GONNA NEED MORE BRONZE:

His life (1709-1784) was more or less bookended by the beginning and end of the British transatlantic slave trade, of which he was an inveterate and uncompromising opponent. He dismissed Jamaica, the most profitable of the British colonies at the time, as "a place of great wealth and dreadful wickedness, a den of tyrants, and a dungeon of slaves." He once offered a toast at a dinner in Oxford to "the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies." His verdict on the American Founding ("How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?") is in some ways the first and last word on the subject.

Nor was his belief in the wickedness of slavery a mere abstract commitment of the kind so familiar to scribblers then as now. Johnson's valet Francis Barber was a freed black Jamaican who eventually became his heir, an astonishing bequest that was widely reported in the English press at the time. With the help of his friend Tobias Smollett, Johnson secured Barber's release from naval service (for which he thought he should have been disqualified on grounds of health) and paid for him to receive an education. Johnson's relationship with Barber was one of genuine friendship and the latter was an invaluable source for James Boswell and other early biographers of the great man, including those like Sir John Hawkins who were disgusted by their subject's "ostentatious bounty [and] favour to negroes."

Johnson's loathing of racial injustice was not limited to chattel slavery. He heaped scorn on both colonial participants in the French and Indian War, which he called "only a quarrel of two robbers." Nor was this his only apparently forward-looking view. He hated the civil penalties under which British Catholics would live until 1829 and thought it absurd that in Rome of all places men were allowed to visit legally sanctioned brothels ("I would punish it much more than is done"). [...]

What made Johnson's views possible? In addition to his penchant for contrarianism, one might suggest his wide and generous reading, which attuned him to the experience of people far away and utterly unlike himself. (Among his favorite books was Richard Knolles's Generall Historie of the Turkes, the first serious English treatment of the history of the Ottoman Empire, which Johnson lamented was full of "enterprizes and revolutions, of which none desire to be informed.") More important than either of these, however, was his deep religious faith. Johnson could not stand to see "black men... repining under English cruelty" for the simple reason that he believed human beings are made lovingly in the image of God and possessed of an innate metaphysical dignity.

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