3. Morgan Godwyn. The Negro’s & Indians Advocate (London, 1680)

This is one of the first publications encouraging Anglican priests to baptise enslaved people. It was described in the 1880s by the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass as ‘the foundation of all the grand concessions yet made to the claims, the character, the manhood and dignity of the Negro’.

An opponent of slavery, Morgan Godwyn was an Anglican minister who had witnessed the barbarity of slavery in Virginia and Barbados. After returning to England, he published several tracts calling for the conversion of enslaved people to Christianity. Closer reading reveals that his arguments voiced criticism not only of the lack of Christian conversion but of the immorality of both the trade in enslaved people and enslavement itself.

Godwyn’s last published sermon was Trade before Religion. It was addressed to King James II and delivered at Westminster Abbey and other churches across London. He compared enslavement and the trade in enslaved people to a pact with the devil:

We have exceeded the worst of Infidels, by our first enslaving, and then murthering of Mens Souls. For how can it be endured that a Nation once so famous for Zeal and Piety… should prostrate her self to that foul Idol Mammon, and worship Trade.

After preaching this sermon in 1685, Godwyn vanished from historical records.

Please click this link to read the full text of Godwyn's last sermon.

KY185.7G6 pp. 40-41