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

A sweet rich juice, which White men prize;
And that they may this sugar gain,
The Negro toils, and bleeds, and dies. 61
In giving voice to the victimized slave, Opie rejected earlier children’s abolitionist
literature, which suggested slavery was acceptable if enforced by a benevolent master or
mistress. 62 Opie also refuted the arguments of pro-slavery authors such as Bryan
Edwards who argued that West Indian slaves were better situated than English laborers.
In The Black Man’s Lament, Opie privileged the slave’s right to equality and claimed
European anxieties about emancipation were outweighed by the moral wrong of
slavery. 63 In her poem, Opie made clear the link between sugar consumption and slavery;
yet, she did not specifically call on children to abstain from sugar, relying instead on the
moral weight of her tale to convince children to forgo the sweet substance.
Chandler, in contrast, appealed directly to children to reject slavery and the
products of slave labor. Historian Deborah De Rosa argues that Chandler created a new
fictional protagonist, the “abolitionist mother-historian.” Women such as Chandler used
the ambiguity of ideologies of motherhood to create “revisionist histories [that] employ
everything from sentimental rhetoric to an increasingly radical, legalistic, and quasi-
seditious rhetoric.” Rather than the “sentimental, patriotic, or morally correct
information” women traditionally used to educate their children, women may have
61 Amelia Opie, The Warriors Return; The Black Man’s Lament, ed. Donald H. Reiman (New
York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1978), 3-4.
62 See for example, Maria Edgeworth’s “The Grateful Negro.” As Karen Sands-O’Connor argues,
Edgeworth argued only for the humane treatment of slaves rather than treating slaves as humans. Karen
Sands-O’Connor, Soon Come Home to This Island: West Indians in British Children’s Literature (New
York and London: Routledge, 2008), 30-32.
63 Sands-O’Connor, Soon Come Home to This Island, 36.
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