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

CHAPTER 2
“I AM A MAN YOUR BROTHER”:
ELIZABETH HEYRICK AND THE SECOND BRITISH ABSTENTION CAMPAIGN
British Quaker convert Elizabeth Heyrick’s first anti-slavery pamphlet, Immediate
Not Gradual Abolition, published in 1824, marked the beginning of the second abstention
campaign. Frustrated with the gradualist and conciliatory measures of the British anti-
slavery leadership, Heyrick called on consumers to reject the slave-grown produce of
West India. “The hydra-headed monster of slavery,” Heyrick claimed, “will never be
destroyed by any other means than the united expression of individual opinion, and the
united exertion of individual resolution.” 1 Heyrick’s tract graphically signaled a shift in
the use of abstention as an anti-slavery tactic; the first British edition of Immediate Not
Gradual Abolition featured on the cover an illustration of a muscular African slave, a
broken chain and a discarded whip at his feet. (See Fig. 4) Framed by the words, “I am a
man, your brother,” the man faced forward, looking directly at the viewer. 2 Both the text
and the illustration reminded readers of the eighteenth-century origins of the abstention
1 Heyrick, Immediate Not Gradual Abolition, 23.
2 The “provocative image” featured on the cover of the first British edition was not reprinted on
subsequent American editions. See Faulkner, “The Root of the Evil,” 380-381. Lucy Townsend used the
phrase in a letter to the Christian Observer in 1825 to encourage women’s involvement on behalf of the
slave. Townsend urged women to “apply their whole strength to raise the fallen African, instead of merely
stretching out, as it were a finger, to aid him to rise and say, ‘I am a man and a brother!’” Christian
Observer 12 (1825), 750.
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