Yes, there were many varying viewpoints about abolitionism and the morality of the slave trade basically from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. Some became abolitionists after they witnessed the cruelty of slave trade first hand. John Newton, for example, began working as a slave trader out of Liverpool in the mid-18th century. He witnessed (and greatly profited from) the brutality of the slave trade, and described in detail his experiences aboard slave ships in his autobiography. In the late 1750s, Newton had a spiritual awakening and realized the evils of the slave trade and the great wealth being generated by Europeans and Americans at the expense of African lives. He became an Anglican priest, gave up all of his money, and became an ardent supporter of abolition of the slave trade. His description of the slave ship in his 1787 "Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade" is very stirring and helped galvanize support for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade by Great Britain in 1807:

"The heat and the smell of these rooms, when the weather will not admit of the slaves being brought upon deck, and of having their rooms cleaned every day, would be, almost, insupportable, to a person not accustomed to them. If the slaves and their rooms can be constantly aired, and they are not detained too long on board, perhaps there are not many die; but the contrary is often their lot. They are kept down, by the weather, to breathe a hot and corrupted air, sometimes for a week: this, added to the galling of their irons, and the despondency which seizes their spirits, when thus confined, soon becomes fatal."

Newton is more well known as the author of Amazing Grace.

There were many others who commented on the abolition of the slave trade, including people of African descent. Paul Cuffee advocated for a return to Africa for free blacks in America to escape the racism and slavery of Euro-Americans. Ouladah Equiano described the horrors of the trade in his 1787 autobiography:

"But is not the slave trade entirely a war with the heart of man? And surely that which is begun by breaking down the barriers of virtue involves in its continuance destruction to every principle, and buries all sentiments in ruin!"

There are a significant number of primary sources available online of people commenting against the slave trade. I suggest going to archive.org and searching "slave trade." As for secondary sources, there are also many. W.E.B. Du Bois's classic "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America" is still very relevant and tediously researched. Marika Sherwood's "After Abolition" describes the movement to pass the 1807 and 1808 acts prohibiting the slave trade and the subsequent illegal slave trade that became increasingly cruel and profitable in the mid/late 19th century. Markus Rediker's "The Slave Ship," Dale Graden's "Disease, Resistance, and Lies," and Sowandé Mustakeem's "Slavery at Sea" are all more recent and excellent studies of the worldwide importance of the slave trade, its abolition, and legacies.

It takes a long time to review, research and write an answer to a question, but in the meantime I suggest taking the opportunity and looking through the many posts on /r/AskHistorians that can help you understand the topic at hand a bit better. For example, /u/freedmanspatrol wrote about the “moderate” views towards slavery in Antebellum USA and /u/sowser explained what it was like to be the human “cargo”, as well as talking about consumer campaigns to boycott slave-made products. Until an answer on the level of depth we want to see is posted, I highly suggest reading through these to get a better picture of the past.

Also, could this be social commentary from or as a nod to Alexandre Dumas being a black man in the western world during slavery times?

Can you clarify your question? In particular, are you looking for examples opposition to the slave trade, or of quotes similar to the ones you cited?

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Tl;dr: Yes in every cases.

Long version: Not sure to understand properly your question. Do you mean: did people consider slaves to be a commodity? Or did they consider that slaves were not a commodity? The idea of slaves being/not being a cargo found its roots very early in history. That being said I'm going to focus on the two centuries you are talking about.

Voltaire in "Candide ou l'Optimisme" (1759) depicts a slave with one leg and one arm. He lost his leg trying to escape (cut by his master) and his arm working for his master to make sugar. The famous sentence: "The sugar you ate in Europe comes with this price" illustrate the suffering of slaves and how they are not considered as people. Candide is truly shocked when he learns this and the purpose of the book is clearly to vulgarize the ideas of the Enlightments philosopher. He also shows the contradiction on a religious point of view when he says: "Missionaries taught us we are all sons of Adam and Eve, if it's true, we are all cousins".

This idea was always supported by the Quakers who considered it to be non-christian (since the very beginning of the triangular trade) since they considered black people to be humans. The first public reports of this opposition in the British Empire starts in the middle of the 17th century. In the book bury the chains by Adam Hochschild, the author explains the roots of the abolitionist movement in the British Empire. Though the idea already exists amongst the Quakers, it really emerges starting 1770. The first legal battle was won by Mansfield (abolitionist) in 1772 and the first people to oppose slavery in public where mostly Quakers.

Finally: As there were insurrances to cover cargo of slaves and considering how they were treated, some people did consider that slaves were only cargo. By recognizing that slaves are Human beings and by opposing the slave trade, we can conclude that Quakers refused to consider slaves as a cargo as they were considered as human beings first and fought for their rights to be free.

I'm not sure if this will meet the standard of the sub so I apologise in advance.

In the U.K. there were two cases during the 18th century that dealt with the issue of slaves as chattel.

Somerset v Stewart is a famous case in which a Scottish slave owner had brought a slave back to the UK. It is accepted the slave was treated well, he was baptised and had god-parents. He attempted escape but was capture and Stewart attempted to deport Somerset and sell him as a plantation slave as punishment.

The god-parents brought a writ of habeas corpus to free Somerset. Lord Mansfield's judgment made clear that within England slaves were NOT considered chattel, even if they were elsewhere in the empire.

Confusingly, a decade later in Gregson v Gilbert (the famous Zong case) there is a seemingly different conclusion. Now Lord Chief Justice Mansfield presided again. 132 slaves were thrown overboard to drown due to a supposed (proven false) lack of water. Many other slaves died. The shipowners claimed that as chattel the owners did not even have to feed the slaves if they didn't wish.

The case was deemed a simple insurance case, deciding if the insurer had to pay out for the 'lost cargo'. It was accepted that in such a matter a slave was the same as a horse. This seems to contrast with Mansfield's ruling in Somerset, and that case wasn't brought before the court (due to how precedent worked on the 18th century).

This case prompted abolitionist sentiment in England and was seen as outrageous that the case was treated as a simple insurance case - the counsel for the insurance company said the case should have been a murder trial at the Old Bailey.

Not sure if this answers the question or not, but Somerset was decided in 1772 and Zong in 1781. Mansfield is now seen as a pragmatic judge, he remitted Zong to a jury to decide on the 'necessity' but the case seems to have been dropped by the ship-owners.

The ruling in Somerset could show that, in England at least, slaves were not seen as property. This was mainly for selfish reasons, stripping one person of liberty in England was seen as a dangerous step toward stripping Englishman of liberty - there was much fear at the time that the arbitrary governments of the Americas would be imported back home.

For early abolitionists, going back to the 17th century, look no further than the Quakers, a Christian movement officially called the Society of Religious Friends.

"When George Fox (founder of Quakerism) visited Barbados with William Edmundson in 1671 he was confronted with the realities of slave labour face to face, probably for the first time. His initial reaction was to appeal for masters to treat their slaves better. It was the Irish Friend, William Edmundson, on that same visit, who denounced the authorities’ attitude to African slaves. By 1675 he was condemning slavery outright. The Germantown Quakers in Philadelphia first recorded their protest that slavery itself was immoral in 1688, almost a full century before the first national campaign to make the trade illegal began in Britain." from here.

It was the Quaker Francis Daniel Pastorius who "In 1688... drafted together with Garret Hendericks, Derick op den Graeff, and Abraham op den Graeff the first protest against slavery in America. Pastorius was a cosigner of the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery, the first petition against slavery made in the English colonies."

As for abolitionism in the eighteenth century, it usually had its roots in Christian universalist movements which saw humans as equal before God, or had an influence from Enlightenment thinkers.

Francis Wheen, in his book on the Enlightenment says that the Enlightenment philosophers "actually made some effort to understand distant peoples and free them from subjugation. See, for example, Voltaire's denunciation of slavery in Candide, or the Abbé Raynal's tract Histoire philosophique de établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, one of the earliest and most powerful polemics against the slave trade: the Enlightenment provided much of the political language and principles that were to be used by anti-slavery campaigners in the nineteenth century, when the immorality of slave-owning became commonly- though not universally- accepted. Those who routinely deplore the "imperialism" of Enlightenment attitudes cannot have read Reynal, Diderot, Kant, Condorcet or Adam Smith. "When America, the Negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape and so forth were discovered," Kant wrote in Towards Perpetual Peace, "they were, to [the Europeans], countries belonging to no one, since they counted the inhabitants as nothing." For these authors, moral universalism was not incommensurate with cultural pluralism. Quite the opposite: an insistence on universal standards of morality, freedom and dignity was what inspired their defence of indigenous peoples against invaders who trashed "inferior" cultures. As Diderot complained, "the Spaniard, the first to be thrown up by the waves on to the shores of the New World, thought he had no duty to people who did no share his colour, customs or religion."

Some famous pieces of anti-slavery propaganda in poetry from the eighteenth century include William Blake's "The Little Black Boy" from 1789: "My mother bore me in the southern wild, / And I am black, but O! my soul is white;/ White as an angel is the English child:/ But I am black as if bereav'd of light." etc.

William Cowper, in 1785: "We have no slaves at home.—Then why abroad? And they themselves once ferried o'er the wave That parts us, are emancipate and loos'd. Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free, They touch our country and their shackles fall. That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then, And let it circulate through ev'ry vein Of all your empire. That where Britain's power Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too."

Even Robert Burns has "the Slave's Lament" from 1792: "It was in sweet Senegal that my foes did me enthral, For the lands of Virginia,-ginia, O: Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more;/ And alas! I am weary, weary O:/ Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more;/ And alas! I am weary, weary O, etc."

You may also find interesting "The Journal of John Woolman" (a Quaker who lived from 1720 to 1772) which concerns, in part, his transition from being conflicted about slavery to becoming a full on abolitionist. It is in the public domain and you can find it on Project Gutenberg here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37311