ABSTRACT
Antislavery clergy waged a largely reactive campaign against proslavery clergy who mined the Old Testament for proof that the Bible supported African slavery. This chapter traces the evolution of the major proslavery arguments that developed from 1770-92 and analyzes their implications for the formation of British national identity. The Somerset decision and subsequent antislavery interpretations of the ruling shattered the complacency of the merchants and planters who relied on slave labor for their livelihoods. Antislavery writing developed particular rhetorical strategies to capture the public's interest and titillate their imagination in the two decades following Mansfield's decision. The rhetorical terrain of national identity became a critical issue in the dialogue between camps, and proslavery constructions eventually pushed antislavery/anti-slave-trade activists to refine their own image of the Briton. The counter-discourse of national identity had to address the image of the Briton constructed and widely distributed by antislavery activists.
