Noah Webster privately considered slavery a sin yet condemned northern abolitionists as criminal.

Evidence

The inference in that, remove the protecting force of the north and the slaves will rise and vindicate their right—this would sacrifice fifty or perhaps a hundred thousand men, women, and children—but no matter, the slaves would obtain their rights! Such appear to be their wishes. … Eliza, slavery is a great sin and a great calamity—but it is not our sin, though it may prove to be a terrible calamity even to us in the north. But we cannot legally interfere with the south on this subject—and every step which the abolitionists take is tending to defeat their own object. To come to the north to preach and then disturb our peace, when we can legally do nothing to affect their object, is, in my view, highly criminal, & the preachers of abolitionism deserve the penitentiary. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 219

Categorization

• XREF: The moral-distance maneuver here—abolition is good but not ‘our sin’ and legally untouchable—is a template the reparations case later must press against; echoes the reader’s interest in how institutions hold stolen things.
• SEED: Angle: the man whose speller taught enslaved people to read believed preachers of abolition ‘deserve the penitentiary’ — a study in how tools outrun their makers’ politics.