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

increasingly held an authority that tempted men to appropriate it. 75 If the female
apologist was a man appropriating a female identity, it is significant that the author did
not emphasize gender more. Hillier, in contrast, emphasized the author’s gender in his
title and in his argument. He highlighted her feminine identity and argued that she had
violated appropriate gender ideals in her rejection of the boycott of slave-grown sugar.
Criticizing the female apologist allowed Hillier to implicitly censure other women who
failed to support the boycott.
If An Answer was authored by a man using a female identity, it suggests the
power of sentimental rhetoric in the slave trade debates. For example, when the female
apologist and Hillier debated the relative situation of West Indian slaves and British
miners, the two authors suggested divergent responses to suffering, one focused on
distant pain and the other focused on nearby distress. The anonymous author consciously
created a “hierarchy of suffering” and may well have decided to use a feminine authorial
identity to strengthen the argument privileging white laborers over black slaves. In the
second edition of A Vindication, Hillier revealed his knowledge of the apologist’s identity
and, in refusing to identify the author, suggested again that the author was indeed female.
Hillier also noted that the author “retail[ed] a commodity,” which might well be affected
by the boycott thus implying her arguments against the boycott might be more self-
75 Susan Staves, “‘The Abuse of Title Pages’: Men Writing as Women,” in A Concise Companion
to the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cynthia Wall (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing,
2005), 162-182; John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of the English Language (London: Faber and
Faber, 2007), 128-129.
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