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

Wollstonecraft implied, feminine virtue based on reason would rid the home of false
femininity and colonial produce. 82 Ultimately, the decision to abstain from slave-grown
sugar would affirm the virtue or barbarity of individual women.
The threat of blood-stained sugar turned British commerce and culture upside
down. In his poem, “The Negro’s Complaint,” William Cowper suggested that the bodily
fluids of African slaves nourished the sugar cane:
Why did all-creating Nature
Make the plant for which we toil?
Sighs must fan it, Tears must water,
Sweat of ours must dress the soil.
The usually nourishing qualities of water are replaced by the tears and sweat of the slave.
Cowper’s poem was reprinted on the cover of many editions of Fox’s Address and was
included in a small privately circulated publication, A Subject for Conversation and
Reflection at the Tea Table. 83 In his “Lecture on the Slave Trade,” Coleridge mocked the
Christian who called for divine blessing of his meal:
Gracious Heaven! . . . A part of that Food among most of you is sweetened
with the Blood of the Murdered . . . O Blasphemy! Did God give Food
mingled with Brothers blood! Will the Father of all men bless the Food of
Cannibals — the food which is polluted with the blood of his own
innocent Children? 84
82 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 282. See also Sussman, Consuming
Anxieties, 125-126. Srividhya Swaminathan argues that Wollstonecraft’s text is evidence of “the link
between the abolitionist boycotts and the proliferation of women’s voices” as well as the incorporation of
“‘femaleness’ . . . in the concept of the Briton.” Swaminathan, “Transforming Arguments,” 246-247. See
also Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 186-189.
83 A Subject for Conversation at the Tea Table (n.p., n.d.), [2]; Clarkson, History, II: 190-191.
84 Coleridge, “Lecture on the Slave Trade,” 248.
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