Abstract
The Weston sisters were admirable women if one shared their views and believed that black slaves should enjoy liberty.1 Freedom and equality were the basis of Anglo-American democracy in the nineteenth century, but even in old and New England where liberty was a birthright, the sisters were often regarded as troublemakers by their racially prejudiced society — a society which also attacked them because black slave labour produced cash crops essential to the transatlantic economy. The problem of slavery thus became a personal crisis for people like the Westons whose kin included merchants and bankers active in transatlantic trade, and committed to the ideals of the American Revolution. They were open to later criticism that as hypocritical capitalists they had exploited slave labour;2 worse, they were shown in their own day to be powerless to give freedom to all without using force.
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© 1995 Clare Taylor
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Taylor, C. (1995). The Weston Sisters and the Anti-Slavery Movement. In: Women of the Anti-Slavery Movement. Studies in Gender History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23766-1_2
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