‘The Science of Human Rights:’ American Abolitionism and the Language of Human Rights

Historians of human rights have not had much to say about America’s anti-slavery movement. Scholars tend to focus instead on the early enlightenment or how ideas of human rights emerged over the twentieth century. This essay, however, makes a case for why American abolitionists should be considered early rights pioneers and progenitors of what we know as human rights. It argues that though different factions of the movement had particular conceptions of rights, the movement itself mobilized around a shared rights vision and made this vision of human rights a centre piece of America’s anti-slavery crusade. As a result, the essay intervenes in existing debates about how unified the abolitionists were and what made their thinking ‘modern,’ but it also speaks to the history of human rights by offering the field a new origin story to contend with.