natives of the immense continent of Africa to the rest of mankind. - I am conscious, I have not wilfully misstated or exaggerated any one circumstance; and I have written with the caution of a man who expects to meet with the most pertinacious contradiction. - To give as agreeable an air, as I could, to a subject in itself dull and disgusting, I have preferred the looser form of letters to the formality of a regular treatise. - The sketch I have given of the state of slavery in Jamaica was no part of my plan, but was drawn after that plan was compleated. This I hope will apologize for some repetitions in the latter part of my book.

The name and authority of an author have perhaps greater weight with some readers than his arguments. Such persons regard a proportion as true, not so much because a celebrated man has demonstrated it as because he has affirmed it. Those undoubtedly are bad arguments which require foreign aid; but knowing that, on account of the obscurity of an author, even good arguments do not always operate with their whole intrinsic force, I have had frequent recourse to works of acknowledged merit, quotations from which, I am sensible, form the best part of my book.

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