Draft:Ebenezer Davies

Davies should link here

Not to be confused with E. T. Davies

Ebenezer Davies (1808-1882) was a British minister, abolitionist and author. He wrote about his travels in the United States and its slave trade. Before his book on the trip was published he had letters written about the trip published. The book is written in the form of a series of letters (epistolary). His account of the trip discusses life in the U.S. during the 1840s in Ohio, the river Mississippi and the cities of New Orleans, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The account is noted as being "witty". Davies was minister at the Mission Chapel in New Amsterdam in British Guyana.

He depicted economic vitality in the northern free states and backwardness and stagnation in the south. He noted the "terrible din" of slave auctioneers "disposing of God's images to the highest bidders." In writing about New Orleans he stated that Anglo-American influenced "Southerners seem to have no heart— no feeling, except that of love to the almighty dollar." He decried the "horrid system which makes it a crime to teach a Negro to read the Word of God."

In 1849 the Athenaeum criticized the manner and emotion in his criticisms calling for reason and while noting it agreed with him on the subject of slavery, "most terrible of con- temporary social evils". Is this Ebenezer Davies the father of Matthew Henry Davies and John Mark Davies???

Writings

 * American scenes and Christian slavery; a recent tour of four thousand miles in the United States, John Snow (1849)
 * The ruins of Bible cities : their scenes and associations, Elliott Stock (1868)