An Address to the People of Great Britain (1791)

William Fox’s Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum, appeared anonymously late in the summer of 1791. The first four editions were printed and sold by James Phillips, the Abolition Committee’s printer, and Martha Gurney. Fox pulled no punches in his Address, accusing every user of West Indian sugar of participating in the slave trade.  “The slave-dealer, the slave-holder, and slave-driver,” he wrote, “are virtually the agents of the consumer, and may be considered as employed and hired by him to procure the commodity.” He contended that the cost of consuming one pound of sugar was equal to the annihilation of  “two ounces of human flesh.” Since Parliament was “not only unwilling, but perhaps unable, to grant redress,” he urged the English people “to abstain from the use of sugar and rum, until our West India Planters themselves have prohibited the importation of additional slaves … or till we can obtain the produce of the sugar cane in some other mode, unconnected with slavery, and unpolluted with blood.” In less than a year, Fox’s Address went through twenty-six editions in London and other locations in Great Britain and America. Its publication spawned one of the most strident pamphlet wars of the 1790s. By the summer of 1792, approximately twenty responses to the pamphlet, both pro and con, had appeared in London. Some of these included four works sold by Martha Gurney: An Address to the People called Methodists, Concerning the Criminality of Encouraging Slavery (1792), by the Methodist minister Samuel Bradburn (1751-1816); A Second Address to the People of Great Britain; Containing a New and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar (1792), by Andrew Burn (1742-1814), a Baptist layman; The Duty of Abstaining from the Use of West India Produce, a Speech, Delivered at Coach-Maker’s-Hall, Jan. 12, 1792 (1792), by William Allen (1770-1843), a Quaker; and Cruelty the Natural and Inseparable Consequence of Slavery, and Both Diametrically Opposite to the Doctrine and Spirit of the Christian Religion:  Represented in a Sermon, Preached on Sunday, March 11th, 1792, at Hemel-Hempstead, Herts. (1792), by the Baptist minister John Liddon (1746/47-1825). The success of Fox’s Address and his follow-up pamphlet, A Summary View of the Evidence Delivered before a Committee of the House of Commons, Relating to the Slave Trade (1792), as well as A Defence of the Decree of the National Convention of France, for Emancipating the Slaves in the West Indies (1794). For more on Fox and his pamphlets and his primary printer/bookseller, Martha Gurney, see Timothy Whelan,  “William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Radical Discourse of the 1790s,”  Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2009): 397-411; and Timothy Whelan,  “Martha Gurney and William Fox: Baptist Printer and Radical Reformer, 1791-94,” in Pulpit and People: Studies in 18th Century Baptist Life and Thought, ed. John Briggs (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2009). 165-201.