Jonathan Boucher Quotes

Rev. Jonathan Boucher , FRSE, FSA was an English clergyman, teacher, preacher and philologist.

✵ 12. May 1738 – 27. April 1804
Jonathan Boucher: 10   quotes 0   likes

Famous Jonathan Boucher Quotes

“Our rulers (both here and in Great Britain) will now have leisure to attend to every part of our American polity; and, among other things, to the state of Indians: … they have been looked upon as untamed and untameable monsters; whom, like the devoted nations around Judea, it was a kind of religion with white men to exterminate. We have treated them with a rigour and severity equally unsuitable to the genius of our government, and the mild spirit of our religion.”

[In later footnotes, Boucher notes that by "white men" the native Americans mean the English; they call the French and Spanish by their proper names. He also gives examples of atrocities committed by colonists against native Americans, and expresses sarcastic surprise that "all such circumstances have failed to attract the attention of the writers of American history"].
"A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution" (London, Robinson, 1797)

Jonathan Boucher Quotes

“Were an impartial and competent observer of the state of society in these middle colonies asked, whence it happens that Virginia and Maryland (which were the first planted, and which are superior to many colonies and inferior to none, in point of natural advantage) are still so exceedingly behind most of the other British trans-Atlantic possessions in all those improvements which bring credit and consequence to a country?”

he would answer - They are so, because they are cultivated by slaves. … Some loss and inconvenience would, no doubt, arise from the general abolition of slavery in these colonies: but were it done gradually, with judgement, and with good temper, I have never yet seen it satisfactorily proved that such inconvenience would either be great or lasting. … If ever these colonies, now filled with slaves, be improved to their utmost capacity, an essential part of the improvement must be the abolition of slavery. Such a change would hardly be more to the advantage of the slaves, than it would be to their owners."
"A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution" (London, Robinson, 1797)

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