‘Read This, and Blush’

The Pamphlet War of the 1780s

Bibliographic Data

ID23685982
AuthorsBrycchan Carey (0000-0002-6220-3394, corresponding author)
Year2005
Pages107-143
Publication date2005-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueBritish Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230501621_5
OpenAlexW2506459381
ISBN9780230501621
LanguageEN
References cited10

This chapter argues that the use of sentimental rhetoric was widespread in abolitionist pamphlets and essays of the 1780s, as well as in some pamphlets written by proslavery apologists. Throughout the decade, the number of publications addressing slavery grew annually, from just a handful of titles in the first three years of the decade to a peak of well over 100 titles in 1788. 1 This relatively sudden growth in publications concerning slavery might be taken for the historical moment when ‘antislavery’ originated as an identifiable political position. Nevertheless, as Hugh Thomas has shown, outright opposition to slavery had been articulated almost from the start of the European slave trade, with sixteenth-century Spanish clerics and lawyers leading the way. 2 Many of their arguments were specific to their historical and geographical location but, as David Brion Davis has pointed out, by the early eighteenth century the substance of the Anglophone antislavery debate had largely been worked out, even if few people were aware of it. In his analysis of two pamphlets published by the American Quaker John Hepburn in 1715, he notes that ‘taken together, these remarkable essays answered virtually every pro-slavery argument that would appear during the next century and a half’. 3 They went largely unread, even in the colony in which they were written. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Genealogy · Literature · Opposition (politics) · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy

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