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

Negroes, written by British Quaker Joseph Woods in 1784, linked Protestant ideas about
morality and sinfulness to commercial ideologies. Woods called the slave trade “a
disgraceful commerce” that exceeded humanitarian limits. The evil of the slave trade
called into question all forms of trade and the expansion of the market economy had led
to a decline in civic virtue: “The . . . motives of commercial policy [require] that the
claims of religion and morality ought to be subservient to those of avarice and luxury,
and that it is better a thousand of poor unoffending people should be degraded and
destroyed [than] the inhabitants of Europe should pay a higher price for their rum, rice,
and sugar.” Woods demanded that humanity rather than profit set the standard for
financial exchange. Christian principles, he argued, required consumers choose free-
labor goods regardless of price. 67 Linking anti-slavery, sentiment, commerce, and
gender, eighteenth-century abstainers created a vision of a moral economy that benefitted
all members of society.
Two pamphlets, published in response to Fox’s Address in late 1791, reflect the
intertwining of the language of gender with commerce and slavery. The first pamphlet, a
work titled An Answer to a Pamphlet Intituled [sic] An Address to the People of England
against the Use of West India Produce, was printed by W. Moon of Whitechapel in 1791.
This tract has not been discussed in either the secondary literature or in The African Slave
Trade and Its Suppression, Peter C. Hogg’s substantial bibliography of the slave trade
debate. 68 An Answer to a Pamphlet is perhaps the only pro-slave trade response to Fox’s
67 Joseph Woods, Thoughts on the Slavery of Negroes (London: James Phillips, 1784), 7, 18-19.
68
For a list of abolitionist pamphlets published during this period, see Hogg, The African Slave
Trade, 169-175.
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