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

Fox’s fiery pamphlet, Britons abstained from the products of oppression. 14 William
Dickson, who toured Scotland in Clarkson’s stead, noted that the London Committee did
not organize the boycott of sugar or commission the publication of Fox’s pamphlet; yet,
the response to the boycott “had shewn that many people over the Whole kingdom of
Engld. wished well to our cause.” 15 Clarkson and Dickson understood the sugar boycott
as one more step in the progression of anti-slavery sentiment. As Clarkson explained in
1808: “. . . we are taught the consoling lesson, that however small the beginning and slow
the progress may appear in any good work which we may undertake, we need not be
discouraged as to the ultimate result of our labours.” 16 Clarkson contrasted Parliament’s
failure of moral nerve to the virtuous community of consumers rising up in protest.
Abstainers, he noted, believed it “a truth . . . that if each would abstain, the people would
have a complete remedy for this enormous evil in their own power.” 17
Interpreting widespread abstention from sugar as a spontaneous protest against the
slave trade, as Clarkson did, simplifies the influence material goods had on eighteenth-
14 Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the
African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), II: 347,
349-350. See also Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 193. Hochschild, using contemporary estimates of
participation, suggests that “well over half a million Britons joined the boycott.” Moreover, “. . . grocers
reported sugar sales dropping by a third to a half in a few months’ time. Over a two-year period, the sale of
sugar from India increased more than tenfold.” Hochschild notes the habit of one clergyman who carried at
all times a packet of East India sugar in case his parishioners offered him tea.
15 William Dickson, entry for January 16, 1792, “Diary of Journey to Scotland, January-March
1792,” Friends House Library, London, England.
16 Clarkson, History, I:263-264.
17 Ibid., II: 348. See also Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, 10. Carey
notes: “Clarkson held that abolition was a triumph of Christian humanitarian ethos that naturally came to
the fore when the true facts about slavery were revealed to the public by campaigners such as himself. This
self-congratulatory position was orthodox throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries.”
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