British Quakers and Antislavery in the 1780s

The transformation of Quaker abstention began in the early 1780s as British Quakers launched an extensive and unprecedented propaganda campaign that utilized the extensive connections of British and American Friends. In 1783 London Yearly Meeting’s Meeting for Sufferings appointed twenty-three men to form the Committee on the Slave Trade. This organizational activity followed an abolition petition, the first of its kind, presented to the House of Commons on June 16 by London Yearly Meeting and signed by 273 Quakers. Although the petition had no impact on the government’s stance toward the slave trade, its generally positive reception by members of Parliament encouraged British Quakers to accelerate their efforts. William Dillwyn and John Lloyd, members of the committee, prepared a short pamphlet that was published in December of that year and distributed to each member of Parliament.

In addition to the Committee on the Slave Trade, Quakers organized a smaller, informal group that included Dillwyn and Lloyd as well as Joseph Woods, Samuel Hoare, George Harrison, and Thomas Knowles. This group of men had extensive transatlantic connections that were critical to the work of the group. Dillwyn, a Quaker businessman from Pennsylvania, had been a student of Anthony Benezet in Philadelphia before quietly relocating to England in 1774, citing business and family interests rather than political loyalties. Woods was a woolen merchant. Hoare, the younger brother of Wood’s wife, and Harrison were bankers. By 1783, Woods, Harrison, and Hoare, as well as James Phillips, were deeply engaged in commerce in England and North America, cultivating a wide range of contacts among Quakers and non-Quakers. Dillwyn, for example, served as an important connection between Benezet and the Anglican Granville Sharp in England. Additionally, in 1783, Dillwyn and Woods were asked to serve as purchasing agents for the Library Company of Philadelphia, placing many of their orders through the printer Phillips. John Lloyd, son of a wealthy merchant and banker, was involved in the tobacco business and had observed American slavery while traveling in the American colonies between 1775 and 1777. Knowles had been an apothecary before taking up the study of medicine. He was a member of the Royal College of Physicians, which placed Knowles in the highest ranks of the English medical profession. His wife, Mary Morris Knowles, was a poet and an artist whose needlework won her the friendship of the royal family. Of the six men, only Woods was not a member of the formal Committee on the Slave Trade.⁷

Operating independent from London Yearly Meeting, the informal group used its members’ extensive connections to arrange the distribution of articles and pamphlets about the slave trade. The autonomy of the group allowed it to publish works without subjecting them to review by London Yearly Meeting, which was the standard process for Quaker publications. As a result, the informal association published works by both Quakers and non-Quakers. Their independence also freed individuals to publish their antislavery views anonymously, thereby gaining a broader audience by remaining unaligned with any particular religious sect. Thus the informal group could distribute antislavery literature throughout Britain and America without regard for denominational lines.⁸

The informal group was responsible for the publication and distribution of Woods’s thirty-two-page essay, Thoughts on the Slavery of Negroes, which was published anonymously in 1784. Woods’s essay was the first ecumenical argument for abstention from slave-labor goods. In his essay, Woods defended the humanity of Africans: “They cannot be denied to be men.” He admitted the economic value of slavery and the slave trade, noting that the “very sufferings” of African slaves were “the source of public revenue and private wealth.” Still, the slave trade was “a disgraceful commerce” that exceeded humanitarian limits. “No subsequent purchase can convert the wrong into right, the receiver of the stolen goods, knowing them to be so, is equally culpable with the thief,” he asserted. Woods demanded that humanitarianism be used as the standard to judge what goods could be bought and sold in the marketplace. Although his arguments originated in Quaker abstention, Woods appealed to a nonsectarian audience, broadening the scope of moral commerce and aligning abolitionism and humanitarianism with the duties and privileges of merchants and consumers.⁹

In addition to Woods’s pamphlet, the informal group arranged for the publication and distribution of other antislavery works. Together the informal and formal groups arranged for the distribution of tens of thousands of antislavery articles and pamphlets in the 1780s. Woods, Lloyd, and the other committee members arranged to place items about the slave trade in newspapers throughout England. The Quakers selected materials from a variety of sources: writings by Anthony Benezet, histories by the French writer and propagandist Abbé Raynal, and excerpts from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Additionally, they published travel accounts from North America, Africa, and the East Indies; letters from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting; and selections from Blackstone’s Commentaries. The Quakers also arranged the publication of numerous tracts including a reprint of Benezet’s Caution and Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies, James Ramsay’s landmark antislavery tract, Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the Sugar Colonies, and Anglican Thomas Clarkson’s prize-winning essay on the slave trade, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (1786), written while Clarkson was at Cambridge in 1785. The diversity of material disseminated by the committee and the informal group gave the impression that a nonsectarian, ecumenical movement against the slave trade was gaining momentum.¹⁰ It also allowed the Quakers to disguise the sectarian origins of the antislavery sentiment that had suddenly started to appear in print. “British newspapers and periodicals published from the summer of 1783 to the spring of 1787 need to be read with caution,” historian Christopher Brown notes. “Historians will never know how many of the antislavery statements that appear in the British press in this period resulted from [the] sponsorship [of the informal group].” Significantly, the Quakers “tried to create the appearance of an emerging public consensus on behalf of abolition more than two years before that support materialized in full.”¹¹

Quaker antislavery efforts between 1783 and 1787 did not create a movement, but those efforts did make a difference. The Quakers’ campaign, according to Brown, “profoundly affected the political and cultural landscape” of England. By the 1780s, antislavery had gained “moral capital.” As Brown explains, “To condemn slavery in principle and colonial institutions in practice had become … the mark of an enlightened, humane Christian.” Quaker antislavery took hold in part, because antislavery could bestow moral prestige on the individuals who sustained the movement and generate moral capital for other movements. For example, antislavery gained support from the activists who sought parliamentary reform because they believed association with antislavery would bring credit to their movement. Moreover, the example of the American colonists who sought liberation from British sovereignty brought into public discussion the subject of imperial reform. In the 1780s, Quakers rebranded antislavery by aligning it with the national projects of the period, ultimately transforming sectarian antislavery into a genuine mass movement.¹²

The momentum of the early and mid 1780s culminated in the organization of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST), which was organized in 1787 by Quakers and their allies. The establishment of the SEAST coincided with the reorganization of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) and the founding of the Free African Society (FAS) in Philadelphia. The simultaneous establishment of the three associations led activists to hope that competition between the two nations would lead both to abolish slavery. British supporters of abolition made the strategic decision to focus on the slave trade rather than the larger, more complicated issue of slavery. The Quakers who helped establish the SEAST recruited prominent Anglicans to the organization, including Clarkson, Sharp, and Phillip Sansom. Between 1787 and 1794, Clarkson traveled more than 30,000 miles, gathering evidence against the slave trade to be used in parliamentary proceedings. Sharp had gained fame for his role in Somerset v. Stewart (1772), which was widely albeit erroneously interpreted as freeing all slaves on English soil. Sansom was an Anglican businessman with American ties. Additionally, William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament, pledged his support as did pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood. The SEAST initiated a nationwide petition campaign and began to collect subscriptions. Wedgwood designed a cameo of a kneeling slave framed by the words “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” The society also arranged for the publication of numerous antislavery publications, enlisting, for example, the aid of evangelical Hannah More, who produced the didactic poem Slavery to coincide with the renewed debate in the House of Commons in 1788. From 1789 to 1791, the SEAST gathered and disseminated information about the slave trade and the parliamentary debates about the trade, all in an effort to generate support for its abolition. In April 1791, Wilberforce’s bill against the slave trade came up for vote, just as news of the massive slave rebellion in Saint Domingue began to reach England. Opponents of abolitionism blamed the situation in the Caribbean on the agitation for abolition. When the votes were tallied, Wilberforce’s bill was resoundingly defeated.¹³

In the wake of parliamentary defeat, the formal Committee on the Slave Trade broadened its membership and began to align itself more with the abstention movement. In the weeks following Parliament’s action, the committee added new members, many of them evangelicals, and issued a report questioning for the first time, whether “the luxuries of Rum and Sugar can only be obtained by tearing asunder those ties of affection which unite our species and exalt our nature.” Describing parliamentary action “a delay rather than a defeat,” the committee urged supporters to join in “asserting the claims of Humanity” and to continue to fight for the abolition of the trade until “the commercial intercourse with Africa shall cease to be polluted with the blood of its inhabitants.” The committee ordered one thousand copies of the report printed and distributed to local correspondents.¹⁴

Outside the Committee on the Slave Trade, others also responded to parliamentary defeat. In July 1791, the Baptist printer William Fox composed and published anonymously An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum.¹⁵ The first four editions of Fox’s pamphlet were printed and sold by the Quaker James Phillips and Fox’s business partner Martha Gurney, London’s only female dissenting printer, in a partnership of abolitionist elite (Phillips) and radical outsider (Gurney and Fox). Gurney was the only daughter of Thomas Gurney, a high Calvinist Baptist and a shorthand writer at the Old Bailey, and the sister of Joseph Gurney, who became the leading court stenographer in the late eighteenth century. Before their partnership in 1782, Fox had been a minor bookseller while Gurney had been an active printer and bookseller. Between 1770 and 1813, Gurney’s name appeared on more than one hundred titles, thirty-four of which were political pamphlets, published between 1788 and 1802, on various topics including abstention, abolition of the slave trade, and Britain’s war with France. With Fox, between 1791 and 1794, Gurney produced thirteen abolitionist pamphlets, many of them promoting abstention from slave-grown sugar.¹⁶ Gurney, along with the Quaker Phillips, dominated the printing and selling of abolitionist works in London in this period; with the publication of Fox’s tract, Gurney found herself at the center of the strident pamphlet wars of the 1790s.¹⁷ Fox’s Address quickly came to symbolize the eighteenth-century rejection of slave-grown sugar. Clarkson credited Fox’s tract with helping to start a boycott of slave-grown sugar that garnered support from an estimated 300,000 Britons.¹⁸ In January 1792, Clarkson wrote and circulated a private letter acknowledging the influence of Fox’s tract and requesting Wedgwood arrange for the printing of another 1,000 copies of the pamphlet. “I have seen the effects of the work in the course of my travels, and I am so convinced that the like effects will be produced upon others if it still be more circulated,” he told Wedgwood. Clarkson also suggested that abstention might lead to more signatures on petitions.¹⁹ Even Fox’s critics noted the rapid dissemination of the Address. As one author wrote, “this pamphlet claims particular attention [for] the rapid and extraordinary manner in which it has been circulated in all parts of the kingdom.”²⁰

The partnership of Fox, Gurney, and Phillips aided the wide distribution of the Address in England and the United States. A note in the tenth edition indicated 50,000 copies had been printed in the first four months. Likely, Gurney alone printed 130,000 copies by the twenty-sixth edition. Gurney was not the only printer to produce copies of the Address, however. Approved and bootleg copies were published throughout Great Britain and the United States in the early 1790s, as well as private printings such as the one requested by Clarkson. In his analysis of the Fox-Gurney partnership, literary scholar Timothy Whelan estimates at least 250,000 copies were printed by Gurney and others during 1791–1792, eclipsing Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man as “the most widely distributed pamphlet of the eighteenth century.”²¹ Fox’s pamphlet outsold every other antislave-trade pamphlet up to that time and caused a veritable war of words in the months following its initial publication. More than twenty pamphlets were printed either challenging or supporting Fox’s contention that consumers should reject the produce of slavery.²²

Fox’s argument for abstention resonated with supporters in large part because it engaged with contemporary ideas about gender and commerce as well as slavery. In his Address, he made three arguments that together emphasized the moral potential of commerce if individual consumers, especially women, would demand more ethically produced goods. First, he argued the slave trade had corrupted commerce. Sugar, according to Fox, was produced by a corrupt system of manufacture, which produced only “human woe” and “poison.” The trade in slaves and in slave-grown sugar surpassed, in brutality and injustice, even “the most barbarous ages.”²³ Second, consumer desire sustained the slave trade. The traffic in slaves was driven by domestic desire for luxury items, which habit had transformed into essential household goods. Fox reasoned that if one family consuming five pounds of sugar per week abstained from sugar for twenty-one months, that family “would prevent the slavery or murder of one fellow-creature.”²⁴ Finally, Fox argued that regardless of parliamentary action, consumers could accept or reject the products of slavery. Criticizing the mercantile system that had protected West Indian sugar, Fox warned that while British law might only provide slave-grown sugar for the domestic market, consumers could choose not to purchase such tainted goods.²⁵

Fox did not appeal specifically to female consumers. He did, however, make explicit the connection between domestic consumption and colonial slave labor. In the months following publication of Fox’s Address, the rhetoric of the abstention movement changed as writers responded to contemporary debates about female commerce and slave labor. Increasingly, writers appealed to female consumers using both economic and gendered language.²⁶ In doing so, activists shifted the focus of the slave-trade debate from Parliament to the tea table. The tea table symbolized the promises and the costs of consumption, thus the tea table acted as a centripetal force in private and public debates about commerce, gender, and the slave trade. Cultural anxieties about female consumption, particularly at the tea table, became enmeshed in political debates about the blood-stained commerce of the African slave trade.

Gender and Consumption at the Tea Table

The association of tea and women dated to the late seventeenth century. Edmund Waller, for example, linked tea consumption to Queen Catherine in his poem “Of Tea, Commended by Her Majesty” (1690), thus describing tea as an essentially upper-class female activity.²⁷ In the eighteenth century, poets celebrated the virtuous properties of tea, particularly when compared to wine. In A Poem on Tea (1712), Peter Motteux claimed tea banished brutish male behavior, which had been caused by the consumption of wine:

I drink, and lo the kindly Streams arise,

Wine’s vapour flags, and soon subsides and dies.

The friendly Spirits brighten mine again,

Repel the Brute, and re-inthrone the Man.

The rising Charmer with a pleasing Ray

Dawns on the Mind, and introduces Day.²⁸

Wine led to excess and dissipation while tea calmed and civilized. When tea was served by a British woman, she participated in this process of civilization. “The Task” by William Cowper described the classic tea-table scene, emphasizing the civilizing characteristics of British tea consumption:

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,

Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,

And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,

That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

So let us welcome peaceful ev’ning in.

The feminine architect of this harmonious scene is unidentified yet understood as essential to its creation. Shutters and curtains enclose the scene, shutting out “The grand debate, / The popular harangue, the tart reply” of the public sphere though the man and the material culture of the tea ritual were reminders “of a noisy world.”²⁹ Cowper’s poem emphasized the dual benefits of tea consumption, which simultaneously civilized Britons and expanded the British economy.

As opportunities to consume material goods increased, critics questioned the impact such changes had on society and, in particular, on women. In a letter in Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator, published in 1775, John Careful described the tea table as “the Bane of good housewifery.” Women, according to Careful, believed a well-equipped tea table as important as a wedding ring. Female commerce turned British households upside down.³⁰ Politician Joseph Addison, for example, lamented his wife’s obsession with collecting china: “The common way of purchasing such trifles, if I may believe my female informers, is by exchanging old suits of cloaths for this brittle ware.… I have known an old petticoat metamorphosed into a punch-bowl, and a pair of trousers into a tea pot.”³¹ Similarly, in a rather wistful look back, the poet Charles Jenner wrote in l773:

Time was, when tradesmen laid up what they gain’d,

And frugally a family maintain’d;

When they took stirring housewives for their spouses,

To keep up prudent order in their houses;

Who thought no scorn, at night to sit them down,

And make their childrens cloaths, or mend their own;

Would Polly’s coat to younger Bess transfer,

And make their caps, without a milliner:

But now, a -shopping half the day they’re gone,

To buy five hundred things, and pay for none.

Commerce preyed on the worst of female behavior. “Miss despises all domestick rules,” Jenner wrote, preferring to “spend their precious time in hackney-coaches.”³² “Whilst mine is the Labour and you have the Gains,” wrote an anonymous poet in 1749, “I have but ill Words and worse Looks for my Pains.”³³ Yet something is amiss, as scholar Karen Harvey argues: “The horror and inappropriateness of exchanging clothes for china is made all the more outrageous by the transformation of a woman’s petticoat into a punchbowl and a man’s breeches into a teapot.” Rather than a description of male impotence when confronted by female consumption, these narratives suggest instead that the benefits and costs of modern consumerism were far from settled. Like Quakers on either side of the Atlantic, non-Quakers worried about the effects of the new consumer society. For many Britons, as evidenced by these examples, men were just as culpable as women. The men in Jenner’s poem, for example, despised “laborious trade” as “too slow a way” to gain wealth. Instead, “Fortunes must rise, like mushrooms, in a day.”³⁴

Questions about male and female commerce assumed that consumption had a cultural narrative as well as its traditional explanation of profit and loss. Faced with a dazzling new array of goods, consumers often assigned cultural narratives to material goods that conveyed social status, reflected individual values, and even conditions of production. Moreover, those cultural narratives were contextual and often influenced by social class, gender, and politics. Consider, for example, how social class could blur definitions of appropriate female commerce. Among the upper class, the tea ritual could be the epitome of ladylike sociability. British diarist Elizabeth Shackleton served tea to exclusively female company, often using tea as a forum for her business dealings with haberdashers, mantua makers, and other tradeswomen.³⁵ In contrast, tea drinking among the “common sort” led some critics to claim that tea consumption encouraged the poor to squander money and time in an attempt to mimic their betters. In 1761, Englishman John Galt described the new habit of tea drinking among the elderly women of the parish, who would sneak off to “out-houses and by-places,” consuming their tea in “cups and luggies [a wooden dish or bowl] for there were but few that had cups and saucers.” The women, Galt noted, gathered in hedges, “cackling like pea-hens” until they were scattered by passersby. In the first example, the tea ritual creates an amiable atmosphere in which to conduct business; in the second example, the tea ritual creates instead an atmosphere of superfluity, which is further emphasized by the raucous laughter of the old women.³⁶

As the habit of tea drinking spread through all the social classes of England, some critics linked the breakdown in class relations to the disintegration of British national identity. In “An Essay on Tea” (1756), social critic Jonas Hanway claimed tea consumption drained Britain’s economic and military resources. “It is the curse of this nation, that the laborer and the mechanic will ape the lord,” Hanway observed. Describing tea drinking as an “infection” and a “disease,” Hanway believed consuming the food of another culture would somehow transform England into that culture. Tea consumption “took its rise from EXAMPLE; by EXAMPLE it is supported; and EXAMPLE only can abolish it.” Hanway urged “ladies of rank” to abstain from the habit of drinking tea, claiming the “welfare” of the nation depended on female virtue. Leisured women had contributed to the spread of the habit of tea drinking, and leisured women must be the ones to put an end to the practice.³⁷

Motteux and Cowper lauded the civilizing effects of conversation with a virtuous woman over a cup of tea; yet, their descriptions contrast sharply with contemporaneous complaints about excessive female speech at the tea table. Haywood, for example, asked, “Where have the Curious an Opportunity of informing themselves of the Intrigues of the Town, like that they enjoy over a TEA-TABLE, on a Lady’s Visiting Day?”³⁸ Male and female behavior is contrasted in The Tea Drinking Wife, and Drunken Husband (1749). The husband claimed his wife spent too much time and money on tea:

Until ten or eleven o’Clock you seldom will rise;

And then when you’re up you must have your desire,

And straight get the Tea-kettle Clapton the Fire.

Then in comes her Gossips to prate and to Chat,

Here is this that and t’other and the Devil knows what,

There is prattling and tatling until it be Noon

… And if I find Fault your Tongue it will run

So fast one would think you would never have done,

For such is your Humour; if ever controul’d;

I’m certain to hear a most damnable Scold.

Not only is the tea table the site for gossip and idleness, it also becomes the source of tension between husband and wife. Criticized by her husband, the wife responded with harsh words, “a most damnable Scold.” Asserting the innocence of tea, the wife lamented her husband’s habit of drinking ale and returning home late and unable to work. Poet Edward Young described “Scandal” as “the sweet’ner of a female feast” while Haywood noted that at the tea table, “Scandal, and Ridicule seem here to reign with uncontented sway, but rarely suffer the intrusion of any other themes.”³⁹

Women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft claimed the consumer revolution had made objects of women much as slavery had made property of Africans. Women, according to Wollstonecraft, were “rendered weak and luxurious by the relaxing pleasures which wealth procures.” Enslaved by a commercial culture that transformed women into “alluring” objects, women were forced to rely on man to “lend them his reason to guide their tottering steps aright.”⁴⁰ Consumerism transformed women’s lives, creating in them “an immoderate fondness for dress, for pleasure, and for sway.” Moreover, commercial society made such pursuits possible for women of all classes. “Women all want to be ladies,” Wollstonecraft noted. “The blessed effect of civilization,” according to Wollstonecraft, rendered “the most respectable women [into] the most oppressed.” Thus “treated like contemptible beings,” women “become contemptible.” Men and women alike were to blame for the current state of gender relations, preferring “slavish obedience” from women rather than “rational fellowship” between the sexes.⁴¹

FIGURE 1.    James Gillray. “Anti-Saccharites; or, John Bull and His Family Leaving Off the Use of Sugar,” 1792. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.

Two political caricatures, produced in 1792, reflect women’s ambiguous place at the tea table and in the slave-trade debate. James Gillray’s “Anti-Saccharites; or, John Bull and his Family Leaving Off the Use of Sugar” reflects the intertwining of contemporary debates about slavery, gender, and domestic consumption. Focusing on Queen Charlotte, Gillray highlighted the importance of women in the boycott. In the caricature, the Queen attempts to convince the recalcitrant princesses to accept unsweetened tea, reminding them that abstention from sugar-sweetened tea would save both money and “the poor Blackamoors.” Yet the question remains: Is the royal family’s “Noble Example of Oeconomy” influenced by compassion for enslaved Africans, or concern over the high cost of sugar?⁴² Likewise, Isaac Cruikshank’s “The Gradual Abolition off [sic] the Slave Trade; or, leaving of Sugar by Degrees” focuses on Queen Charlotte at the tea table. Carefully weighing the sugar, the Queen tells Mrs. Schwellenberg, Keeper of the Robes, to take “only an ickle Bit” and to reflect on “de Negro Girl dat Captain Kimber treated so Cruelly.”⁴³ Once again, the viewer is reminded of the connection between sugar and slavery. The luxury of sugar-sweetened tea is made possible at a high cost in both African bodies and English currency. On the left side of the image, Princess Elizabeth refuses to give up sugar, claiming that she cannot forgo a “good thing.” Her sister, however, turns away in disgust, emphasizing her rejection of slave-grown sugar with a dramatic facial expression and hand gestures. Again, we are left to wonder what motivates the royal family’s boycott of slave-grown sugar: economics or morals.

FIGURE 2.    Isaac Cruikshank. “The Gradual Abolition off [sic] the Slave Trade; or, Leaving of Sugar by Degrees,” 1792. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.

Consumer goods created a political and moral crisis that threatened British domesticity and rendered virtuous English womanhood a novel construct. The boycott provided supporters the opportunity to challenge these unflattering images of English womanhood, constructing instead an ideal of an activist feminine sympathy for the oppressed. After publication of Fox’s Address, boycotters increasingly appealed to female compassion. Pamphleteer William Allen, for example, described Englishwomen as “MODELS of every just and virtuous sentiment.” Another author hoped to capitalize on the popularity of the new Duchess of York, seeking to draw her attention to the abstention movement and to obtain her support through a public appeal to her “heart of sensibility.”⁴⁴ Men were not alone in their appeals to women. Dublin Quaker Mary Birkett, for example, called upon women to adopt an activist sensibility:

Yes, sisters, yes, to us the task belongs

’Tis we increase or mitigate their wrongs,

If we the produce of their toils refuse,

If we no more the blood-stain’d lux’ry choose;

Birkett rejected the notion of a limited, distinct female sphere of influence:

Say not that small’s the sphere in which we move,

And our attempts would vain and fruitless prove;

Not so—we hold a most important share,

In all the evils—all the wrongs they bear,

And tho’ their woes entire we can’t remove,

We may th’ increasing mis’ries which they prove,

Push far away the plant for which they die,

And in this one small thing our taste deny,

We must, we ought, ’tis Justice points the way;

Mercy and Charity loudly call—“obey.”

Birkett called on women to reject slave-grown sugar and to adopt an activist sensibility, responding to the wrongs of slavery by refusing to consume “the plant for which they die.”⁴⁵

Much of this rhetoric used the language of sensibility, which as Brycchan Carey argues, served “as a site for the working out of changing gender relationships” in the eighteenth century.⁴⁶ The rhetoric of sensibility positioned feminine sympathy apart from the marketplace, defining abolition as a moral question. Female behavior represented “authoritative moral consistency.”⁴⁷ For example, an anonymous letter published in the Manchester Mercury in 1787 called on women to use “the qualities of Humanity, Benevolence, and Compassion” to draw public attention to the slave trade. Men were too “much involved in the cares of the world, the bustle of trade” to have time to consider “the Humanity of our Commerce.”⁴⁸ Yet the distinction between the humanity of the private sphere and the calculating commerce of the public sphere was unstable. In a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1788, “Polinus” claimed that the fashion “of the present day is HUMANITY, or as it was well called by a great minister, the Philanthropy of five days.”⁴⁹ Indeed abolitionism seemed ubiquitous (partly because of the abolitionists’ extensive propaganda campaign), resulting in the “mammoth overproduction” of antislavery poetry and abolitionist artifacts. Wedgwood’s iconic image of the kneeling slave was reproduced widely on cameos, tea ware, snuff boxes, and other domestic goods. “The ladies,” author Hester Thrale wrote in 1788, “now wear the Figure of a Negro in Wedgwood’s Ware round their Necks.”⁵⁰ The consumption of abolitionist artifacts and prose led many critics and supporters of slavery to question female motivation. Were women motivated by genuine benevolence, or were they simply responding to the fashion of the moment? Polinus, for one, believed that fashion prevailed: “Our poetesses who can oppress and abuse one another when opportunity offers, unite in opposition to oppression with … ill … grace.”⁵¹

Abolitionists who struggled to define the appropriate role for female sensibility in the slave-trade debates focused their arguments on the distinction between false and true sensibility. In her poems Sensibility and Slavery, evangelical Hannah More distinguished between false and true sensibility. The former, according to More, was superficial and feigned while the latter was natural and active. More rejected false sentiment and insisted her readers weep and then act when confronted by suffering.⁵² In his lecture on the slave trade, Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted that “true Benevolence is a rare Quality among us. Sensibility indeed we have to spare—what novel-reading Lady does not over flow with it to the great annoyance of her Friends and Family.”⁵³ More and Coleridge, as well as Wollstonecraft, criticized false sensibility but did not renounce the use of feminine sympathy altogether. These critiques of false sensibility were an attempt by writers to use sentimental rhetoric to garner support for abolition while simultaneously countering proslavery authors who argued that abolitionist prose was based on emotion rather than reason.⁵⁴

Proslavery literature suggested that women’s sensibility rendered them susceptible to the arguments of abolitionists and supporters of the boycott. “No Planter,” a widely quoted essay first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1789, satirized abolitionist sentiment: “The vulgar are influenced by names and titles. Instead of SLAVES, let the Negroes be called ASSISTANT PLANTERS; and we shall not then hear such violent outcries against the slave trade by pious divines, tender-hearted poetesses, and short-sighted politicians.”⁵⁵ Writing at the height of the boycott, the proslavery author of Strictures on an Address to the People of Great Britain suggested that Fox’s argument was successful because he worked on “the passions.” According to the anonymous author, Fox owed his success to the patronage of his female readers who were “pierced to the heart with the sufferings of the oppressed Africans.”⁵⁶ Another critic of the boycott suggested that women had been duped by “hypocrites who make fortunes by using cotton and other things provided by Negroes labor.”⁵⁷ Such arguments reflected contemporary ideas that women’s commercial behavior was based on fashion rather than economics. In a review of Fox’s Address, one author criticized the pamphlet as the “effusion of some fond zealot” who hoped to destroy the slave trade “by a serious dissuasion of our wives and daughters from the use of sugar!” Contrasting male and female consumption, the anonymous reviewer warned readers against “what uproars [Fox] may occasion, should his reasons prevail with any masters of families to enforce such a decree, while the females remain unconvinced and contumacious?”⁵⁸

The rhetoric of sensibility thus became a battleground for pro- and antislave-trade writers. False sensibility made women particularly vulnerable to the passionate arguments of the abolitionists; yet that same false sensibility rendered women unable to take an active role in response to abolitionist rhetoric. Proslavery supporters used false sensibility to dismiss the popularity of the abolitionist movement as just another example of overwrought female sensibility. In this view, the horrors of slavery and the slave trade were fabricated by abolitionists in much the same way novelists and poets created works meant to generate an emotional response, usually in female readers. Abolitionists did not deny the presence of false sensibility; instead, abolitionists sought to transform false sentiment into true benevolent action. The implications of this debate were the same: women were unreliable abolitionists. For both pro- and antislave-trade writers, questions remained about the true character of female sensibility.⁵⁹

Blood-Stained Sugar

Anxieties about female commerce intensified with the publication of sensational stories of white female cruelty, which were presented to the House of Commons during the slave-trade debates of 1790 and 1791. According to testimony, colonial women of all ranks were responsible for ordering, supervising, and even inflicting punishment on their slaves; one colonial woman was accused of routinely prostituting her female slave.⁶⁰ Wollstonecraft questioned the integrity of female sensibility in light of the evidence: “Where is the dignity, the infallibility of sensibility, in the fair ladies, whom, if the voice of rumour is to be credited, the captive negroes curse in all the agony of bodily pain, for the unheard of tortures they invent?” She criticized colonial women who “after the sight of a flagellation, compose[d] their ruffled spirits and exercise[d] their tender feelings by the perusal of the latest imported novel.”⁶¹ Parliamentary testimony indicated that the political crisis was also a gender crisis. Writing in 1792, radical political writer Benjamin Flower urged British women “to attend to the conduct of some of the West India Ladies toward their slaves.” Flower’s The French Constitution, inspired by a six-month visit to France a year earlier, criticized the British more than it considered the French political system. In the appendix to the second edition, Flower reviewed the progress of slave-trade legislation. Flower recommended Fox’s Address to “the LADIES. They are formed to feel more than men are.” Yet, Flower warned readers that emotions were little more than “pretensions” if women continued to “sweeten their tea, and the tea of their families and visitors, with the blood of their fellow creatures.” Slavery, according to Flower, stripped women “of their peculiar glory; their amiableness, their sensibility, “transform[ing] the loveliest part of God’s creation into savages and brutes!”⁶² Beneath Flower’s chivalrous appeal to virtuous English women lay the fear that women needed abolitionist tracts more than men because ultimately women were the real savages. In this way, the world of the white English woman and the West Indian colonial woman collided, and the “English woman is advised to look into the mirror of her own barbarity.”⁶³

Such criticism of Englishwomen reflected the anxiety of many that slavery had contaminated British society. British writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld, for example, claimed that both the colonial and metropolitan space had been corrupted by their commercial connection with slavery. In her poem Epistle to William Wilberforce, written after parliamentary defeat of the abolition bill in the spring of 1791, Barbauld denounced an indifferent British public, which had been influenced by “the artful gloss, that moral sense confounds.” The “contagion,” she wrote, was a “monstrous fellowship” of female virtue and corruption:

Lo! Where reclin’d, pale Beauty courts the breeze,

Diffus’d on sofas of voluptuous ease;

With anxious awe, her menial train around,

Catch her faint whispers of half-utter’d sound

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

See her, with indolence to fierceness join’d,

Of body delicate, infirm of mind,

With languid tones imperious mandates urge;

With arm recumbent wield the household scourge;

And with unruffled mien, and placid sounds,

Contriving torture, and inflicting wounds.

In Barbauld’s narrative, “voluptuous ease” slid easily from civilized to savage. Under the influence of the “seasoned tools of Avarice,” manners melted and hearts hardened until the “spreading leprosy taints ev’ry part.”⁶⁴

For opponents of slavery, the contaminating effect of slavery was most visible in the blood-stained sugar served at ladies’ tea tables. “Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood?” asked Wollstonecraft.⁶⁵ Abstention rhetoric claimed the bodily fluids of African slaves were active agents in the production of colonial produce, nourishing the produce of slave labor and contaminating the tea consumed by British women. In Cowper’s “The Negro’s Complaint,” one of the most popular poems of the period, water is replaced by the tears and sweat of the slave:

Why did all-creating Nature

Make the plant for which we toil?

Sighs must fan it, Tears must water,

Sweat of ours must dress the soil.

Cowper’s poem was reprinted on the cover of many editions of Fox’s Address and was included in a small privately circulated publication, A Subject for Conversation and Reflection at the Tea Table.⁶⁶ African blood, sweat, and tears were frequent tropes in abstention rhetoric. While such rhetoric intensified in the early 1790s, particularly after the revolutions in Saint Domingue and in France, such bloody rhetoric actually began to appear in the late 1780s.⁶⁷ For example, a poem published in the Scots Magazine in 1788 claimed the luscious juice of the sugar cane resulted from African blood: “Are drops of blood the horrible manure / That fills with luscious juice the teeming cane?” Thus, the “keen sorrows” of the slave “are the sweets we blend / with the green bev’rage of our morning meal.”⁶⁸

The rhetoric of the boycott of slave labor linked the consumption of slave-grown sugar to the cannibalistic consumption of slave bodies. In a series of “bloody vignettes,” abolitionists described the slave’s passage from freedom to enslavement, from Africa to the West Indies. Abstention completed the triangle of trade, explaining the slave’s transformation from producer of consumer goods to that which is consumed.⁶⁹ This blood-stained rhetoric had been used to describe the production of slave-labor goods as early as the seventeenth century as both Quakers and non-Quakers connected the violence of slavery to the products of slave labor. London merchant Thomas Tryon, writing in 1684, described the evils of slavery from the slave’s viewpoint. Slaveholders, the slave lamented, had “grow[n] fat with our Blood and Sweat, gormandizing with the fruits procured by our Slavery and sore Labour.” The slaveholder reclined by his “Rum-Pots, Punch-Bowls, Brandy-Bottles, [and other] Intoxicating Enchantments.”⁷⁰ In 1729, colonial Quaker Ralph Sandiford condemned slaveholders who fed on “the flesh and Blood of Slaves instead of Christ,” a claim later adopted by William Fox who suggested that each pound of West Indian sugar contained two ounces of African flesh.⁷¹ British political reformer Thomas Cooper claimed “the infernal voracity of European avarice” had consumed an estimated 180 million slaves so “That the Gentlefolk of Europe, (my friend) may drink Sugar in their Tea!”⁷² Samuel Taylor Coleridge mocked Christians who sought divine blessing for a meal sweetened by African blood: “Gracious Heaven!… A part of that Food among most of you is sweetened with the Blood of the Murdered … O Blasphemy! Did God give Food mingled with Brothers blood! Will the Father of all men bless the Food of Cannibals—the food which is polluted with the blood of his own innocent children?”⁷³ However, none were as graphic as pamphleteer Andrew Burn, whose A Second Address to the People of Great Britain has been described as the “paranoid double” of Fox’s Address. Appeals to sentiment, he believed, were not strong enough. Rather he hoped to disgust consumers into abstention by convincing his readers that “either in Puddings, Pies, Tarts, Tea, or otherwise, that they literally, and most certainly in so-doing, eat large quantities of that last mentioned Fluid [blood], as it flows copiously from the Body of the laborious slave.” Burn went beyond the standard trope of blood-stained sugar, however, as he described in great detail the physical conditions of slavery in the sugar colonies. Sweat, lice, and jiggers all contaminated the sugar produced by African slaves in the West Indies and were in turn consumed by Britons. After piling horror on horror, Burn concluded with the story of a British wine merchant who opened a cask of West Indian rum and discovered inside “the whole body of a roasted Negro.”⁷⁴

Contaminated sugar was most dramatically depicted by the caricaturist James Gillray in April 1791. “Barbarities in the West Indias” invoked the horror of cannibalism: as an overseer stirs a steaming vat of sugar cane juice, the flailing arms and legs are all that is seen of the slave who has been tossed into the pot. In the background, a bird, a fox, some rats, two black cats as well as two black ears, and a black arm have been pinned to the wall. As he works, the overseer sneers, “B—t your black Eyes! what you can’t work because you’re not well?—but I’ll give you a warm bath to cure your Ague, and a Curry-combing afterwards to put Spunk into you.” Gillray’s image is made all the more horrible because it was based on testimony given to the House of Commons by “Mr. Frances.” In his History, Clarkson noted that Phillip Francis reported the case of an overseer who punished a slave by throwing him into a pot of boiling cane juice. Gillray, however, embellished the story Francis reported, which casts doubt on the veracity of the source and renders Gillray’s political cartoon an ambiguous commentary on slavery and the slave trade.⁷⁵

FIGURE 3.    James Gillray. “Barbarities in the West Indias,” 1791. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.

Opponents of abolitionism criticized the bloody rhetoric of abstention, suggesting that boycotters’ emphasis on blood-stained sugar overlooked other products that had been contaminated by slave labor. One critic asked, “How anybody who will not eat Sugar because it is eating Negro flesh, can handle gold or silver, or feed themselves with silver spoons or forks; for if eating Sugar is eating Negroes flesh, sure every time anybody puts a fork or spoon in their mouths, it is putting a poor dead Negro’s finger or toe there.”⁷⁶ Such criticism mocked abstention rhetoric that saw blood and flesh in every bowl of sugar; yet, such criticism used the very rhetorical devices of the antislave-trade writing it mocked.

The graphic violence of abstention rhetoric served both to repel and to remind consumers of the bloody connection between colonial production and domestic consumption. By depicting ladies’ sugar bowls as dripping with the blood of slaves, supporters of abstention suggested that metropolitan women who did not support the boycott were no better than their counterparts in the colonies. Women who did support the slave trade were forced to defend not only their support of slavery but their femininity as well.

Debating Gender and Commerce

Of the dozens of tracts about the slave-trade debate that were produced in 1791 and 1792, none is as unusual as the one sold by W. Moon of Whitechapel. Bearing the title An Answer to a Pamphlet Intituled [sic] An Address to the People of England against the Use of West India Produce, this piece was purportedly written by a female apologist for slavery. While it was one of many proslavery tracts written in this period in response to Fox’s Address, it was the only one allegedly composed by a woman. The apologist’s arguments caught the attention of Richard Hillier, who had for a time worked as a sailor in the West Indies. Compelled to challenge the female apologist and to defend Fox, Hillier published A Vindication of an Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Use of West India Produce in late 1791.⁷⁷ Read together, these three tracts—An Address to the People of Great Britain, An Answer to a Pamphlet, and A Vindication of an Address—highlight the importance of the domestic world to the political campaign against the slave trade.

In her Answer, the female apologist defended her femininity, outlined the economic benefits of the slave trade, and suggested that activists alleviate the suffering of the working men of Britain. The female apologist made a careful distinction between support of slave-produced goods and the slave trade. Aligning herself with the ascribed female qualities of “humanity” and “Christian principles,” she denied that she supported the slave trade just because she did not support the boycott. If the boycott were successful, it would have a devastating effect on Britons, the apologist argued. The British trade in slave-grown sugar was a “vast and extensive branch of commerce”; thus, abstention would force West Indian planters to find another market for their sugar and force thousands of British businessmen into bankruptcy or prison. The end of the market for slave-grown sugar would “effectually cramp the spirit of industry and enterprise.” Indeed, in a rather tortured discussion of scriptural authority, the female apologist suggested that the availability of slave-produced goods in the marketplace indicated a divine sanction of the consumption of such goods. The female apologist further suggested that activists should focus first on the suffering of workingmen at home rather than Africans in the colonies. She denied Fox’s claim for a high rate of death among African slaves in the Caribbean and instead argued that more working-class men in Britain died young “either by hazardous employments, by working in infectious trades, or by extreme labor.” Calling English miners “underground slaves,” she argued that if the labor conditions of these workingmen were examined, their situation would be found “unenviable, even by the West Indian slave.”⁷⁸

Comparing African slaves to the workingmen of Britain demonstrated that the female apologist had a clear understanding of pro- and antislave-trade rhetoric. By diverting attention to miners, she placed her tract within an established rhetorical tradition. Emphasizing the importance of slave-goods, proslave-trade writers created what literary scholar Brycchan Carey has described as a “hierarchy of suffering.” Child chimney sweeps and miners were most often singled out for comparison with slaves, Carey argues, because all three groups shared harsh labor conditions, child labor, high mortality, and “black faces.” Relief for child chimney sweeps was supported by abolitionists and proslavery supporters alike; however, proslavery supporters used their concern for child chimney sweeps to argue, like the female apologist, that “charity” should begin at home.⁷⁹

Hillier’s Vindication challenged the female apologist on gendered terms, focusing in particular on her lack of feminine sympathy. “Your charity, my good Lady, may begin at home, and end at home, and stay at home for ever,” he asserted.⁸⁰ Hillier referred to the now-familiar testimony in the House of Commons about the cruelty of colonial women and suggested that with a little practice the female apologist could become just like those colonial women. “The ladies in the West-Indies have a happy dexterity in flipping off their shoes, and beating the heels of them about the heads of their negroes,” he wrote. “Now, with a very little practice upon your bed-post or dressing table, you will make a tolerable proficiency in the art.” To further emphasize her lack of feminine sympathy, Hillier contrasted the apologist with more notable women such as antislavery author Helen Maria Williams, who linked support for abolitionism with the moralization of politics and commerce.⁸¹

The use of gender in this debate reveals just how important feminine ideals had become in the slave-trade debate and in the boycott. In An Answer, the author identifies herself as female on the first page though she chooses to remain anonymous.⁸² Anonymity was common among political authors in the eighteenth century. Many pieces of pro- and antislave-trade rhetoric were published anonymously or pseudonymously. Generally, women adopted a male identity; however, by the late eighteenth century, women’s experience increasingly held an authority that tempted men to appropriate it.⁸³ If the female apologist was a man appropriating a female identity, it is significant that the author did not emphasize gender more. Hillier, in contrast, emphasized the author’s gender in his title and in his argument, claiming she had violated appropriate gender ideals by rejecting the boycott of slave-grown sugar. Criticizing the female apologist allowed Hillier to implicitly censure other women who failed to support the boycott. If An Answer was authored by a man using a female identity, it suggests the power of sentimental rhetoric in the slave-trade debates. For example, when the female apologist and Hillier debated the relative situation of West Indian slaves and British miners, the two authors suggested divergent responses to suffering: one focused on distant pain, and the other focused on nearby distress. The anonymous author consciously created a “hierarchy of suffering” and may well have decided to use a feminine authorial identity to strengthen the argument privileging white laborers over black slaves. In the second edition of A Vindication, Hillier revealed his knowledge of the apologist’s identity and, in refusing to identify the author, suggested again that the author was indeed female. Hillier also noted that the author “retail[ed] a commodity,” which might well be affected by the boycott, thus implying her arguments against the boycott might be more self-interested than she admitted.⁸⁴ Whether authored by a man or a woman, the anti-boycott argument of An Answer suggests growing awareness of the importance of gender and sentiment as well as commerce in the slave-trade debates. The gender of the female apologist might have escaped the notice of the careless reader had Hillier not given it such prominence in his tracts. This along with the apparent relationship between the anonymous author and Hillier raises questions about this particular debate. An Answer to a Pamphlet—regardless of the author’s gender—may have been written in conjunction with Hillier’s pamphlet in an attempt to use gender to bring attention to the abstention campaign. As writers on either side of the slave-trade debate addressed arguments from the opposition, the authorship and form of pro- and anti-slavery appeals changed, using complex ideological shifts to more effectively petition their audience. In the process, ideologies of gender and sentiment and commerce and trade intertwined within the slave-trade debates to create competing ideas of British national identity.⁸⁵

Eighteenth-century abstention rhetoric developed within this oppositional interchange, as subsequent editions of Fox’s Address illustrate. In mid-1791, the title of Fox’s pamphlet changed. The first six editions were published as An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum. Beginning with the seventh edition, the tract was published as An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum. Replacing “utility” with “propriety” and “refraining” with “abstaining,” the new title emphasized the morality of the abstention campaign rather than its more utilitarian aspects. Shifting the emphasis to the morality of abstention also reinforced the gendered nature of the abstention campaign.

The Decline of the Boycott

Throughout the winter of 1791–1792, supporters and opponents of the slave trade publicly debated the future of colonial slavery with perhaps as many as one-half million consumers agreeing to boycott slave-grown sugar until Parliament took action. In the spring of 1792, hoping to build on the momentum of the boycott, abolitionists once again brought the issue of the slave trade before the House of Commons. In a matter of weeks, 519 antislave-trade petitions bearing at least 390,000 names were presented to Parliament. In contrast, Parliament received just four petitions supporting the trade. Abolitionists’ hopes were high when the debate began on April 2. To their dismay, however, home secretary Henry Dundas inserted the word “gradually” into Wilberforce’s bill. Ultimately, the House of Commons passed the gradualist proposal postponing debate about the slave trade until 1796 when the trade was supposed to end. When the slave-trade abolition bill came before the House of Lords, the Lords insisted on holding their own hearings about the trade. The hearings were monopolized by proslavery interests until Parliament adjourned, effectively ending any hopes of passing the bill.⁸⁶

As British abolitionists regrouped after this latest defeat, events in France took a violent turn. King Louis XVI was taken prisoner. Then in September, two thousand French royalists, clergy, and aristocrats were killed. Conservatives in Britain were horrified by the events. On January 21, 1793, as British abolitionists were attempting to schedule another hearing on the abolition of the slave trade, the French king was executed. “Every bosom burns with indignation in this kingdom against the ferocious savages of Paris,” declared the London Times. The French ambassador was expelled from Britain, and relations between Britain and France spiraled downward, ending in France’s declaration of war against Britain on February 1.⁸⁷ The abstention writer Fox took a strong antiwar stance, claiming Britain was the aggressor and wished to destroy the new French republic because the revolution held dangerous possibilities for Great Britain. He criticized a British government that worried about the affairs of other European nations while neglecting British issues such as the slave trade. It was, Fox noted, easier “to express the warmest emotions, and the most indignant feelings against them,… than to pursue the thorny path of virtue, and steadily resist the temptations to which we are exposed.” Britons wept for the French king and sobbed at the tragedy of Oronooko (Aphra Behn’s tale of an enslaved African prince), yet failed to act against the slave trade, a crime supported daily by British consumers.⁸⁸ Noting that Britons sympathized with the victims of the very crimes they committed, Fox raised uncomfortable questions about the nature of sympathy and the pleasure that the spectacle of death could invoke.⁸⁹ Nonetheless, events in Saint Domingue and France had a chilling effect on the boycott and the slave-trade debate. Many leading abolitionists, including Clarkson, distanced themselves from the boycott, which waned significantly after 1792. In 1793 the SEAST made an abortive attempt to continue the boycott after the House of Commons refused to revive the slave-trade debate. By 1797 the SEAST had suspended all operations and the slave-sugar boycott was a distant memory.⁹⁰

It is likely that more than half a million Britons participated in the boycott of slave-grown sugar. Grocers reported decreases in sugar sales, dropping as much as “a third to a half in just a few months’ time,” while “the sale of sugar from India increased more than tenfold.” That grocers began to stock East rather than West Indian sugar suggests that female consumers, who were responsible for most of the household purchases, had had an influence. Yet the success of abstention was tempered by declining supplies, rising prices, and increased demand elsewhere. In January 1792, for example, sugar riots broke out in the streets of Paris. Moreover, the narrow scope of the boycott, targeting only slave-grown sugar, limited its economic impact on slaveholders. Clarkson, for example, was unwilling to extend the boycott to cotton, which he believed “might take away the bread of a million of our fellow subjects, the innocent poor of this country.” Nonetheless, the British boycott of slave-grown sugar highlights the possibilities of consumer activism. When abstention merged with contemporary anxieties about the slave trade and female commerce, the boycott gained support from outside the Society of Friends. For these new supporters of the boycott, more was at stake than Britain’s support of the slave trade. Nowhere is this more evident than in the debates surrounding women’s participation in the boycott. Critics on either side of the boycott were uncertain whether women were appropriate activists in the movement. Supporters of slavery believed women were too easily swayed by the sentimental rhetoric of abolitionists, whereas antislavery writers worried that women were too driven by their insatiable appetites to make the moral choice. For the women who abstained from slave-grown sugar, the boycott provided an opportunity to actively participate in the abolitionist movement. Women who did so rejected cultural constructions of gender that described women as apolitical and interested only in fashion and consumption. Abstention transformed the landscape of ladies’ tea tables into a liminal zone where conversations about gender, commerce, and abolitionism blended into one another. In addition to cultural debates about gender and commerce, the British boycott of slave-grown sugar benefited from the large-scale political movement against the slave trade that developed in the late 1780s. The idea of abstention was drawn into and influenced by these debates and, in turn, abstention shaped discussions of the slave trade and gender and commerce. As a result, the boycott benefited from a much broader base of support than it might otherwise have had if it had remained tied solely to the antislavery movement.