Conspicuous consumption: white abolitionism and English women's protest writing in the 1790s.

In this paper I wish to examine two overlapping areas of middle-class polemic from the 1790s: white abolitionism and English women's protest writing. A certain polarization has crept into recent discussions of abolitionism, with

some critics arguing that a relatively benign "cultural racism" in the eighteenth century came to be supplanted by a more aggressive biological racism.(1) Patrick Brantlinger, for instance, characterizes late eighteenth-century abolitionist writing as more "positive" and "open-minded" about Africa and Africans than the racist and evolutionary accounts that were to follow in the wake of Victorian social science; in his view, the Victorians must bear responsibility for inventing the myth of Africa as the Dark Continent.(2) But while abolitionism may have taken its roots in philanthropy and a new-found enthusiasm for the universal rights of man, the many tracts it spawned contradict such a clear-cut distinction between the earlier and later periods. In its luridness and violence, late eighteenth-century anti-slavery rhetoric points directly, for instance, to the systematic colonization of Africa; it is also rich in the sorts of phobias and bogeys more commonly associated with the later nineteenth century, such as miscegenation, cannibalism, and an essentialist stereotyping of sex and race, such as the perception of white woman's sexuality as a form of degenerate black sexuality.

The close association of woman in this earlier period with slavery, luxury, sexual license, and violent cruelty intersects problematically with the second area of oppositional rhetoric I wish to examine: women's protest writing. In seeking to capitalize upon fashionable anti-slavery rhetoric for their own political objectives, women only increased the general murkiness of abolitionist rhetoric, an effect most evident in their employment of the emotive but cliched analogy between their own disenfranchised lot and the plight of enslaved Africans. While these late eighteenth century women both anticipate and confirm Frederick Douglass's claim, in mid nineteenth-century America, that "the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman's cause," their writings also reveal clearly why any political link between white women and black people was doomed to be a bitter misalliance.(3) As bell hooks has argued, in an essay on the history of racism and feminism in America, the analogy between white women and blacks is a deeply conservative one, concerned to uphold and maintain the racial hierarchy that grants white women a higher status than black people.(4)

My first text is a lecture Coleridge delivered in Bristol in 1795, advertised in the Bristol Mercury as "A Lecture on the Slave Trade, and the duties that result from its continuance."(5) Although the fight for abolition of the trade had not yet been decisively lost, the impetus had slowed markedly from the heyday of protest in the period 1789-1792. That heyday is probably best illustrated by the immense popularity and circulation of Wedgwood's design of the manacled and supplicating slave, doubly captured by chains and by discourse, with the ventriloquized Christian motto floating above his head: "Am I not a man and a brother". Janus-faced, the motto stands curiously open to a positive or negative response, a reflection perhaps of the white racist spectre that often underlies sentimental ideals of equality between white and black: the spectre of too close a blood kinship, the term "brother" reading literally rather than figuratively in a nightmare confusion of the races through interracial sexy Nevertheless, thousands of seals and cameos with this design were sold or given away gratis; women wore it as pins in their hair, men sported the design on rings, on shirt-pins, or coat-buttons.

The waning of enthusiasm in the mid 1790s was principally caused by the reactionary climate of suspicion and fear generated by the Pitt government. By the time Coleridge made his somewhat belated contribution, abolitionism had begun to lose its respectability, and in some quarters, was even associated with jacobinism. In a daring jest at the end of his lecture, Coleridge flirts with that association between anti-slavery and revolutionism by enjoying, rhetorically, the dangers of the pro-slavers' too easy identification of England's labouring poor with the West Indian slaves. Although he does not mention the recent and bloody revolts on Santo Domingo and other West Indian islands, they clearly form the back-drop to his joking:

I have heard another argument in favor of the Slave Trade, namely, that the Slaves are as well off as the Peasantry in England! Now this argument I have [seen] in publications on the Subject--and were I the attorney General, I should certainly have prosecuted the author for sedition & treasonable Writings. For I appeal to common sense whether to affirm that the Slaves are as well off as our Peasantry, be not the same as to assert that our Peasantry are as bad off as Negro Slaves--and whether if the Peasantry believed it there is a man amongst them who [would] not rebel? and be justified in Rebellion? (LST, 250-51)

Daring though this was in 1795, if we return to the title of Coleridge's lecture, we note that this is a lecture "on" and not against the trade, a formulation that might reflect some acquiescence in the current status quo--as might his allusion to "the duties" that must follow from the continuance of the planters' rights: namely, the moral duties of boycotting two West Indian commodities, sugar and its by-product rum, the one "useless," the other, "pernicious" (LST, 248). But the duties that result from the continuation of the trade are not just the moral ones of abstinence. Duties are also economic, and it is likely that the pun served to remind his audience that the very high price of sugar reflected the import duties that formed such a large part of the Government's revenue. At the height of the boycotting campaign, Thomas Clarkson boasted that the Government's sugar revenue had fallen by [pounds]200,000 in the last quarter of the year 1791.(7) There were also the unequal sugar duties that, by providing artificial protection to West Indian sugar, prevented free trade and more competitive pricing. Thus the high cost in moral terms was also a high economic cost to the consumer in the form of taxes, and it is perhaps not too far-fetched to see in Coleridge's pun on "duties" the economic challenge to the old protectionist, plantocratic economy that must always be seen to go hand in hand with the moral and humanitarian grounds for abolition.