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

Thomas Clarkson once again toured Great Britain to generate support for the cause. 11 By
the time the Anti-Slavery Society held its first major meeting in 1824, more than two
hundred auxiliaries had been established throughout the country and nearly eight hundred
petitions sent to Parliament. 12 In May 1823, Thomas Fowell Buxton, who had replaced
William Wilberforce as the anti-slavery leader in Parliament, introduced a resolution
calling for the immediate emancipation of the children of slaves and the implementation
of measures that would prepare adult slaves for emancipation. 13 Despite the conciliatory
nature of Buxton’s resolution, Foreign Secretary George Canning offered an alternative
resolution, which emphasized the need to prepare West Indian slaves for emancipation
and the importance of maintaining property rights and civil order in the colonies.
Canning’s resolutions called for religious instruction for slaves, prohibited work on
Sundays, and abolished the flogging of female slaves. Canning opposed Buxton’s
resolution to free upon birth the children of slaves believing such a proposal was not
feasible. In an attempt to shape parliamentary action, the West Indian interest in
11 Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers, 168-177; Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 322-324; Davis,
Inhuman Bondage, 237. Heyrick’s pamphlet, Fladeland claims, “was hurled like a bomb into the midst of
the battle. Slavery was a moral issue, she contended, and must be emphasized as such. Neither
immediatism nor the sinfulness of slavery was a new idea, of course, but the timing of Mrs. Heyrick’s
appeal was all-important, for it caught at its full the tide of disillusionment with gradualism.” See
Fladeland, Men and Brothers, 181.
12 Ibid. Despite their gender neutral name, auxiliary, or local, anti-slavery societies were in
practice associations run by an all-male committee. Thus, the auxiliaries or societies established in this
period were associations established by men for men. According to Clare Midgley, “. . . women were
excluded but in a way which rendered their exclusion invisible and taken for granted, rather than a matter
for debate.” “In contrast,” Midgley explains, “when the first women’s groups were set up in 1825 their
titles made clear their sex-specific nature, thus indirectly drawing attention to the sexual division of labour
in the anti-slavery movement.” Midgley, Women against Slavery, 45.
13 Buxton’s speech as well as the full debate of May 15, 1823 is recorded in Hansard’s
Parliamentary Debates, new ser., 9 (May 15, 1823), 257-360.
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