Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça [SEP] date of birth
Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça
Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça (1620–1698), probably born in Brazil, went to Lisbon in 1681, then Madrid in 1682 where he became procurator-general of the Confraternity of Our Lady, Star of the Negroes, a charitable lay society in Brazil and Portuguese Africa. Lourenço, claiming to be descended from kings of Kongo and Angola, travelled to Rome in 1684 to protest to the Pope against slavery. His petitions, which presented a firsthand account of the cruelties inflicted by slavery, supported
this law was not passed in the largest colonial states, and it was not enforced as a result. In the late 17th century, the Roman Catholic Church officially condemned the slave trade in response to a plea by Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça, and it was also vehemently condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in 1839. The abolitionist movement only started in the late 18th century, however, when English and American Quakers began to question the morality of slavery. James Oglethorpe was among the first to articulate the Enlightenment case against slavery,