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

“Think of Our Country’s Glory” is Chandler’s searing indictment of American
nationalism based on the blood and tears of African slaves.
Like her British contemporary Elizabeth Heyrick, Chandler urged women to take
an active role in the anti-slavery movement. Such activism, Chandler believed, did not
force women out of their proper sphere but rather was an essential step in women’s moral
development. According to Chandler many women held fast to the idea of woman’s
proper sphere out of indifference and lack of intellectual independence. She consistently
called on her readers “to analyse the strange workings of the human heart, and to instill
into it high principles of virtue.” 6 Like Mary Wollstonecraft, Chandler distinguished
between true and false sensibility. An overwrought sensibility, Chandler wrote, led
women to “weep over a faded flower” yet refuse to aid “the oppressed.” 7 Like Heyrick
she urged women to use their economic and moral influence to support the purchase of
free-labor products and encouraged women to join together in associations to lead the
cause of abolition. Chandler re-imagined sentimentalism and domestic ideology as a
revolutionary force. If each woman developed herself into a model of domestic values,
she imagined, women would then lead the peaceful overthrow of slavery.
The extensive distribution of Chandler’s poems and essays placed her work in the
vanguard of abolitionist and free-produce rhetoric in the United States. As an author,
Chandler wrote more than two hundred poems and prose pieces between 1826 and 1834.
6 Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, “Time,” in Essays Philanthropic and Moral, by Elizabeth
Margaret Chandler: Principally Relating to the Abolition of Slavery in America, ed. Benjamin Lundy
(Philadelphia: Lemuel Howell, 1836), 91.
7 Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, “Woman,” in Essays Philanthropic and Moral, 64.
94