Clotel

Mr. Peck is talented and eloquent, and he contributes to “benevolent causes to which he took a fancy” (94). Because he dearly loves his daughter, she “exercised considerable influence over him” (94).

Carlton, despite knowing Mr. Peck from school, is younger than Mr. Peck, being just over thirty. Carlton is a “free-thinker […] who took no note of to-morrow” (94), and Georgiana endeavors to convert him. Though Carlton often had looked at religion with “indifference” (95), he is drawn by Georgiana’s “innocent and persuasive manner,” and he relents, accepting Christianity.

Georgiana teaches Carlton that the Bible does not condone slavery. She tells him that “[t]o claim, hold, and treat a human being as property is a felony against God and man” (95) and that Christianity “is opposed to slaveholding in its spirit and its principles” (95). She argues that people should not convince themselves “that slavery is right, because it is profitable” (95) and that they should be moved by “the wail of the mother as she surrenders her only child to the grasp of the ruthless kidnapper” (96).

Georgiana asks her father to promise that, when the newly converted Carlton discusses slavery with him, he will not tell him that the Bible justifies slavery.