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

contribution to British economic well-being, he would base his rebuttal on similar
grounds. 80 Other leading male abolitionists were not so circumspect, linking financial
support of slavery to a moral drain on the empire. 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, they argued. 81
Heyrick called for abstention from West Indian slave-grown sugar and suggested
that East Indian sugar might be substituted, where available. In a response to Heyrick’s
tract, an anonymous author noted that Heyrick’s plan while not meant to deprive
consumers of a necessary comfort such as sugar was nonetheless thwarted because of the
artificially high cost of East India sugar. The author described the discriminatory
bounties charged to East Indian sugar as “another rivet [that] has been added to the chain
of the slave.” The duties imposed on East Indian sugar were charged to save West Indian
planters from financial ruin. Implicitly linking the fate of the poor to emancipation, the
author suggested that the poor were more impoverished because they paid a premium to
maintain slavery by paying higher prices for sugar. 82
Heyrick rejected plans to revise duties on East Indian sugar. Heyrick linked
political measures such as the revision of duties to the gradualist status quo. These forms
of “commercial speculation,” as Heyrick described them, reduced the question of
emancipation to matters of political compromise and financial profitability.
80 Macaulay, East and West Indian Sugar, 63.
81 Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, October 1826, 248.
82
Anthropos, The Rights of Man, (Not Paines,) but the Rights of Man, in the West Indies (London:
Knight and Lacey, 1824), 35, 36.
80