James Boswell, a Scottish gentleman who spent much of his life in London, which he called a “heaven on earth,” was a good friend of Dr. Samuel Johnson, a very intelligent, well-educated, and famous Englishman. Among other things, Dr. Johnson had written a dictionary. Boswell looked up to Johnson a lot, though he didn’t always agree with him.
Johnson hated the Americans — and I mean he really hated them. When I read his biography (written by Boswell himself, with lots of notes of conversations they had and time they spent together), it seems like the Americans, and especially the rebellious ones, were the only subject that always made him angry, whenever it came up. Other things he might get upset about, but when he talked about the Americans, or when somebody else spoke in their favor, he got more than a little upset.
Boswell, on the other hand, thought that England was too harsh on the American colonies, and that they were even being unjust. This caused some friction between them at times, and Boswell generally tried to avoid the subject.
But on another subject that had to do with freedom, their opinions were reversed, in my view: Johnson said that slavery was wrong (which was one thing he had against the Americans), while Boswell said it was right and necessary. Johnson said:
It must be agreed that in most ages many countries have had part of their inhabitants in a state of slavery; yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man. It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another but by violent compulsion.
But Boswell, in the biography he wrote about Johnson, put in his response to Johnson’s opinion:
I beg leave to enter my most solemn protest against his general doctrine with respect to the Slave Trade. For I will resolutely say — that his unfavorable notion of it was owing to prejudice, and imperfect or false information… To abolish a status, which in all ages GOD has sanctioned and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated. To abolish this trade would be to “…shut the gates of mercy on mankind.”
Boswell wasn’t nearly the only one who used those arguments. Some people probably just did it because they made money from the slave trade, or because other people did it. But some — and Boswell may have been one of them — honestly had that opinion. It was not uncommon. And at the time that Boswell wrote the biography, there was a lot of debate in England about the slave trade, because some people were working hard to abolish it.
If you think that Boswell’s arguments were strange or stupid or mean or whatever (and I do), then ask yourself this: Do you think slavery is wrong because you were always told, since the time you were a little kid, that slavery is wrong? Or because you studied and thought and read and debated about it, and came to that conclusion yourself? Perhaps Boswell was misinformed, but at least he did some homework and came to his own conclusions, and he didn’t just say what other people said; he was even willing to disagree with the man whom he admired more than anyone else.
But at any rate, Johnson’s opinion of slavery was as immovable as Boswell’s. In a pamphlet called “Taxation no Tyranny,” which said that England had a right to tax America, he asked a question that pointed out one of the great paradoxes of the American Revolution: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
Source
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by James Boswell, Esq., vol. 2, pp. 134-136. (The biography was first published in 1791; my copy, of course, was printed much later, in New York, but it was long enough ago that it doesn’t have the usual copyright page, with dates, etc., so I don’t know exactly when it was published.)