Chapter Doopsgezinden en slavernij – Privé profijt en publiek protest II – Bestrijders

Abstract

Despite the substantial number of Doopsgezind shareholders and investors in the slavery economy of the 17th- and 18th-centuries, as the previous article demonstrates, it could not be established that there were among them ardent promotors of the horrendous colonial system. On the contrary, taking Buisman’s 1992 statement as a starting point: ‘no other religious denomination but the Doopsgezinden demonstrated so unanimously their enlightened views on slave trade and slavery.’ This second article chronologically highlights the abolitionist views of twelve Doopsgezinden. Most of these occur during the era of revolutionary Patriottism (ca. 1780-1800). They include predominantly pastors with a Leiden background, like Wybo Fijnje, François Adriaan van der Kemp, Jan de Kruyff Jr, Jan de Geus, Willem de Vos, and Jacob Hendrik Floh, as well as the very first ‘prime minister’ of the Netherlands, Pieter Vreede, whose most impressive abolitionist speech, held in 1798 in Dutch Parliament, is included here in an appendix. Most relevant at the time was also the opinion of the Remonstrant professor and member of Parliament, Jan Konijnenburg. However, prior to this, there were the early anti-slavery views by Pieter Plockhoy, who in 1662 became the founder of a short-lived utopist Dutch colony in Delaware (USA). Then there was a 1744 sermon by the Harlingen minister Johannes Stinstra, overtly denouncing slavery, while in 1764 his successor, Cornelis van Engelen, published an unprecedented abolitionist article in his enlightened magazine, De Denker, in the form of a fictitious letter by a liberated enslaved person. Three other literary contributions are enclosed in this article: at the beginning there is a poem by Joost van den Vondel (1623), and at the end a short story by the famous author Adriaan Loosjes (1804), as well as a poem by the obscure Hendrik van Loghem Jr (1808).