Not a Mere Rhetorical Flourish

One day in the fall of 1841, the Black abolitionist William Johnson was walking down the street in Philadelphia when a friend thrust a “Human Rights Circular” into his hands. The printed bulletin called for the convening of a “World’s Human Rights Convention,” an idea that Johnson — a formerly enslaved jockey who used his prize winnings to buy his own freedom — couldn’t endorse enough: “If the anti-slavery cause had been productive of no other good,” he would write in a letter published in November 1841, “it has led to the inquiry of the nature of all those various relations of human beings, commonly known by the name of human rights.” Now was the time, he believed, to make human rights “a great central, practical truth, and not a mere rhetorical flourish.”

Everyone supposedly has them, but where exactly do human rights come from? 

Historians of human rights have typically answered the question in one of two ways. One camp tracks the idea back to the Enlightenment, the 17th and 18th century movement of the mind that valued reason and science and celebrated the transcendent power of humanity. The other points to a more modern vintage, arguing that the idea arose in earnest after World War II — an era of refugee resettlements, international trials, and U.N. Declarations. (Some historians have even traced a more recent lineage, locating the birth of human rights in the formation of humanitarian groups like Amnesty International in the 1970s.)

These two main camps leave little room for people like William Johnson and the larger abolitionist movement. This is unfortunate, as they have what is arguably the best case for being the original “human rights” advocates. 

The phrase human rights was itself a product of the antislavery movement. The previous generation of political thinkers had preferred a different set of terms. For the founders, rights were “inalienable” and “natural,” as Jefferson described them in the Declaration of Independence. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the sacred text of a revolution that promised liberté, egalité, and fraternité, preferred the “rights of man,” American abolitionists, in contrast, pioneered the more inclusive “human rights” and popularized it within the movement. Antislavery societies often fundraised by asking “friends of human rights” to donate money. Individual abolitionists had a habit of signing letters with the salutation, “in the name of human rights.” And from 1835 to 1839, the American Anti-Slavery Society even published a monthly journal entitled simply, Human Rights. At its peak the paper sold more than 200,000 copies. 

It’s not just that abolitionists established use of the phrase; they also contended that their understanding of rights differed from that of their forebears. While they all paid their respects to that earlier era of rights-thinking, abolitionists also recognized its limits — namely, its acceptance of human bondage. As such, they stressed the need for a new, more universal conception of rights that aligned with the goals of the movement, seeing their mission as expanding rights and otherwise updating the tradition passed down by their forebears. 

“What we have to do as abolitionists,” stated an editorial from the Pennsylvania Freeman, a Black abolitionist paper, “is to diffuse a clearer knowledge of human rights and duties, to promote a truer humanity and more reverence for the right, and a deeper hatred of oppression and injustice.” Parker Pillsbury —a follower of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who led a more radical faction of the antislavery movement — put it more directly, saying that the abolitionist mission was to pull back the “scales that darkened the vision” of America’s founders and “understand the science of human rights better.” 

Nothing embodied this new vision of rights better than the proposed “World Human Rights Convention.” First floated in 1841, a year after the very first World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, the meeting was the brainchild of Garrisonian abolitionist Henry C. Wright, a New Englander with radical zeal. Wright’s plan for the convention mirrored the new spirit of rights that had swept through the movement. He wanted this convention to be truly universal in scope, with attendees eschewing national identities or allegiances and meeting on the basis of a common humanity, an idea stemming from a wider Garrisonian belief in the degeneracy of nation-states. “Better than a Congress of nations,” wrote Maria Weston Chapman, one of Wright’s staunchest allies, in an 1841 editorial printed in The Liberator, it “would be a Congress of humanity.” 

At the same time, Wright and his supporters were not interested in clamoring on about human rights in the abstract. Their goal was to use the gathering as a starting point for defining, defending, and otherwise bringing human rights into a tangible existence. They imagined committees gathering to study the issue, and Wright’s own vision included instituting a world court-like body to adjudicate and police human rights abuses. 

Sadly, the convention never happened. The logistics were far too daunting and the costs far too great, leaving the proposed World Human Rights Convention a theoretical exercise and nothing more. Nevertheless, the spark of the convention speaks to the popularity such ideas had within the movement at large. 

So why have American abolitionists often been written out of the history of human rights? 

Two factors help explain this absence. The first has to do with religion. On the whole, American abolitionists were a deeply religious bunch — so much so that a generation of historians writing in the 1930s and ’40s cast them as a discreditable group of kooks and cranks whose religious zealotry brought on an otherwise needless war. Historians have since moved on from this school of thought, tempering the view of abolitionists as extremists. But it is undeniable that Christianity was profoundly influential within American abolitionism. Historians of human rights, meanwhile, often regard human rights as emanating from more secular sources. Rights and religion are realms that, at least within the academy, have been in tension, making America’s antislavery movement, and the U.S. rights movements with significant religious ties that followed — the proverbial square peg in the round hole when it comes to the history of human rights.

The second factor stems back to the abolitionists and their political inheritance. Despite departing from the natural rights tradition and criticizing the founders for abiding and abetting slavery, abolitionists still looked to the American Revolution as a source of inspiration. The Declaration of Independence, in their minds, represented what one antislavery lecturer called the most “lucid expositions of human rights” ever written, a document whose soaring words captured the very essence of the concept. 

The trouble is that historians of human rights often de-emphasize the American Revolution and its famous Declaration and instead focus on the French Revolution and its far more radical Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens. They are not wrong to do so. One revolution, after all, severed ties from an imperial metropole; the other transformed the fabric of French society while championing a more robust set of rights. Yet the unintended outcome of favoring the French Revolution is that historians of human rights tend to attribute the idea to a European bloodline — helping to make America’s antislavery movement an ill-fitting piece in the puzzle of this history. 

Where human rights come from or who created them is, at this point in the idea’s history, mostly an academic debate, but giving the abolitionists their due is still a worthy endeavor, as their place in this history is vital. Not only do they connect the struggle for human rights back to the history of human bondage, they represent an important link, helping show how the rights tradition of the 18th century morphed into our modern vision of human rights.