Elizabeth Hart, who was among the earliest black women to write in English, showed that popular understanding of theological issues in a time of debate between Calvinists and Arminians conditioned opinions about slavery and that moderate opposition to slavery, far removed from nineteenth-century abolitionism and twentieth-century intolerance for slavery, seemed a viable option for a black woman around 1800. Theodicy, the examination of the role of evil in a world created by a benevolent deity, influenced her thoughts on slavery, which she opposed less as an infringement on individual liberty than as a trap in which slaves were led into vice. Her major writings are "History of Methodism," written in 1804 at the request of a British minister, Richard Pattison, and a 1794 letter that was published in an 1856 collection of missionary documents relating to the West Indies. This collection also includes several hymns and poems by Hart.

Hart was born...