Peter Williams, Jr.: “Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade”

Glossary

• “am I not a man and a brother” the words on the seal of the Quaker-led Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which met in London in 1787, when the seal was designed
• Anthony Benezet an eighteenth-century Quaker abolitionist
• Columbia America
• Flemish favorite Lorenzo de Gorrevod, who obtained a license to transport four thousand slaves
• Hispaniola the island consisting of present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic
• Jehovah a name for God, commonly used in the Old Testament of the Bible
• Robertson's “History of America” a text by the Scottish historian William Robertson first published in 1777
• sons of 76 the American colonists who proclaimed independence in 1776
• tenements dwelling places
• William Wilberforce a British member of Parliament who worked to abolish the slave trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
• Woolman John Woolman, an eighteenth-century Quaker abolitionist and itinerant preacher