Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina from George Whitefield

In George Whitefield’s Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina, he vehemently denounces the plantation owners’ ill treatment of their slaves. He says as he travelled through these southern colonies that he was “sensibly touched with the miseries of the Negroes.” The lack of basic survival needs given to the slaves such as food and clothing appalled him. He described the effects of this maltreatment with examples of the issues of slaves committing suicide and violent revolts because they believed that death was a better alternative than continuing to work in the conditions that they were forced into. Whitefield questioned the spiritual state of the American colonists regarding the brutality that they seemed to show their slaves by stabbing, scourging, withholding food and clothing, and keeping them ignorant to Christian doctrine. He believed that black and white people were created equally, having the same aptitude to grow spiritually and mentally.
Whitefield’s letter outlined his concern for the general well-being of people, seeing them as God’s creation, which might have contributed to his desire to begin missionary work in the colonies and found the orphan house in Savannah. He disagreed strongly with the “enslavement and misusing” of the plantation slaves’ bodies, however, he stated that he could not say whether or not the actual act of purchasing slaves and encouraging the nations that sell them was a sin. The inconsistency in his teachings were exemplified when he later became a plantation owner himself in South Carolina, owning slaves and adopting a moderate view on slavery (Kidd). The blasphemy that Whitefield spoke of the slave owners in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas having so intensely became partially his own plight.