Thoughts That Burned: William Goodell, Human Rights, and the Abolition of American Slavery

In Thoughts That Burned, Steve Gowler showcases the life of William Goodell, one of the most significant leaders of the antebellum antislavery movement. Between 1826 and 1864, Goodell edited more than a dozen reform newspapers and played a leading role in the formation of several organizations, including the American Anti-slavery Society, the Liberty Party, the American Missionary Association, and the Radical Abolition Party. His 1852 book Slavery and Anti-slavery was the first comprehensive history of the antislavery movement written by an American.

Convinced that the logic of slavery needed to be investigated and laid bare, Goodell explored the institution’s deep structures. Whereas many abolitionists based their arguments on the inhumane consequences of enslavement, Goodell analyzed the legal and psychological relations constituting the slave system. At the heart of this analysis was his close reading of Southern slave codes and of the United States Constitution. He argued that the Constitution, properly understood, is incompatible with slavery and should be used as an instrument of emancipation. Among those influenced by his constitutional hermeneutic was Frederick Douglass, who described Goodell as the man ＂to whom the cause of liberty in America is as much indebted as to any other one American citizen.＂ Thoughts That Burned is the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary thinker, whose powerful political and theological arguments grounded abolition within the concept of human rights.

Steve Gowler was a faculty member at Berea College in Kentucky from 1993 to 2024. His articles on nineteenth century religious thought and literature have appeared in The New England Quarterly, Church History, The Anglican Theological Review, and the Southern Humanities Review.