[13] Easton was a preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ) which he joined in the 1830s,[14][15] and an influence on the young Amos Beman who was in Hartford teaching.
He invoked the Declaration of Independence as free from racial discrimination;[21] and he challenged the assumption that slaves could be regarded as machines and lacking in morality.
[22] Not well received in its time, it is now considered to be a leading work articulating the African-American abolitionist view, with the 1829 Appeal of David Walker.
[1] William Cooper Nell quoted Easton at length in 1859 on the constitutional point, while speaking against the Dred Scott Decision.
[24] Easton's outlook was rather pessimistic, informed by what he perceived as a hardening of racial divisions into a polarization in the North-East of his time and experience.
[26] Further, he argued, the stereotypical denigration based on race was a matter of early indoctrination, had economic ends, and was supported by the way white clergy condoned slavery.
He dealt with stereotypes, attempting to sift those that were artefacts of the institution of slavery from those that represented human variability and could be attributed to God.
[29] Along with James Forten and William Watkins, Easton queried the "immediatist" assumptions common in white abolitionists.
His message was not what abolitionists, whether black and in many prominent cases escaped slaves, or white, much wanted to hear, and his reputation accordingly suffered.
[32] He used the scriptural ethnology of Hamitic and Japhetic lineages to argue for the cultural importance of Africa in the ancient Mediterranean world.