In both Scotland and Ireland, antislavery activism constituted another unmistakable aspect of the Presbyterian fringe. Opposition to slavery is generally viewed as a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century response to the growing horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and the unfair advantage the slave economy held against free white workers. But over a century before and for much different reasons, seventeenth-century Covenanters belied these paradigms. Covenanters of all stripes held unique and long-standing articulations of antislavery thought rooted in their logic and theories of Christian nationhood.

The earliest antislavery Covenanter was Scottish theorist Samuel Rutherford. In Lex, Rex, Rutherford taught that “Slavery of servants to Lords or Masters, such as were of old amongst the Jews, is not natural, but against nature.” Despite its presence in the biblical text, slavery for Rutherford was a malum natura that was only valid if it was a punishment for sin. The “buying and selling of men; which is a miserable consequence of sin,” created “a sort of death, when men are put to the toiling pains of the hireling,” to “hew wood, and draw water continually.” This was contrary to the nature of humanity. People were made in God’s image and therefore “can no more by nature’s law be sold and bought than a religious and sacred thing dedicated to God.” Tying slavery to the state tyranny he discussed in his critiques of Charles I, Rutherford claimed that “Every man by nature is a freeman born, that is, by nature no man comes out of the womb under any civil subjection to King, Prince, or Judge to master, captain, conqueror, teacher.” This was the heart of seventeenth-century Scottish radicalism. Both the individual and the state had the natural right to obey God. Neither the individual nor the state had the natural right to offend God. Both were free to do right. Neither was free to do wrong.

This early birth and long incubation of Covenanter antislavery thought sprang from a different front than that of later activists. Though Covenanters were not Lockean liberals, their articulations of Scottish radicalism’s antislavery were grounded in natural law. They were not biblically literalistic and needed not be. Seventeenth-century paradigms had not yet encountered the commonsense literalism used by nineteenth-century pro-slavery advocates. But Covenanters had long experience with the literalism of figures such as James VI/I. Such conservatives used biblical texts to support the autocratic rule of kings, and Whigs across the British Isles refused to concede this point. Rutherford, like those who followed him, was antislavery because of his distinctive approaches o antityranny and religious liberty. Covenanters perceived their greatest threats in Catholicism’s power over its members and the state’s attempt to make “perpetual Slaves” to “our English Pope.”

The early slavery Covenanters opposed, however, was no metaphorical flourish. It was real oppression tied to their own experiences. Bond slaves from Scotland and Ireland populated the American plantation labor force. Yet to encounter monolithic chattel race slavery, Covenanter notions of bondage arose out of a compilation of forms of coerced labor and man stealing. In the mid-seventeenth century, North African raiders stole people from English towns, city streets were swept to export vagrants, defeated Scottish Royalists and Irish Catholics were deported, and London “spirit rings” stole thousands and shipped them–without indenture contracts–to Barbados and Virginia. In 1660, there were more bond slaves in the British New World than chattel slaves. This number soon included those on the Presbyterian fringe. Many survivors of the 1679 Covenanter debacle at Bothwell Bridge were exiled to the plantations of Barbados. In 1685 [Covenanters] refusing to take the oath of Abjuration renouncing the covenants were shipped to New Jersey (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 32-33).