Letters on American slavery addressed to Mr. Thomas Rankin, merchant at… (original 1826; edition 1838)

In 1822 Ripley, Ohio’s new Presbyterian minister, John Rankin, began writing a series of letters to his brother Thomas. Thomas, like their father, owned slaves and John was trying to convince him that owning human property was wrong. A local newspaper began to publish the letters and in 1826 they were collected and published for the first time as a book. Henry Lloyd Garrison printed them in his anti-slavery newspaper, Liberator, in 1832. Garrison later said that Rankin’s book inspired him to take up the cause.

No one will ever have to ask Rankin how he really felt about slavery, he begins the first letter , “I received yours (your letter) of the 2d December with mingled sensations of pleasure and pain it gave me pleasure to hear of your health and pain to hear of your purchasing slaves. I consider involuntary slavery a never failing fountain of the grossest immorality and one of the deepest sources of human misery; it hangs like the mantle of night over our republic and shrouds its rising glories. I sincerely pity the man who tinges his hand in the unhallowed thing that is fraught with the tears and sweat and groans and blood of hapless millions of innocent unoffending people.” He then goes on to explain that Africans are the same as the brothers, they have a human spirit that loves liberty and that chafes under bondage as badly as they would.

In each of the thirteen letters Rankin attacks a different rational that slave owners use to rationalize their immorality. In each he starts with a simple assertion and builds his evidence to a rationally undeniable conclusion. Even if you are not that interested in the history of the anti-slavery movement this short book is worth reading to see the masterful way each argument is built. Slave owners frequently used scripture to support slavery, Rankin, a Presbyterian minister, made better use of it to undermine their arguments.

Now, 190 years later, the letters still maintain their moral power, even though some of the phrasing is old fashioned. Rankin’s cause, anti-slavery, succeeded 150 years ago but his letters are still worth reading. What he calls the “love of gain” is still the root of many of our problems. People still make bad laws and those same people can, but often don’t, change them, as Rankin said when answering the laws that prevented slaveholders from freeing their slaves, “slaveholders made the very laws which prohibit emancipation and they are the very men who prevent the repeal of these laws. Hence they are the sole cause of the evil.”

Rankin was the prototype for Hollywood’s western preacher, the one with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. He took up arms to protect “fugitives” he sheltered in his home on their journey to a new, free, life. He organized an aborted daylight raid into Kentucky to rescue a band of refugees from slavery who were in danger of capture before darkness made crossing the Ohio river safer. When he quoted Deuteronomy 23:15/16, “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee. He shall dwell with thee even among you in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.” (Rankin, 109), you can be sure he lived it. ( )