Ellen G. White and Her Critics

Our Consistent Antislavery Position

The position of Seventh-day Adventist leaders in opposition to slavery has been clear cut from the very earliest days of the movement. Indeed, the great Advent Awakening under William Miller, from which Seventh-day Adventism sprang, was headed largely by men who were ardent reformers, particularly in the matter of the abolition of slavery. We need offer no apology for them or for Mrs. White, who was foremost in her declarations of horror at the slave traffic. If all religious leaders in America in the generation preceding the 1860’s had spoken with the same forthright vigor against slavery, we doubt whether there would have been a proslavery political group of any consequence by the year 1861. It is an unquestionable fact that Mrs. White, and the Adventist ministers associated with her, were definitely in advance of the great body of the clergy in America in the matter of opposition to slavery. EGWC 116.6

We set forth these facts, not to boast on behalf of Mrs. White or the Adventist ministry, but only to keep the record straight. And certainly we do not give this historical material with any desire to stir up what should now be the long-dead embers of the fires of misunderstanding and sectional hatred that once blazed in the United States. We have no way of returning adequate, convincing answer to a series of misrepresentations and half truths except as that answer can be placed in a historical context. EGWC 117.1