SOURCE: "A Serious Proposal for Slavery Reform: Sarah Scott's Sir George Ellison" in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 28, Summer, 1995, pp. 379–96.

In the following essay, Stoddard argues that Sir George Ellison is a pre-abolition text in which Enlightenment principles and Christian morality are the basis for Scott's entreaty, addressed primarily to the planter class, petitioning for more humane treatment of slaves, but not the eradication of slavery itself.

In mid-eighteenth century Britain, prior to the start of the Abolition Movement, proposals for regulating and reforming slavery began to appear from writers on both sides of the issue. The British had no slave code comparable to the French Code Noir; there were virtually no laws governing the treatment of slaves, except as items of personal property. As anti-slavery feeling mounted in Britain, especially after 1770 in the wake of the James Somersett legal case which took away property rights over slaves on British...