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

elieved in the “unity of moral and material progress.” 74 Davis emphasizes the conflict
between Cropper’s commercial success and Quaker beliefs, which ultimately found
resolution in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Thus, 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.” 75
Cropper became involved in the anti-slavery movement in response to a move by
the West Indian interest to increase duties on East Indian sugar. Free labor and free trade
in legitimate commodities were divinely appointed engines of moral progress, according
to Cropper. 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. 76 Slavery depended on discriminatory duties on imports and bounties on exports.
74 Davis, “James Cropper and the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1823-1833,” 173. See also
David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 179-191.
75 Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 180. According to Davis, The Wealth of Nations became
for Cropper “a second bible, whose laws were to be no more questioned than the Ten Commandments.
Though still acutely aware of the corrupting power of wealth, Cropper now saw the hand of God in the
flow of goods toward their natural markets, in the unfettered interplay of capital, labor, and resources, and
in the contribution of individual self-interest to the irresistible march of human progress.” See also, David
Brion Davis, “James Cropper and the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1821-1823,” The Journal of Negro
History 45 (1960), 244.
76 James Cropper, Letters Addressed to William Wilberforce, M.P.: Recommending the
Encouragement of the Cultivation of Sugar in Our Dominions in the East Indies as the Natural and Certain
Measures of Effecting the Total and General Abolition of the Slave-Trade (London: Longman, Hurst, and
Co., 1822).
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