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

ousing readers to feel sympathy but not take action. Crafton, like Clarkson and other
abolitionists, distinguished between the “squeamish ear” and the “disposition of heart.”
Only the latter ultimately led to action. 57
Abolitionists struggled to define the appropriate role for female sensibility in the
slave trade debates. In her poems “Sensibility” and “Slavery,” evangelical Hannah More
distinguished between false and true sensibility. The former, according to More, was
superficial and feigned while the latter was natural and active. More rejected false
sentiment and insisted her readers weep and then act when confronted by suffering. 58 In
his lecture on the slave trade, Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted that “true Benevolence is a
rare Quality among us. Sensibility indeed we have to spare — what novel reading Lady
does not over flow with it to the great annoyance of her Friends and Family.” 59 Like
More, Coleridge attacked false sensibility. More and Coleridge’s critiques of false
sensibility were attempts to use the rhetoric of sentiment to garner support for abolition
while simultaneously countering pro-slavery critics, who argued that anti-slavery writing
was based on emotion rather than reason.
Pro-slavery literature suggested that women’s sensibility had rendered them
susceptible to the arguments of abolitionists and abstainers. “No Planter,” a widely
quoted essay published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1789, satirized abolitionist
57 Ibid. See also Clarkson, History, I: 44-242.
58 Hannah More, Slavery, a Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1788),
http://libproxy.uta.edu:2132/servlet/ECCO (accessed May 30, 2009); Carey, British Abolitionism and the
Rhetoric of Sensibility, 38-39, 84-88.
59 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Lecture on the Slave Trade,” in Lectures 1795: On Politics and
Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London: Princeton University Press, 1971), 249.
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