![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tumblr crosspost (31 December 2020)
Mar. 18th, 2024 10:15 pmHe was pretty conservative in some ways, but also a hardline opponent of chattel slavery; his argument against the American Revolution was that the drivers of slaves had no moral ground for talking about liberty, and he argued in “A Brief to Free a Slave” (1777) that “No man is by nature the property of another.”
I took a class in which he was only mentioned as influencing a female novelist towards making her heroine more docile at the end, which, yeah, but also, a lot of British people more radical than he was could only seem to grasp slavery as a metaphor for their own lives or extension of their own experiences. Johnson was like, nope, even accepting that a person can give up their own liberty, they can’t make the choice for their children and descendants. And he argued that most people who end up in slavery didn’t give up their liberty but were abducted and traded by merchants whose right to do this had never been examined anyway, and the whole system was morally abhorrent in law and in practice.
He also had a pretty sympathetic take on mental illness in 1759, saying “To mock the heaviest of human afflictions is neither charitable nor wise. Few can attain this man’s knowledge, and few practice his virtues; but all may suffer his calamity.”
