...hypocrisy is, of course, longstanding, instantiated perhaps most memorably by Samuel Johnson's quip: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" See also Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction,...

...hundred men, women and children, some of whom were his blood relations. As Dr. Samuel Johnson had asked: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" With this in mind, it is hardly surprising to find that Jefferson's words and deeds on the subject...

...287, 308-10, 350-51. 134. In perhaps the most famous Tory quip to this effect, Samuel Johnson asked, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Quoted in Jack P. Greene, "Slavery or Independence: Some Reflections on the Relationship among Liberty,...

...seemed cheap. The American Revolution changed all this. The revolutionaries did not need Dr. Johnson ("How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?") to tell them about the glaring inconsistency between their appeals to liberty and their owning of slaves....

...owners. Not a few Englishmen and many Americans read the Declaration and wondered, as did Samuel Johnson, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" This question bothered some early constitution makers. But only three of the new states confronted...

...from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have." The British were only too happy to agree. "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" asked British writer Samuel Johnson. A few white colonists responded to these contradictions by calling...

...Americans, in Johnson's eyes, were "thieves" in their relations with indigenous peoples and African slaves. "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes? ... I am willing to love all mankind, except an American."9 For the same reason that many young people...

...to justify their rebellion.57 Here, of course, was the answer to Samuel Johnson's celebrated jibe: "how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"58 The two greatest discursive productions of the legal mind in America during the Revolutionary...

...Farringdon Without. Courtesy of Gerald M. Goldberg. from plantations in Antigua. Dr. Johnson famously asked, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"2 The next day, Alderman Wilkes, dressed in somber black robes with a long white wig upon...

...with the most liberal politics often have the most illiberal private lives: "how is it," he asked, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" (The chief beneficiary of Samuel Johnson's will was Johnson's Jamaican servant, a former slave.) In...