Anti-Slavery Manual, Containing a Collection of Facts and Arguments on American Slavery.

Anti-Slavery Manual, Containing a Collection of Facts and Arguments on American Slavery (1837) is a foundational document of the American abolitionist movement, written by the Reverend La Roy Sunderland (1802-1885), a Methodist Episcopal minister and one of the most energetic and theologically grounded anti-slavery agitators of the antebellum period. Published at a moment of intense national controversy over the question of slavery, the volume assembles a systematic compendium of factual evidence, statistical documentation, legal analysis, and moral argument designed to equip abolitionists with the intellectual armament necessary to counter proslavery arguments in the public arena. Sunderland, who had co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society alongside William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Weld and edited the Methodist abolitionist journal Zion's Watchman, approached the subject with the disciplined rhetoric of a preacher trained to marshal Scripture and evidence in service of a moral cause, making the Anti-Slavery Manual simultaneously a work of theological argument and empirical documentation. The volume was sufficiently influential to be issued in multiple editions and printings in 1837 alone, and is today held in the collections of Harvard University and the Library of Congress.