In 1562 Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595) kidnapped about four hundred Africans and sold them in the West Indies for pearls, ginger, sugar, and hides. Two years later this Englishman sailed again, capturing five hundred. Between 1562 and 1569, he enslaved over 1,500 men, women, and children. Nearly three times this amount were likely killed during the village raids.1 Why did Hawkins begin trading in human flesh? Money. The slave trade made him a wealthy man, and for nearly three hundred years it lined the pockets of England’s elite. By the late eighteenth century, the “heinous practice generated millions of pounds sterling and reached to the fashionable country homes of the landed aristocracy.”2 In 1792, when pastor Abraham Booth (1734-1806) stepped into his pulpit to preach against this “Commerce in the Human Species,” English ships processed 45,000 Africans a year.

Born into a nominal Anglican family, Booth converted to Christianity thanks to a ministry started by David Taylor, servant to the evangelical Selina, Countess of Huntingdon.3 Years later, Booth took the pastorate of Little Prescot Street Church, a Particular Baptist congregation in the heart of London. Here he shepherded until his death, preaching faithfully, writing, and arguing matters of theological conviction.4 Still, Booth did more than simply speak to the church. In his published sermon, Commerce in the Human Species, and the Enslaving of Innocent Persons, he stood up “to plead the cause of moral justice, of true benevolence, and of compassion, relative to the poor oppressed Africans.”5

Booth based his sermon on Exodus 21:16, “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.” Many Christians argued that the Old Testament supported, in principle, the African slave trade. Booth insisted otherwise, pointing both to Exodus 21:16 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10 where Paul stated that “enslavers” are ungodly sinners. Furthermore, Booth pointed out that, when slavery is found in Scripture, it is of a civil or political nature. So, for example, a Hebrew might be enslaved for theft or insolvency, but even here freedom would be restored in the year of jubilee.6 Likewise, although the Hebrews enslaved Gentiles in their midst, this practice was rooted in the divine decree to conquer and possess Canaan.7

Overall, the English approved of the slave trade. However, Christians like William Wilberforce (1759-1833), John Wesley (1703-1791), and Abraham Booth called it sin. The offense included the inhumane treatment the Africans received; Booth told his congregation that the gruesome details “would make your ears tingle; they would shock your tender feelings; they would rouse your indignation against a trade so degrading to humanity, and so enormously wicked.”8 But Booth diagnosed love of money to be the root problem, the principal cause of the whole, awful industry. What sin could so blind so many that they would traffic in men as if they were “whales and seals!”9 Greed.

Booth believed the avarice of the slave trader, if it went unchecked, would lead him to enchain even his own people.10 It is the “nature of his employment . . . to provide victims for abject slavery . . . for capricious cruelty”11 This lucrative business stems from greed and ends in murder: “[C]ommerce and slavery originate in the basest avarice; are carried on by injustice and cruelty; and issue in the misery and murder of thousands, who have an equal claim to liberty and to happiness with ourselves.”12 Booth saw injustice, sought its source, and concluded that man will do almost anything to live in luxury.

Today, those who covet probably aren’t tempted to traffic in human flesh.13 And yet the Church should pause when she discovers that what leads a believer to lie for a promotion, inflate his company’s profits, or keep an exchange “under the table,” is the same sin that instructed John Hawkins to sell a human being for pearls, ginger, sugar, and hides. And yet followers of Jesus should pause when they discover that what leads a believer to lie for a promotion, inflate his company’s profits, or keep an exchange “under the table,” is the same sin that instructed John Hawkins to sell a human being for pearls, ginger, sugar, and hides. Such is the danger of “greed and self-indulgence”

Footnotes:
1
“Sir John Hawkins: England’s First Slave Trader,” The Black Networking Group Webpage, http://www.blacknetworkinggroup.co.uk/Hawkins_biography.htm (accessed May 13, 2005).

2
J. Douglas Holladay in the foreword to John Pollock, William Wilberforce: A Man Who Changed His Times (Burke, VA: The Trinity Forum, 1996), 5.

3
Robert Oliver, “Abraham Booth (1734-1806),” The British Particular Baptists 1638-1910, ed. Michael Haykin (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 2000), 31.

4
He advocated for Baptist distinctions in An Apology for the Baptists; he defended nonconformity in An Essay on the Kingdom of Christ; and he safeguarded the gospel in The Death of Legal Hope: The Life of Evangelical Obedience.

5
Abraham Booth, “Commerce in the Human Species, and the Enslaving of Innocent Persons, Inimical to the Laws of Moses and the Gospel of Christ” (a sermon, delivered January 29, 1792) The Works of Abraham Booth, vol. 3 (London: W. Button & Son, 1813), 185-186.

6
Ibid., 192. Booth cited Exodus 22:1-4, Leviticus 25:39-43, and Deuteronomy 25:12-15.

7
Ibid., 199. He proceeded to consider the difference between the enslavement of Canaanites and the treatment of Africans: “The former were treated as men, who, in the divine estimation, had forfeited the rights of citizens: but the latter, like beasts of burden, or as articles of mere commerce.” Ibid., 200.

8
Ibid., 201.

9
Ibid., 190.

10
Ibid., 204-205. “Nor, other things being equal, is there the least reason for us to imagine, that the white skin of a European would afford any more protection against a violent seizure, than does the black skin of an African. No; had the trader in man an equal opportunity of gratifying his cruel avarice; were he equally sure of impunity, and no more exposed to infamy, in the one case than in the other; the same disregard to justice, and the same principle of avarice, would have a similar operation on the persons of neighbouring Europeans, as they have on the poor Negroes.—Nay, he who is, by profession, a negro merchant . . . cannot be considered as restrained by any virtuous principles, though he never attempted to purchase, for West Indian slavery, any of his peaceable neighbours in this country.”

11
Ibid., 210.

12
Ibid.

13
Having said that, while chattel slavery is uncommon today, a blight on twenty-first-century modernity is the growing traffic in human sex slaves. See Peter Landesman, “The Girls Next Door,” New York Times Magazine, January, 25, 2004, 30. See also Kairos Journal article, “Holy Land? Bible Belt?”

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article adapted from Karios Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located at 4800 West Pulaski Highway, Perryville, MD