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

Slavery Associations also listed tracts appropriate for each anti-slavery society’s library;
interestingly, all of the tracts listed were endorsed by the national Anti-Slavery Society.
Heyrick’s tracts are noticeably absent. 58
Publication of the Anti-Slavery Society’s guidelines coincided with the
publication of Heyrick’s Apology for Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Associations, in which she
urged women to ever greater levels of anti-slavery activity. The national society’s
guidelines promoted amelioration and gradual abolition. 59 In contrast, Apology,
continued Heyrick’s argument for immediate emancipation. Heyrick dismissed gradual
abolition as “a delusive phantom.” “No mutilated offerings on the altar of duty will be
accepted,” Heyrick wrote. The number of women’s anti-slavery associations, according
to Heyrick, needed to be “greatly multiplied” and their “zeal and exertion must be greatly
accelerated” to achieve their “ultimate object,” the abolition of slavery. Women’s efforts
to date had been inadequate, she claimed. Rather than individual abstinence, women
needed to “unite in some . . . mutual pledge” like that adopted by women in Worcester
who had collaborated in a general boycott of grocers and confectioners who sold or used
West Indian sugar. 60
Heyrick consistently urged immediate abolition of slavery, a tactic adopted early
on by women’s associations. The first anti-slavery society, regardless of gender, to
58 Ladies Anti-Slavery Associations, 1, 3. An earlier tract, published in 1826, suggested that
women petition the legislature. See Negro Slavery. To the Ladies of the United Kingdom (London: Ellerton
and Henderson, c. 1826), 3.
59 Ibid., 5.
60
Elizabeth Heyrick, Apology for Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Associations (London: J. Hatchard and
Sons, 1828), 6, 8, 15.
73