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

than profit and loss. In 1792, as the violence of the French Revolution escalated,
abstention rhetoric evolved in response to the bloodshed and the British critique of events
in France.
The Spectacle of Death: Gender, Violence, and Abstention
The ultimate failure of female sensibility was perhaps most graphically depicted
in descriptions of blood-sweetened sugar. Historian Ian Haywood argues that eighteenth-
century abolitionists developed a repertoire of “bloody vignettes,” which traced the
slave’s passage from freedom to enslavement, from Africa to the West Indies. 78 “Bloody
vignettes” also described the slave’s transformation from producer of consumer goods to
that which is consumed, thus completing a triangle of trade from the West Indies to
Britain. Richard Hillier described a slave, forced to eat so that he might live to produce:
“The speculum oris is resorted to; a broken tooth gives an opportunity for its
introduction, his mouth is forced open, rice is crammed down his throat and he is forced
to live.” 79 Forced to eat and to live, the slave produced goods for domestic consumption.
78 Ian Haywood, Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation,
1776-1832 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 11.
79 Hillier, A Vindication of an Address to the People of Great Britain, 13. Originally designed to
open the mouth in cases of lock jaw, the speculum oris was adopted by slaveholders to force open the
mouths of slaves who refused to eat. See Clarkson, History, I:375-377. In his history of the abolition
movement, Clarkson included an illustration of this scissor-like device, which he had purchased while in
Liverpool. The speculum oris was one of several tools used in slave restraint and torture included in
Clarkson’s chest. In addition to these horrific artifacts, Clarkson also collected objects that symbolized the
potential for more civilized trade with Africa. For more on Clarkson’s chest, see Marcus Wood,
“Packaging Liberty and Marketing the Gift of Freedom: 1807 and the Legacy of Clarkson’s Chest,” in The
British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament, and People, ed. Stephanie Farrell, Melanie Unwin, and James
Walvin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust, 2007), 203-
223; D.C. Devenish, “The Slave Trade and Thomas Clarkson’s Chest,” Journal of Museum Ethnography 6
(1994), 84-89. Parliament has an online exhibit of Clarkson’s chest. See “Parliament and the British Slave
Trade, 1500-1807,” under “Explore/Objects,”
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