Abstention, Working-Class Radicalism, and Slave Rebellion

Heyrick’s family background influenced her antislavery activism. She was born in 1769 to John and Elizabeth Coltman in Leicester in the English Midlands. Elizabeth’s family belonged to the Presbyterian (later Unitarian) Great Meeting in East Bond Street, which was the center of Leicester’s Protestant dissenting community. Her father was a successful worsted hosiery manufacturer, a radical political reformer, and a supporter of the campaign to end the slave trade. Likely, her family participated in the first slave-sugar boycott, which received widespread support in Leicester, where the residents were “nearly unanimous in rejecting the use of sugar and rum.” In 1789 Elizabeth married the Anglican John Heyrick. Despite their tempestuous marriage, she was grief-stricken when John died suddenly in 1797. Forced to sell off her furniture to pay her husband’s debts, Elizabeth opened a boarding school to support herself.⁶ It was around this same time that she joined the Society of Friends and began to write, anonymously authoring more than twenty radical and reformist pamphlets that “oppos[ed] war, animal cruelty, poor prison conditions, corporal and capital punishment, low wages, and the oppression of the poor.” In addition to writing about social issues, she took action. She stopped a bull-baiting contest by buying the bull and hiding it until the angry crowd dispersed. Heyrick also lived for a time in a shepherd’s cottage to better understand the life of Irish migrant workers, visited prisons and paid fines to gain prisoners’ release, called for laws limiting the workday, and supported workers’ strikes.⁷ While these early experiences were crucial to the development of Heyrick’s antislavery activism, gender was equally important. As a young woman, Heyrick was introduced to a complex mix of female role models. Her mother emphasized women’s domestic role and conformed to restrictive ideas of femininity. In contrast, other women in Heyrick’s circle of family and friends challenged, implicitly or explicitly, the restrictions placed on women. These women included the poet Anna Laetitita Barbauld, who published works on controversial topics such as slavery, and Priscilla Hannah Gurney, who was a Quaker minister and cousin of the prison reformer Elizabeth Gurney Fry. Although Heyrick did not argue explicitly for women’s rights, she did believe in women’s spiritual equality and intellectual worth.⁸

These influences—religious dissent, political radicalism, and gender—framed Heyrick’s activism, which intensified in the 1810s when she became involved in the fight for the economic rights of the poor. The end of the wars with France triggered an economic crisis in Britain that severely impacted the working class. Between 1815 and 1819, wages for framework knitters dropped steadily, reaching a low of four shillings a week for sixteen to eighteen hours of daily labor. Knitters and leading working-class radicals were unsuccessful in their attempts to set a minimum wage. Radical agitation increased as critics denounced Parliament for maintaining the price of corn but not the price of labor.⁹ In 1819, at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, eleven people were killed and more than four hundred wounded when the militia and the cavalry broke up a gathering of more than sixty thousand men, women, and children who were demanding parliamentary reform, particularly universal male suffrage. The notorious Peterloo Massacre has been described as “one of the defining events of its age.”¹⁰ It was within this environment of working-class reform that Heyrick demanded the rights of the poor. In two pamphlets, published in 1817 and 1819, Heyrick rejected the philanthropic approach to poverty within which middle-class women engaged with the poor. She claimed that more was required than simply “humanity and benevolence.” Instead, she insisted that justice had been denied. “We may discover,” she wrote, “that, so far from having obeyed the requisitions of charity, we have not yet discharged the demands of justice.” Heyrick used analogies with slavery to describe the plight of the working class. The declining value of human labor, as evidenced by the poor and the enslaved, reflected larger political problems in the British Empire. Comparing the two, Heyrick claimed both lived and worked in a “state of wretchedness and despair” because the “spirit of the slave-trade”—“the lust of wealth”—continued to frame the relationship between laborer and employer.¹¹ “The Rights of Man—The Rights of Woman—The Rights of Brutes—have been boldly advanced; but the Rights of the Poor still remain unadvocated,” she observed.¹²

The comparison of the poor laborer and the enslaved African was an established trope in antislavery rhetoric. In the late eighteenth century, child chimney sweeps and coal miners were singled out for comparison with slaves to divert attention away from the slave trade and West Indian slavery and to instead focus public attention on the laboring poor.¹³ In the early nineteenth century, such rhetoric increased as working-class activists and abolitionists sought parliamentary reforms. Working-class radical William Cobbett invoked the image of a happy group of “fat and lazy and laughing and singing and dancing negroes” in the West Indies. The “wage slaves” of England, he claimed, would be happy to lick the bowls of such well-fed slaves. Likewise the spinners of Stockport claimed to endure “all the horrors of a sullen and hapless slavery.”¹⁴ Abolitionists, on the other hand, worried that planters might use working-class conditions to deflect attention away from slavery; thus, some abolitionists privileged the British laborer. In an 1824 article in the Christian Observer, Clarkson reviewed the comparisons made between the enslaved and the laborer. To support his argument, he used examples culled from the colonial publication the Jamaica Royal Gazette. The poor would be so shocked by the slaves’ sufferings, Clarkson concluded, “they would absolutely lose sight of their own.”¹⁵

What set Heyrick’s argument apart from comparisons like those put forth by Cobbett and Clarkson was her claim that because the two problems were so deeply intertwined, they had to be resolved simultaneously. The laborer was only nominally free, she argued; thus, to suggest, as some abolitionists did, that working-class reform should wait until slavery had been abolished was misguided. Yet to argue that the abolition of slavery should wait until working-class reform had been enacted was also wrong. The oppression of the working class and the oppression of the slave came from the same source, greed. The condition of the working class and the oppression of the slave were both “directly contrary to the Divine will.”¹⁶ She challenged waged labor as little better than slavery for British laborers who received a starvation wage. Heyrick believed consumers must apply economic pressure to bring about change and to free both the enslaved and the laborer.¹⁷

The working-class radicalism of the early nineteenth century coincided with massive slave rebellions in the British colonies of Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823); both of these events influenced British antislavery in general and Heyrick’s activism in particular. In Barbados, on Easter Sunday 1816, slaves on seventy plantations revolted after hearing rumors that “Mr. Wilberforce” had freed the slaves. More than two hundred slaves were killed or executed. In Demerara, the conditions of revolt were similar. On August 18, 1823, an estimated nine to twelve thousand slaves from at least sixty plantations in the East Coast region rebelled after hearing rumors that the King of England had freed the slaves. During the three-day uprising, only two or three whites were killed while colonial troops killed or wounded more than 255 slaves. After white West Indians regained control, mock trials and summary executions on various plantations claimed the lives of more than twenty slaves. The official trials that followed claimed another thirty-three slaves. Ten were decapitated and their heads displayed as a warning to other slaves.¹⁸

Supporters of slavery blamed abolitionists for the rebellions, which they saw as further evidence that Bryan Edwards was correct: abolitionist agitation caused slave rebellion. A West Indian planter, member of Parliament, and historian of the Caribbean, Edwards published his Historical Survey of the French Colony of St. Domingo in 1797, after the revolt in Saint Domingue. According to Edwards, the French abolitionist society, the Amis des Noirs, was responsible for the slave insurrection in Saint Domingue. Edwards’s work quickly became the standard proslavery account of the Haitian Revolution. It was widely disseminated in Britain and the United States and went through several reprints well into the nineteenth century. Supporters of slavery transformed Edwards’s argument into a general theory about the relationship between abolitionist agitation and slave insurrection.¹⁹ For many white West Indians, missionaries were closely associated with abolitionists; therefore, they too were suspect. After the rebellion in Demerara, missionary John Smith was arrested for his alleged role in the rebellion. Smith and his wife had lived in the sugar colony since 1817 when he was sent there by the London Missionary Society. While Smith remained loyal to the goals of the society to not endanger public safety and to teach slaves to obey their masters, Smith was nonetheless horrified by the plight of West Indian slaves. His popularity with the slave population and his advocacy on behalf of slaves, as well as his private journal entries denouncing slavery, were all used as evidence against him in his trial. Smith was tried by court martial, found guilty, and sentenced to death. While awaiting word from England regarding his appeal, Smith died of consumption in jail in early 1824. As soon as word reached England of Smith’s conviction and subsequent death, the London Missionary Society and their co-religionists inundated the religious press with evidence of Smith’s innocence. Smith quickly became a martyr for the abolitionist cause.²⁰

In Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, Heyrick challenged the Edwards thesis and supported the defense of Smith that had appeared in the press. Slavery was a sin against God, thus the slave “has a natural right to his liberty, a right which it is a crime to withhold,” Heyrick argued. As a result, both slaveholders and abolitionists were to blame for the rebellion. The conditions of enslavement and the protracted discussions of emancipation had left slaves frustrated. Heyrick recounted the story of a slave named “Respectable Billy,” who had been married for eighteen years and had fathered ten children and who had been forcibly separated from his family. Another couple had been separated when the wife was forced to become the mistress of the overseer. Both men sought redress through rebellion. Other slaves were refused passes to attend church or had been punished for attending services. Under these conditions, the spread of rumors of freedom denied had taken on powerful meaning. Yet, Heyrick claimed that the slaves had not resorted to violence, but instead had refused to work until news of their future was given to them. Instead, she suggested that the planters were responsible for the violent outcome. Heyrick also emphasized the guilt of abolitionists, who had been timid, cold-hearted, and exceedingly polite in their dealings with slaveholders.²¹

Heyrick linked slave rebellion and abstention from slave-labor goods, claiming that abstention would end slave rebellion by ending slavery. Frustrated with the inaction of Parliament and the abolitionists, she called for direction action against slavery by boycotting slave-labor goods, specifically sugar. “Too much time has already been lost in declamation and argument,—in petitions and remonstrances against British slavery,” she wrote. “Why petition Parliament at all, to do that for us, which … we can do more speedily and more effectually for ourselves?” she asked. Emphasizing the effect of the “combined exertion” of individual consumers, Heyrick claimed their targeted economic choices would accomplish a “greater moral revolution” than could ever be accomplished by parliamentary action. At the heart of this moral revolution stood thousands of British women who once mobilized could render slavery unprofitable by simply changing their habits of consumption. Recognizing the connection between morals and economics, Heyrick appealed to women and their emotions, asking them to use their sympathy for the slave to change the market. As she wrote, “What rational hope is there left of the extinction of slavery but by rendering it unprofitable? And how can we render it unprofitable but by rejecting its produce? And how can such an extensive rejection of its produce be obtained as shall render it unprofitable, without direct appeals to the hearts and understandings, to the feelings and principles of individuals, on the folly, danger, and wickedness of upholding such a system of iniquity?” Heyrick believed that even if the planters did not experience a similar conversion of heart, their economic self-interest would lead them to make the morally right decision.²² Such arguments encouraged female participation in the antislavery and abstention movements and resulted in the organization of dozens of ladies’ antislavery associations in Britain in the 1820s.

Abstention and Women’s Antislavery Activism

Heyrick identified “two very important branches of action” uniquely suited to women: the boycott of slave labor and the distribution of information about slavery.²³ To coordinate these efforts, Heyrick and other women organized an extensive network of ladies’ antislavery associations. In April 1825, the Female Society for Birmingham (later renamed the Birmingham Ladies’ Negro’s Friends Society) was established by women from Birmingham and its surrounding communities. The society established a network of committees, district treasurers, visitors, and collectors. It also identified three primary goals: distribute information about slavery, provide direct aid to female slaves in the West Indies, and encourage the boycott of slave labor.²⁴ Functioning as an unofficial national antislavery organization for women, the group influenced the formation of other ladies’ associations. Its vast organization of officers and committees, as well as the extensive correspondence maintained by society founder Lucy Townsend, enabled the Birmingham women to communicate with other like-minded women in Great Britain, the United States, and beyond.²⁵ The group’s network of district treasurers grew from ten women in 1825 to forty-nine by 1830 spread throughout England as well as Wales, Ireland, France, Sierra Leone, and Calcutta. Often local antislavery associations were established by district treasurers. For example, as district treasurer for Leicester, Heyrick helped establish that city’s local ladies’ antislavery society. The network of women’s associations expanded as a result of the system of treasurers. Though not directly affiliated with the Birmingham group, other associations such as the Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society (1825), the Colchester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Association (1825), and the Liverpool Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society (1827) also relied on the Birmingham women for information and support. Between 1825 and 1833, at least seventy-three ladies’ associations were established. Of those, twenty were organized under the direction of the Female Society for Birmingham.²⁶

The women’s groups relied on direct action; thus, the visitors and collectors of the women’s associations were essential to the arduous work of canvassing entire communities to spread the antislavery message and to encourage the boycott of slave labor. Door-to-door canvassing was a uniquely female method for distributing abstention and antislavery tracts, most likely adopted from the system of female district visitors to the poor used by benevolent associations in this period. In 1827 the Birmingham women reported that more than half of the households in the area had been visited; in 1828 the number of households visited in Birmingham rose to 83 percent. By 1829 they had completed their canvass of the entire Birmingham area. On her own, Sophia Sturge, sister of the abolitionist Joseph Sturge, visited more than three thousand Birmingham households while Heyrick and Susanna Watts, who together coedited the antislavery publication, The Hummingbird, were credited with canvassing most of Leicester.²⁷

Women’s canvassing efforts were supported by the use of print material, including a variety of pamphlets printed by the various associations for use with specific audiences. The Birmingham women issued five thousand copies of What Does Your Sugar Cost? A Cottage Conversation on the Subject of British Negro Slavery. The tract, which was intended for distribution among the poor, featured a conversation among three characters: “Woman,” “Daughter,” and “Lady.” The lady is a visitor from the local antislavery society, who has come to call on the woman and her daughter to convince them to abstain from slave-grown sugar. In the dialogue that follows, the lady explains how slaves produced the sugar the woman and her daughter consume, and she urges the woman and her daughter to substitute East Indian sugar for that produced by the labor of slaves. By the end of the short tract, the woman is convinced, agreeing to abstain from slave-grown sugar. The conversational nature of the tract provided a model for visiting antislavery women to adopt.²⁸ While What Does Your Sugar Cost? targeted the poor, Reasons for Substituting East Indian Sugar was directed to the “higher classes.” Without a dialogue, this tract emphasized parliamentary shortcomings and called on readers to bring the question of slavery “home to our own bosoms.” Borrowing liberally from Heyrick’s texts, the tract encouraged consumers to abstain from West Indian sugar. Four thousand copies of Reasons were printed for distribution.²⁹ The women also reached out to children. Charlotte Townsend, whose mother Lucy had participated in the first slave-sugar boycott, produced a pamphlet for children titled Pity the Negro; or, An Address to the Children on the Subject of Slavery. At least seven editions of two thousand copies each were published. During their canvasses, women also handed out cards that claimed that for every “six families using East India sugar[,] one slave less is required.”³⁰ Although the use of print culture to support the boycott of slave-labor goods was not a new tactic in the nineteenth century, antislavery women introduced a novel twist. For the first time women were actively selecting materials to disseminate that could be used to appeal to particular individuals that they met during their door-to-door canvass. In the eighteenth century, women gathered in family groups around the tea table to read and discuss tracts such as William Fox’s Address to the People of Great Britain; in contrast, nineteenth-century women instead went into the neighborhoods to call on strangers to encourage them to join the boycott of slave labor. Their systematic canvass along with their strategic use of print media suggests a practical, focused consumer campaign against slave-labor goods. Unlike their predecessors, nineteenth-century women sought to convert entire communities regardless of traditional boundaries such as class.

FIGURE 5.    Workbag with image of kneeling slave. Courtesy of Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

These women did not limit their distribution of print materials to their neighborhood canvasses, however. British antislavery women included tracts in the workbags that were made for sale to “the affluent and influential classes of the community.”³¹ Workbags, which were generally used to store embroidery and other needlework, were made from free-labor East India cotton, silk, or satin by the women of organizations such as the Birmingham group. One side of the bag featured an image of a slave woman; on the reverse, a label admonished the slave woman to “call upon [God] from amidst thy bonds, for assuredly he will hear thee.” The bags were filled with antislavery literature along with a note explaining the contents. The workbags were a significant fund-raiser and form of outreach for women’s associations; indeed, the workbags produced by British women drew the attention of American editor Benjamin Lundy, who noted in the pages of the Genius of Universal Emancipation that the project was worthy of “particular notice.”³² In 1826 the Birmingham society reported that nearly two thousand bags had been distributed throughout England, Wales, and Ireland. In 1827 the group reported that during the preceding two years, the association had spent nearly £400 printing antislavery literature. Nearly all of that cost, they noted, had been covered with proceeds from the sale of workbags. The workbags were also an effective means of disseminating information about slavery and the boycott of slave-grown sugar, countering the numerous “misrepresentations” carried in the press. While the bags were an important fund-raiser, the bags were also distributed by the women to influential women and, on occasion, men.³³

In addition to print literature and workbags, women exerted economic pressure in other ways. Relying on the various district treasurers, women in Dublin and Birmingham compiled registers of families that had agreed to abstain from slave-grown sugar. These lists were then published regularly in local newspapers, giving the impression that the numbers of boycotters were large and growing. Additionally, women organized general boycotts of grocers and confectioners who sold or used West Indian sugar and published lists of retailers who used only free-grown sugar. The systematic neighborhood canvasses conducted by the women allowed them to identify supporters and to disseminate information about tradesmen who supported the boycott. These coordinated efforts were critical to the successful expansion of the boycott in the mid and late 1820s. While exact numbers are not available, it is likely that the number of boycotters exceeded that of the eighteenth-century campaign.³⁴

The direct economic action taken by British women drew on ideas of female sympathy, liberal political economy, and profitability. Women like Heyrick engaged women’s hearts and heads, using an appeal to women’s emotions that also relied on the economic arguments of Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher who authored The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. For Heyrick, immediatism was “direct action undertaken without delay by individuals making particular and targeted economic choices.” As Carol Lasser concludes, “Heyrick had a clear vision of the course to emancipation: Guide people to buy correctly; this involved appeals to the heart; with regenerate hearts, good people would pressure planters into making morally right decisions, even if the planters did not experience the sympathy that could produce a conversion of their hardened, economically driven hearts.” In the marketplace, where men and women were equal, women could operate the levers of economic change, rendering slavery unprofitable.³⁵ Although women’s antislavery work reinforced the political change sought by antislavery men, some men were embarrassed by such “unwanted allies.”³⁶

Abstention and Gender

In his history of the British antislavery movement, journalist Adam Hochschild describes ladies’ antislavery associations as “almost always bolder than those of men.” Hochschild’s description points out the fundamental difference between the associations of women and the associations of men. While antislavery women called for the immediate abolition of slavery through direct tactics like abstention from slave-grown sugar, antislavery men emphasized amelioration and gradual abolition through political change.³⁷ Women rejected gradualism, defining their opposition in terms of Christian responsibility: women “ought to obey God rather than man,” asserted the women of the Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society.³⁸ Christian principles required immediate action against the immorality of slavery. Significantly, antislavery women used direct economic action to bring about change not only in the marketplace but also in the abolitionist movement. In 1830 the antislavery women of Birmingham, frustrated with the gradualist polices of the national antislavery society, passed a resolution to withhold their annual contribution to the group unless “they are willing to give up the word gradual in their title.” The network of women’s associations accounted for more than one-fifth of the national society’s annual income in 1829, so women were an important economic force in the antislavery movement. Seven weeks after the Birmingham women passed their resolution, the London Anti-Slavery Society resolved to drop “mitigation and gradual abolition” from the society’s title. Although pressure from male provincial delegates likely had some influence on the change of title, the financial pressure from the women’s networks surely had an impact as well.³⁹

Gender differences were also critical to the debates about the equalization of sugar duties in the 1820s. The discussion of sugar duties reveals the ways in which the activism of women and men could simultaneously align and diverge. Heyrick described the revision of the tariff on sugar as more of the “slow and solemn process of parliamentary discussion.”⁴⁰ Women recognized the financial impact such a change might bring. For example, the Ladies’ Association for Liverpool and Its Neighborhoods estimated that local residents paid £5,000 annually in duties and bounties to support West Indian slavery.⁴¹ Still, the revision of the tariff on sugar lacked the immediate impact of abstention and relied on the cumbersome process of political change. Although the London Anti-Slavery Society supported women’s efforts by proposing an experiment to market East Indian sugar, many other men worried that the withdrawal of economic support for slave-labor goods might devastate the British economy. British Quaker James Cropper admired the moral scruples of those who avoided the products of slave labor; however, as a businessman, he understood how dependent British commerce was on the products of slavery. Instead, Cropper called for the opportunity for slave-labor goods to compete equally with free-labor goods by revising the protective duties that had made slave-grown sugar artificially profitable. Convinced of the superiority of free labor, Cropper believed that free labor would ultimately prevail and West Indian planters would be forced to emancipate their slaves.⁴²

Cropper’s involvement in the antislavery movement began in response to an attempt by the West Indian interest in Parliament to increase duties on East Indian sugar. Cropper believed free labor and free trade in legitimate commodities were divinely appointed engines of moral progress; therefore, discriminatory duties on East Indian sugar manipulated the market and supported slave labor. In a letter to William Wilberforce in May 1821, Cropper claimed West Indian planters asked for increased duties on East Indian sugar because they feared free competition with East Indian sugar. “Is not this a most decided admission that their system of cultivation cannot exist, unless the country is taxed to support?” Cropper asked. British consumers paid more than £1 million annually in duties and bounties to support West Indian slavery.⁴³ Cropper and other members of the Anti-Slavery Society believed West Indians’ monopoly of trade had rendered the British colonies a liability rather than an asset to the empire.⁴⁴ An article in the Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, published in February 1830, calculated the cost of slavery. Breaking the cost into categories—army, ordnance, commissariat, miscellaneous, and navy—the author concluded that these expenses were “but a part of what it costs to maintain this cruel and criminal system.” Adding the bounties and drawbacks, which favored West Indian sugar, annual expenditures to support slavery were more than £3 million. Such “mischievous policy,” the author argued, “cramps the commerce of Great Britain, and paralyses the industry … of our Asiatic fellow-subjects.”⁴⁵ Leading abolitionist Zachary Macaulay described the West Indian colonies as a “dead weight” on the country and “a source of enormous expense, without any adequate return.” In contrast, India “pours capital into this country,” Macaulay wrote. Macaulay claimed he avoided comparing the morality of the West Indies and India, suggesting instead that because West Indian planters emphasized their contribution to British economic well-being, he would base his rebuttal on similar grounds.⁴⁶ Other leading male abolitionists were not so circumspect, linking financial support of slavery to a moral drain on the empire and claiming that continued support of slavery would “greatly aggravate the distress of our countrymen at home” and impede the progress of “the general happiness and civilization of mankind” throughout the world.⁴⁷

As head of Cropper, Benson, and Company, Liverpool’s largest importer of East Indian sugar, Cropper had substantial economic ties to sugar production in East India. He was also an important member of the British abolitionist establishment; Cropper was a founding member of the Liverpool Society for the Amelioration and Gradual Abolition of Slavery as well as a member of the London committee of the national Antislavery Society.⁴⁸ For historians, Cropper’s fusion of economic and humanitarian interests has served as an example of the link between capitalism and abolitionism. Historian Eric Williams presents Cropper as an example of an abolitionist motivated more by economic self-interest than humanitarian values.⁴⁹ In contrast, historian David Brion Davis describes him as a man in whom “the intensity of Quaker Quietism had fused with the economic optimism of Adam Smith.” Cropper became an abolitionist because he believed in the “unity of moral and material progress.”⁵⁰ Davis emphasizes the conflict between Cropper’s commercial success and his Quaker beliefs, a conflict that ultimately found resolution in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. For Cropper, Smith resolved the tension between Christianity and profit; the invisible hand of the market was in reality the hand of God aiding the flow of goods toward their natural market in an “unfettered interplay of capital, labor, and resources.”⁵¹ Cropper’s vested interest in East India sugar made suspect his support of economic tactics against West Indian sugar. In 1824, when the London committee of the Antislavery Society established a committee on East India sugar to promote its sale, West Indian planters responded, emphasizing the presence of slavery in British India. “Consult the respectable authorities [like Wilberforce],” one pamphlet urged in 1825, “and you will soon be convinced that the labourers who produce Sugar in the East Indies are generally wretched Slaves, whose situation, respecting essential comfort and protection, is far inferior, indeed, to that of the Negroes in our West India colonies.”⁵²

While Heyrick rejected abolitionists’ plans to revise duties on East Indian sugar, she did not reject economic principles or the invisible hand of the market. Rather she rejected political change as too narrow in scope. Heyrick described the revision of duties as a form of “commercial speculation” that reduced the question of emancipation to matters of political comprise and financial profitability. “Speculations on the comparative profitableness of free and slave labour, may ultimately effect the destruction of slavery,—but christian charity will not wait the tardy uncertain result,” Heyrick wrote. While she too believed that free labor was more efficient and more profitable than slave labor, she worried that reducing the question of abolition to economic principles would push aside moral commitments. Guiding consumers to buy correctly, Heyrick believed, was the “shortest, safest, most effectual” strategy for the abolition of slavery. Abstention was “more decisive, more efficient than words”; “more wise and rational, more politic and safe, as well as just and humane,—than gradual emancipation”; and “more lucrative … in the cultivation of … plantations.” As Lasser argues, “For Heyrick, the invisible hand, driven by sympathetic consumer choices, would speedily bring about emancipation without the cumbersome mechanism of the state.”⁵³

Heyrick and Cropper each emphasized the substitution of sugar from the East Indies; yet, East Indian sugar proved problematic for supporters of the boycott. From a practical, economic standpoint, the artificially high cost of sugar from East India thwarted consumers’ attempts to boycott slave-grown sugar. For the poor and the working class, East Indian sugar was often cost prohibitive. As one critic noted, the discriminatory bounties charged to East Indian sugar were “another rivet [that] has been added to the chain of the slave.” While the duties imposed on East Indian sugar were charged to save West Indian planters from financial ruin, the duties further impoverished the poor because they paid a premium to maintain slavery through higher prices for sugar.⁵⁴

In addition to being more expensive, East Indian sugar was produced under conditions that allowed it to be appropriated by West Indian plantation owners and their supporters to undermine the boycott of slave-grown sugar. As historian Andrea Major argues, “India occupied an anomalous place in the British Empire.” British India was governed by the royal-chartered East India Company (EIC) and was characterized by a “large indigenous population and sophisticated social, political, and economic institutions,” which resulted in a substantial difference between East India and the British colonies in the West Indies. The absence of a plantation economy, the lack of African slaves, and the integration of Indian slaves into affective networks all supported portrayals of East Indian slavery as indigenous and benign. Nonetheless, Indian slavery was “far from the innocuous social institution that some EIC officials claimed.” After the EIC monopoly ended in 1813, East India was the focus of entrepreneurial efforts to increase commodity production in the region. Such efforts supported abolitionists’ attempts to locate alternative sources for slave-labor goods such as sugar. Although Indian slavery was the subject of published reports in the 1820s, such as the voluminous collection of parliamentary papers documenting EIC correspondence on slavery since 1772, those reports received little attention in the abolitionist or missionary press. Instead, it was West Indian plantation owners and their supporters who brought the matter to public attention as they appropriated the issue of Indian labor to undermine abolitionists’ moral arguments against West Indian slave-grown sugar.⁵⁵ As a result, for supporters and opponents of the boycott of West Indian sugar, East Indian sugar assumed a symbolic importance out of proportion to its actual ability to displace slave-grown sugar.

Opponents of East Indian sugar claimed the slaves of West India were better off than the slaves of the East whereas supporters of East Indian sugar sought to distance sugar production from Indian slavery. In arguments that bore a striking resemblance to the comparisons between the working class and the slave, supporters of slavery claimed slaves were the privileged group while abolitionists claimed East Indians were the better lot. As one critic of Cropper claimed, “It is only, I conceive because the labourers are obliged to work for next to nothing that sugar can be made in the East Indies so cheap as is asserted. However, then, the matter may be debated on political and commercial grounds, let us hear no more of the superior humanity of employing labourers at 3d per day in the East, rather than slaves in the West, to whom every comfort consistent with their humble position is undoubtedly afforded.” In a series of comparisons between East and West Indian slavery, the anonymous author of To the Consumers of Sugar (1825) concluded that the situation of East Indians was much worse. To further emphasize his support for West Indian sugar, he noted that it “goes farthest, and is cheapest and best.”⁵⁶ Abolitionists countered these arguments, claiming that descriptions of Indian hardship were exaggerated and that freedom itself outweighed relief from poverty. Indian poverty, they claimed, did not cause misery or distress but represented instead a “voluntary acceptance of limited material wants.” However, as Cobbett and other critics of abolitionists continued to emphasize the horrors of slavery, abolitionists found themselves unable to refute the existence of Indian slavery entirely. Instead, as Major argues, abolitionists “dismissed the importance of Indian slavery for their campaign on the grounds that it was not connected to sugar production and was a milder, more benign institution than West Indian slavery.” Abolitionist arguments for East Indian sugar reveal the highly contextual nature of humanitarian reform. “[H]umanitarian agendas,” Major concludes, functioned “within a complex matrix of moral, economic, political, and pragmatic imperatives that produced fissured and contested ideological formations that were applied unevenly across the sites of empire.”⁵⁷

Supporters and opponents of the second major boycott of slave-grown sugar, like their predecessors, linked the consumption of slave-grown sugar to other social and political issues, including women’s activism and imperial reform. Heyrick made slavery and slave-labor goods a matter for woman’s heart and for her pocketbook. As a result, she invested women with the ability to manipulate the market, viewing abstention as a morally directed economic strategy that had a direct impact on slavery. Cobbett and Cropper brought attention to the boycott through their respective arguments for working-class reform and for a revision of sugar tariffs. While their interests and their objectives were very different, Cobbett and Cropper nonetheless brought public attention to the issue of slave-grown sugar. There is no evidence that the second boycott was any more effective than the first in its impact on the market for sugar.⁵⁸ Still, the boycott did keep the issue of British slavery before the public, encouraging Britons to engage in practical action to pressure Parliament into abolishing slavery. The British boycott also reinvigorated the American abstention movement and sparked the reform work of the young Quaker poet Elizabeth Margaret Chandler.