Black Ohioans were impoverished and hard-pressed to accumulate wealth, the abolitionists insisted, not because they avoided work but because whites so severely constrained their employment opportunities. The society not only sought to rebut those who characterized free Black people as a disruptive class in need of regulation but also advanced rights-based, universalistic claims. Like its abolitionist counterparts elsewhere, the OASS often couched arguments for racial equality in Christian terms, urging ministers to speak out against not just the great national sin of slavery but also its
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