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

The image on the cover of Heyrick’s pamphlet reflects the continuities and
changes within the British abstention movement. Like their eighteenth-century
predecessors, abstainers in the 1820s were linked to a radical critique of slavery. The
character of radicalism changed, however, due in large part to the efforts of Heyrick. She
was not the first to describe slaves as possessors of universal human rights, but she was
the first white Briton to argue that as rights bearers slaves were entitled to immediate
emancipation and a just wage. In a series of pamphlets written in the 1810s and 1820s,
Heyrick linked the fate of free white and enslaved black laborers demanding both be
granted their full universal human rights, which she believed were ultimately based on a
“just recompense” for labor performed. 3 Heyrick’s writing was a radical break from
earlier anti-slavery rhetoric, which called for slaves to be educated into their
responsibilities as rights bearers before emancipation.
Heyrick emphasized women’s role in the abolitionist movement. In the
eighteenth century, abolitionist leaders identified women’s support as essential to the
success of the boycott of slave-grown sugar. But those same abolitionists worried
whether women could overcome their desire for consumer goods and make the moral
choice on behalf of the slave. In the 1820s, women like Heyrick claimed the moral high
ground in the home and the marketplace. Female sympathy was described as rippling
outward from the home until it extended “to the verge of the earth,” as Heyrick wrote in
3 Elizabeth Heyrick, Enquiry into the Consequences of the Present Depreciated Value of Human
Labour, &C., &C. in Letters to Thos. Fowell Buxton, Esq. M.P. (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst,
Rees, Orme and Brown, 1819), p. 26.
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