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

interested than she admitted. 76 Whether authored by a man or a woman, the anti-boycott
argument of An Answer suggests growing awareness of the importance of gender and
sentiment as well as commerce in the slave trade debates.
Still, the gender of the female apologist might have escaped the notice of the
careless reader had Hillier not given it such prominence in his tracts. This along with the
apparent relationship between the anonymous author and Hillier raises questions about
this particular debate. An Answer to a Pamphlet — regardless of the author’s gender —
may have been written in conjunction with Hillier’s pamphlet in an attempt to use gender
to bring attention to the abstention campaign. In her study of the slave trade debates,
historian Srvidhya Swaminathan argues pro- and anti-slave trade writers used “complex
ideological shifts to petition their audience in a more persuasive manner.” As writers on
either side of the debate addressed arguments from the opposition, the authorship and
form of these pro- and anti-slavery appeals changed. In the process, ideologies of gender
and sentiment and commerce and trade intertwined within the slave trade debates to
create competing ideas of national identity. 77 Eighteenth-century abstention rhetoric
developed within this abolitionist/anti-abolitionist interchange. Abstainers used the
“commercial jeremiad” to challenge men and women to re-think their relationship to the
world of goods and to envision a national economy based on standards of humanity rather
76 Richard Hillier, A Vindication of the Address to the People of Great-Britain on the Use of West
India Produce with Some Observations and Facts Relative to the Situation of the Slaves. In Answer to a
Female Apologist for Slavery. The Second Edition, with Strictures on Her Reply to a Reply (London: M.
Gurney, 1791), 24.
77 Srividhya Swaminathan, “Transforming Arguments: Rhetoric of National Identity in the British
Slave-Trade Debates, 1767-1808,” Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2002, 33, 104.
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