ABSTRACT
Quaker Barnaby Nixon was born in 1752 into a slaveholding family in coastal North Carolina though he would live most of his adult life in Virginia. His Quaker faith put him in conflict with slavery from an early age, even more so after Quaker slaveholders were urged to free their slaves during the Revolutionary War. Nixon’s Serious Address was his only publication during his lifetime, and appeared just a year before his death in 1807. It apparently exists in a unique copy in the Library of Congress. Nixon’s condemnation of slavery forms only part of his text: he also criticizes the widespread use of liquor, and popular amusements such as horse-racing. His abolitionism, therefore, is part of a wider crusade for moral reform, and indeed it would remain so throughout the antebellum era. Jeffersonian America was particularly concerned with the future development of society, and especially with mechanisms that would sustain the unique features of American democracy.
