George Whitefield, M.A., Field Preacher, James Paterson Gledstone, New York: American Tract Society, 1901, pages 135-36:
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" . . . Whitefield's kind heart was busy with another good work while he was gathering the orphans to his house. That month's ride through Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina had brought him near slavery and all its revolting accessories ; and he was pained at the heart. It would not do to be silent about the wrongs of such as had no helper ; he took pen in hand, and wrote to the inhabitants of those three states, expostulating with them on their cruel treatment of their slaves. But Whitefield was absolutely blind to the wickedness of slavery as slavery ; it was only the brutal conduct of some of the masters that appeared wrong to him. At his first visit to Georgia he expressed his persuasion that the colony must always continue feeble, if the people were denied the use of rum and slaves ; and he afterwards dishonoured himself by becoming a slave-owner, and working his slaves for the good of the orphanage. There is little or nothing to be said in extenuation of his conduct ; for though it was a popular notion in his day, that slavery was permissible, it was not the notion of every one ; and he might have come to a better understanding of the subject had he pondered it. Among his Quaker and Moravian friends there were some who could have led him into the light, had he spend time conferring with them ; but his incessant preaching gave him no opportunity for thinking and forming an independent conclusion. He had only one thought, and cared nothing for a second, because the first was paramount. It might have been impossible for him to preach, and at the same time plead for the freedom of the Negroes ; but at least he might have kept his own hands clean, and have given a practical rebuke to his neighbours' sins. One sentence in his letter shows that his mind might have arrived at a just conclusion but for the hurry which called him away to other things: 'Whether it be lawful for Christians to buy slaves, and thereby encourage the nations from whence they are brought to be at perpetual war with each other, I shall not take upon me to determine.' But that was just the thing he was bound to determine ; and if his convictions on the unlawfulness of war for religious ends had any depth in them, which hardly appears to have been the case, he must have concluded that war for enslaving men who were of the same flesh as their captors and buyers, and of equal value in the sight of God, must be much less justifiable than religious wars. . . "