In the revised and expanded second edition of his 1839 book, A View of the Action of the Federal Government, in Behalf of Slavery, abolitionist jurist William Jay introduced a number of important topics that had not appeared in the original edition. In one new section, ‘Intercourse of the Government with the Indians Made Sueservient [sic] to Slavery’, Jay illuminated for his anti-slavery readers how the United States government acted on behalf of American slave-holders whose slaves had taken refuge among southern Indians during wartime. Jay showed that such efforts usually took the form of treaty clauses ‘for the surrender of prisoners’, white and black. But he disputed the entire foundation upon which these clauses rested, which assumed that Indians captured and held blacks against their will: ‘It is doubtful whether the southern Indians, in their wars, made any slaves prisoners, strictly speaking.’ The real issue, Jay asserted, was that slaves willingly left their white masters to live among Indians:

It may be rather surprising to see an abolitionist like William Jay making statements about benign slavery and benevolent masters, given his commitment to the principles of radical anti-slavery, but such rhetoric was by no means unusual. Similar statements about benevolent Indian masters and the preference of black slaves for Indian masters appeared in a number of anti-slavery speeches and writings from the 1830s through the 1850s. Abolitionists made an exception for Indian slaveholders, not only accepting the widespread view that slavery among Indians was different than among whites, but also exempting Indian slaveholders from moral censure. This essay seeks to answer why abolitionists believed that Indians were benevolent masters, and to what ends they put this romanticized picture of Indian slaveholding.