Justice & Law Quote by Samuel Hopkins

Hopkins doesn’t argue for abolition so much as he corners his audience into it. The line is built like a theological trap: either slavery is a “sin,” an “open, flagrant violation” of justice and humanity, or the entire project of moral reform is a kind of expensive theater. He’s weaponizing the Puritan instinct for moral consistency. If Christians can rationalize bondage, then why bother with conscience at all?

The rhetoric does two things at once. First, it stacks the charge sheet with deliberate excess - “open, flagrant,” “all the rules” - refusing the comforting idea that slavery is merely regrettable or complicated. Second, it pivots to the humiliating alternative: if it’s not sin, abolitionism is “folly.” That word matters. It’s not just “wrong,” it’s naive, performative, even self-indulgent. Hopkins is speaking to a public that measures virtue partly by sacrifice; he forces them to see that sacrifice as either necessary repentance or sanctimonious waste.

As a clergyman in late colonial and early republic New England, Hopkins is operating within a Calvinist moral universe where sin demands remedy and hypocrisy is spiritually lethal. The subtext is aimed at the genteel middle who prefer charity to upheaval: you don’t get to keep the benefits of slavery and still shop for small, tasteful acts of goodness. If the church won’t name the crime, it forfeits its authority to preach “justice and humanity” at all.