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When Rev. John Rankin first penned his Letters on American Slavery in the 1820s and 1830s, he did so not with the distance of a scholar or the detachment of a politician, but with the burning conviction of a man of faith-a minister and father unwilling to remain silent as human beings were bought, sold, and brutalized under the sanction of American law and culture.
Writing to his brother in the slaveholding South, Rankin laid out an uncompromising moral argument against slavery grounded in the teachings of Scripture, the claims of conscience, and the founding ideals of the American republic.
Rankin's voice was a prophetic one-not only because he called his nation to account, but because he did so before it was fashionable or safe to do so. His house in Ripley, Ohio, became a station on the Underground Railroad, and his moral clarity helped inspire others, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.
Nearly two centuries later, Letters on American Slavery still speaks-both as a historical document and a moral compass. Rankin's urgent appeal to his brother-to see the humanity of the enslaved and to act in faith-is a timeless reminder that silence in the face of oppression is complicity.
We invite you not only to learn from Rev. Rankin's words but to be challenged by them. His arguments were rooted not in partisanship or politics, but in the belief that justice, if it is to mean anything, must be lived out-publicly, sacrificially, and without fear.
These letters are not relics of a bygone era. They are calls to action for ours.
July 2025
