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

abstention rhetoric that suggested metropolitan women might easily engage in such
behavior if they continued to consume the produce of slaves.
In the wake of the Haitian and French Revolutions, abstention writers found the
rhetoric of sensibility ineffective. When confronted with the graphic bloodshed of white
citizens in the Caribbean and France, violence against slaves slid down the “hierarchy of
suffering.” After 1792, abstention rhetoric became more entwined with critiques of
Jacobin violence than female behavior. Yet the line between violence and femininity
remained uncomfortably thin for many eighteenth-century Britons. In a letter to The
Gentleman’s Magazine, “Polinus” ridiculed “Poetesses, who can oppress and abuse one
another when opportunity offers [yet] unite in opposition against oppression,” when
fashion or opportunity dictated. 100 Thus, when William Fox and Richard Hillier
interjected the violence of slavery into women’s tea tables, they reminded readers that the
domestic bliss of the white woman’s tea ritual relied upon the destruction of black slave
bodies. Invoking the terrors of cannibalism and the disgust of contaminated colonial
goods, abstainers such as Andrew Burn attempted to repulse their readers, especially
women, into abstaining from slave-grown sugar. As historian Philip Gould argues,
abolitionists’ language in this period bordered on the “hyperbolic,” often “staking the fate
of ‘civilized’ society on both its commercial relations and habits of consumption.” 101
Eating blood-stained sugar, or worse, after abstainers had made clear the link between
slave production in the colonies and domestic consumption in the metropolis, suggested
100 As quoted in Davies, “A Moral Purchase,” 141.
101 Gould, Barbaric Traffic, 30.
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