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

evive the slave trade debate again in 1793, but the House of Commons refused. In June
of that year, the Committee set up a group to draft a letter encouraging supporters to
continue the boycott. In July, the Committee decided against sending the letters and by
August suspended all boycott activities. In 1793, the Committee met thirty-three times.
The following year that number fell to nine and by 1797 the Committee ceased
operations. 90
Historians argue that events in Haiti and France had a stagnating effect on the
transatlantic abolitionist movement. 91 Writing in 1793, the Reverend Samuel Hopkins
worried that nothing more could be said about slavery. The Gentleman’s Magazine made
a similar observation describing the slave trade as “this most exhausted topic.” 92 Rather
than languishing, however, abolitionist and abstention rhetoric appropriated the language
of revolution. Until early 1792, violent imagery was primarily associated with
abolitionism; however, as reports of events in France and Haiti started appearing in
British and American publications, abolitionists lost their monopoly on violence. 93
While the trope of blood-stained sugar had been part of anti-sugar rhetoric from
the beginning, the publication in 1792 of Andrew Burn’s tract, A Second Address to the
90 Coleman, “Conspicuous Consumption,” 342; Oldfield, Popular Politics, 185-187.
91
Coleman, “Conspicuous Consumption,” 342; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of
Revolution, 329.
92 Samuel Hopkins, A Discourse upon the Slave-Trade, and the Slavery of the Africans. Delivered
in the Baptist Meeting-House at Providence, before the Providence Society for Abolishing the Slave-Trade,
&c. At their Annual Meeting, on May 17, 1793 (Providence: J. Carter, 1793), 3; Gentleman’s Magazine, as
quoted in Davies, “A Moral Purchase,” 141-142.
93 Carey, British Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, 89; Rachel Cleves, The Reign of
Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 104-152; Haywood, Bloody Romanticism.
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