THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

passed for the rebels. Some slaves had been sentenced to “one thousand lashes,” Heyrick
wrote, and others “were condemned to be worked in chains for the the residue of their
lives!!” Heyrick used the injustice of the sentences to push her call for abstention,
demanding to know whether the public would allow such severe punishments to stand as
a precedent and challenging her readers to refuse the products of slave labor. 27
Heyrick linked abstinence from the products of slavery to slave rebellion.
Consumers, she charged, had become accomplices in the guilt and bloodshed of slave
rebellion. The slaves’ rebellion and the injustice of their punishment should drive
Christians to either abstain or renounce their faith altogether. The sacrifice inherent in
abstinence was minor compared to what the slaves had suffered, she claimed. 28 Much as
slaves were right to rebel, consumers were right to refuse to consume the products which
encouraged those conditions, in effect staging their own rebellion. Moreover, since
Parliament was infected with the “bug-bear” of gradualism, consumers had to step
forward and refuse to further support slavery. Thus, in Heyrick’s argument, abstinence
27 Heyrick, Immediate Not Gradual Abolition,21- 22. Heyrick’s initial discussion of the rebellion
in Demerara took to the form of a lengthy postscript in Immediate Not Gradual Abolition. The Demeraran
rebellion was, for Heyrick as for many Britons in this period, a transformative event. Heyrick referred
explicitly or implicitly to the rebellion in each of her anti-slavery tracts. Her pamphlet, Enquiry Which of
the Two Parties Is Best Entitled to Freedom, also published later in 1824, focused entirely on the rebellion
in Demerara. Historian Moira Ferguson suggests that Heyrick’s postscript discussion of Demerara in
Immediate Not Gradual Abolition “might be more than the tacked-on addition of late-breaking news and
could suggest some suppressed personal-political conflict.” See Ferguson, Subject to Others, 255.
Placement of the discussion, Ferguson argues, reveals a tension between Heyrick’s sympathy for the slave
and her desire to maintain social hierarchies. More likely, however, Heyrick’s initial discussion of the
rebellion was the result of late arriving news rather than some suppressed internal conflict as Ferguson
argues. Ferguson did not include Enquiry in her discussion of Heyrick or, for that matter, any of Heyrick’s
earlier pamphlets about working class reform and other social issues.
28 Ibid., 25, 23-24.
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