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

two pamphlets supporting women’s associational activity, served as a leader of the
Leicester Anti-Slavery Society, and as district treasurer for the Female Society for
Birmingham. 5
Heyrick, like William Fox before her, placed the consumer at the head of a series
of actions that supported slavery. While Britain had by protest and negotiation attempted
to persuade other nations to end the slave trade, such demands were meaningless so long
as slavery continued in the West Indies. “Before we can have any rational hope of
prevailing on our guilty neighbours to abandon this atrocious commerce,” Heyrick
argued, “we must purge ourselves from these pollutions.” To do that, Heyrick urged her
readers to “bring this great question home.” Rather than a private decision in the
marketplace, consumption was, according to Heyrick, a social act with consequences that
resonated throughout the Atlantic world. Individual abstention from the products of slave
labor would influence friends and neighbors; ultimately, “the example,” she wrote, would
“spread from house to house . . . city to city, — till, among those who have any claim to
humanity, there will be but one heart, and one mind, — one resolution, one uniform
practice.” 6 Heyrick claimed, moreover, abstention from slave-labor products would
increase the market for the products of free-labor, ultimately improving the situation for
5 Corfield, “Elizabeth Heyrick,” 43.
6 Heyrick, Immediate Not Gradual Abolition, 3, 4, 7. In other words, marketplace activity
promoted what historian Thomas Haskell calls the “circle of responsibility.” Haskell, “Capitalism and the
Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,” 128. See also Glickman, Buying Power, 3. In his
discussion of Haskell, Glickman notes, “In this way, consumer activists, in spite of their differences, have
been political theorists, offering a context and a narrative to educate consumers about the meaning of the
goods they buy, or choose not to buy, and the social impact of their shopping choices.”
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