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

Wrongs and Their Remedy. There is Death in the Pot!, written by Anna around 1850,
suggested that if consumers were aware of the misery required to bring slave-labor goods
to the marketplace and to the table, consumers would reject such goods in horror.
Richardson reiterated traditional free-produce rhetoric: consumers were responsible for
the perpetuation of slavery and Christians had a duty to abstain from slave-labor
products. Richardson concluded her text with a table headlined, “The Free-Man or the
Slave; Which Shall Supply Your Table?” Three columns labeled “Produce of Free
Labour,” “Produce of Slave Labour,” and “Partly Free, Partly Slave, or Uncertain”
mapped for consumers the progress of emancipation in the Atlantic world, emphasizing
the availability of free-labor sugar, coffee, and tobacco from the British West Indies and
the continued oppressive labor conditions in Cuba, Brazil, and the American South. 3
There is Death in the Pot! invoked in its title the specter of James Gillray’s
“Barbarities in the West Indias,” the eighteenth-century political cartoon of a slave boiled
to death in a pot of sugar cane juice; however, the phrase “There is death in the pot”
would have had held other implications for Richardson’s readers. In 2 Kings 4:38-41,
Elisha commands his servant to gather herbs to make a soup for the sons of the prophets.
The servant mistakenly gathers poisonous gourds, prompting one man to cry out, “O,
man of God, there is death in the pot.” In 1820, the phrase was given graphic meaning
when it was used on the cover of Frederick Accum’s A Treatise on the Adulterations of
Food and Culinary Poisons published widely in England, the United States, and
3 [Anna Richardson], “There is Death in the Pot!” (London: C. Gilpin, c. 1850),
http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=mayantislavery;idno=16855204 (accessed March 3,
2009).
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