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

was linked directly to slave rebellion: abstain from the products of slave labor and the
fear of insurrection is alleviated as slavery is abolished.
Heyrick sympathized with the rebelling slaves because she believed in the
fundamental sinfulness of slavery and the natural right of slaves to liberty. In this regard
Heyrick did not differ markedly from other abolitionists. Yet within the mainstream
abolitionist movement, immediatism guided theoretical ideas of emancipation while
gradualism dominated the actual practice of abolition. Heyrick, in contrast, argued that
theory and practice should be one and the same. Because abolitionists had distinguished
between the theoretical and the practical, abolition had become a political matter subject
to “human patronage.” Separating politics and morality, Heyrick argued, rendered defeat
of emancipation inevitable. 29 Linking gradualism to slave rebellion, Heyrick blamed the
anti-slavery leadership for the bloodshed in the Caribbean. She also blamed consumers
who continued to purchase the goods that kept slaves in bondage. Heyrick recognized
that her attack on gradualism opposed the “universal sentiment of abolitionists,” but truth
and justice, she declared, were “inflexible.” 30 Heyrick claimed the moral high ground
and distanced herself from the anti-slavery leadership, a position which increasingly
became identified with women as the ladies’ associations formed in the late 1820s
adopted Heyrick’s immediatist approach to slavery.
29 Ibid., 18. See also Midgley, Women against Slavery, 103-107; David Brion Davis, “The
Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” Mississippi Valley Historical
Review 49 (1962), 209-230.
30 Heyrick, Immediate Not Gradual Abolition, 7.
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