SOURCE: “The Intellectual Milieu: Contexts for Black Writing,” in Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing, Associated University Presses, 1988, pp. 43-72.

[In the following excerpt, Sandiford provides an overview of white authors' writings on slavery and the slave trade in Britain from the 1680s to the end of the eighteenth century, and argues that the convergence of ideological currents during this time created a more favorable climate in which blacks could live and write.]

The antislavery movement did not win the concerted advocacy of belletristic writers until the last three decades of the eighteenth century. The slow response was due to the following three factors. The first was the die-hard persistence of legalistic doctrines about slavery that helped to shield the institution from criticism for a long time. The second was that before the formation of the Abolition Society accelerated the course of antislavery, literary figures were likely to be as uninformed about the true nature of the slave trade as ordinary citizens. The third reason was the relation of such figures to the temper of their times. Like the parliamentarians, the philosophers, and the churchmen, they found it hard to escape the prejudices of their age: some could accept the idea of Black people's humanity only with reservation; others might concede kindred humanity but found the thought of the Black's social equality unpalatable.¹ It is not surprising, therefore, that the earliest appearance of the African in English literature was as an abstract literary idealization rather than as a figure of unquestionable human identity.

The idealized figure of the “Noble Negro,” which begins to appear in late seventeenth-century literature, bears little resemblance to the common plantation slave who became the consuming preoccupation of abolitionist writers. The “Noble Negro” is princely, heroic. He is endowed with all the natural virtues of courage and moral incorruptibility that European primitivists liked to imagine were the distinctive marks of primitive humanity. This literary ideal clearly informs the vision of Mrs. Aphra Behn's celebrated work, Oroonoko (1688).

The hero of that work, Oroonoko, is high-born and high-minded; his physical features are more Roman-patrician than negroid. Oroonoko is fearless in the face of his masters' torture and treachery, and faithful in love to the beautiful Imoinda. Altogether, the lineaments of his origin and character serve to set him apart from the much maligned, downtrodden slave. Mrs. Behn's fictional portrait conformed more nearly to the artificial models of conventional heroic tragedy, as exemplified by Dryden, than to the actual particulars of slavery that a Ramsay or Raynal described for definite humanitarian purposes. Wylie Sypher strongly denies any genuine antislavery design in Oroonoko: “Mrs. Behn is not repelled by slavery,” he perceives, “but by the enslaving of a prince.”²

Mrs. Behn's Oroonoko went through many editions, translations, and adaptations. In 1696 Thomas Southerne dramatized Oroonoko, and the subsequent stage history of that production was nothing short of phenomenal; the play was performed at least once every season until 1801. The relation of the Oroonoko legend to antislavery, however, rests more in the metamorphosis wrought through changing audience interpretation over the years than in what its original authors proposed. It established the tradition of the “Noble Negro,” an image that, although highly sentimentalized and unrealistic, stirred most English citizens' consciousnesses to consider more seriously the plight of the African and the ineluctable proofs of Britain's complicity in crimes against humanity.

That Mrs. Behn and Southerne lacked genuine humanitarian commitment in their work must be attributed to the pervasive ambivalences of their age. The Augustans could shed the tear of social sympathy with one eye while winking at injustice with the other. In general, they were too sensible of the inequities on which their Golden Age of progress and stability was built to make any unequivocal stand for enlightened egalitarianism. That had to wait until the next century.

Daniel Defoe was a case in point. In Reformation of Manners (1702), a satirical work ranging widely over a multitude of evils, he denounced the slave trade. But fourteen years earlier he had supported the same trade in his Essay on Projects (1688). Forty years after Reformation we find him urging the continued growth of the slave trade in his Plan of the English Commerce. This inconsistency is a consistent reflection of Defoe's tradesman's mentality. His was an unremitting voice for the vigorous promotion of free trade all over the world; his glowing paeans to the virtues of an enlightened commerce are identical with the spirit of proslavery panegyrics appearing later in the century.

Richard Savage, on the other hand, conceived of a colonial enterprise that would yield the best of both worlds—prosperity for the Englishman and liberty for the African. He recognized the value of the plantations to the British economy and supported their development, but he discountenanced the subjugation and enslavement of the Africans:

Why must I Afric sable children see
Vender for slaves though formed by nature free,
The nameless tortures cruel minds invent,
Those to subject whom nature equal meant.

(“Of Public Spirit” [1737], 141)

Savage was probably the first English poet of mark to devote more than passing attention to the moral implications of colonialism and to plead for compassion for the Black slave. Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the English Poets, particularly praised the tenderness and sympathy Savage displayed in this poem and commended his courage in asserting “the natural equality of mankind” at a time when such ideas were still subject to suspicion.³

By midcentury Johnson was stating his own opposition to slavery on the basis of natural rights. He was particularly critical of the Europeans' motives for undertaking voyages of exploration: “The Europeans have scarcely visited any coast, but to gratify avarice, and extend corruption; to arrogate dominion without right, and practice cruelty without incentive.”⁴ In the same place, he decried the wanton brutality of the Portuguese in firing on the bewildered Africans during their first contacts on the African coast: “We are openly told that they had less scruple concerning their treatment of the savage people, because they scracely considered them as distinct from beasts.”⁵

Johnson's biographer, James Boswell, relates that Johnson always hated slavery with a passion, and that on one occasion at Oxford, he made a toast “to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.”⁶ Johnson recognized the flagrant irony in the Anerican colonists' revolt against British rule: “How is it,” he asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Johnson's championship of the Black cause is remarkable, for he was a Tory in politics and fundamentally conservative in most things. It was undoubtedly his deeply humane spirit that set his face so firmly against the unjust institution of slavery.

But Boswell was not convinced. He thought Johnson's opinions were the result of “prejudice and imperfect or false imformation.” True Whig that he was, Boswell fully appreciated the extensive profits that accrued to the nation from the slave trade and the slave colonies, and so he could muster nothing better than this specious attempt to justify slavery, a claim that it benefited both Englishmen and Africans: “To abolish a status which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life.”⁷

And that idyll of slavery would gain credibility as long as the public remained ignorant of the harsh truth. James Thomson, although more enraptured with the pride and beauty of the African wilderness than with the human value of the Africans themselves, pitied the hapless slaves who were unceremoniously uprooted and loaded on to ships bound for strange lands. He provided for the English readers one of the first pictures of the horrors that attended the Middle Passage. Lured by the scent of rotting flesh and jettisoned corpses, a shark stalks the slave ship:

Behold he rushing cuts the briny flood,
Swift as the gale can bear the ship along;
And from the partners of that cruel trade
Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons
Demands his share of prey—demands themselves.

(“Summer,” from The Seasons, 1016-21)

That was in 1727. As yet, writers still contrived to subsume their antipathy to the slave system beneath the formal literary ornaments of euphemism and periphrasis. Even James Grainger, who became known as the bard of the sugar cane, was apt to romanticize the West Indian neighorhood and sentimentalize the lot of the slave in his georgic to plantation society, The Sugar Cane (1764). His effusions were of this order:

Nor Negro, at thy destiny repine
Though doom'd to toil from dawn to setting sun
How far more pleasant is thy rural task,
Than theirs who sweat, sequester'd from the day
In dark tartarean caves, sunk far beneath
The Earth's surface.

(4, 165-70)

Grainger typified many other Englishmen of his day who, as men of sense, regretted the slaves' suffering, but as men of property could not bring themselves to dismantle the system that inflicted that suffering.⁸ Grainger owned slaves on his Saint Kitts estates. His familiarity with African character and manners lends veracity to his delineations of the different tribal types that were to be found in the West Indies. The slave for him always remains a feeling human, albeit an unfortunate one:

Howe'er insensate some may deem their slaves,
Nor 'bove the bestial rank; far other thoughts
The Muse, soft daughter of Humanity!
Will ever entertain.—The Ethiop knows,
The Ethiop feels, when treated like a man.

(4, 421-25)

The poetry is not fashioned to serve the ends of truth, nor can it accommodate itself to the urgency of a political moment; but it has benevolism and, as we have seen, this was a necessary antecedent to the more practical humanitarianism of the last years of the century.

Nearly one hundred years after Oroonoko was first published, the literary successors of Aphra Behn and Thomas Southerne began transforming the original idealized hero of European myth making into a distinctly political symbol. The “Noble Negro” was not only an enslaved prince, exhibiting the classical qualities of terror and fear and defying his enemies with an indomitable spirit, but he was now being presented as a man of feeling, a benevolist whom slavery scarred and demoralized. In this figure, he was supposed to represent the human virtues of all African slaves, not the overdrawn excellences of a primitivistic ideal. The capacity for feeling, for compassion, and for generosity established the Black's claim to equality with the white. It was the abundance and legitimacy of these virtues that commended the African as a literary figure and Sancho as a literary artist to the reading public. “Beyond any doubt,” Philip Curtin observes, “the use of the savage hero as a literary device helped to create a much more favorable emotional climate for Africans than they would otherwise have enjoyed.”⁹

Nowhere is the literary myth of the “Noble Negro” more strikingly transfigured than in that minor poetic genre commonly known as the “Dying Negro Poems.” Thomas Day was its most worshipful exponent; his poem, “The Dying Negro,” its immortal prototype. Although Day has traditionally been given credit for its authorship, the poem was actually a collaborative effort between him and his friend, John Bicknell. The poem is a tragic tale of heroism and natural passion. It seems to have been occasioned by the report of a slave who had escaped his master's custody and planned to receive baptism as a preliminary to marrying a white woman. His master got wind of his plan, recaptured him, and placed him on a ship bound for America. The slave killed himself rather than accept renewed bondage. The sentiments of the poem are noble and the tone high-serious. Day emphasizes the native worth of the African by pointing to his devaluation by European slavery:

Fallen are my trophies, blasted my fame,
Myself become a thing without a name
The sport of haughty lords, and even of slaves the
          shame.

He makes the Black slave's love for his white bride-to-be as strong as any classical or romantic hero's and certainly superior to any passion of the oppressing antagonists.

And I have loved thee with as pure a fire
As man e'er felt, or woman could inspire
No pangs like these my pallid tyrants know,
Not such their transports, and not such their woe.
Their softer frames a feeble soul conceal,
a Soul unus'd to pity or to feel;
Damped by base lucre and repelled by fear,
Each noble passion faintly blazes there.

The hero dies in the hope that Africa will one day triumph over her enemies. He thunders an apocalyptic vision of conquest and revenge. His final utterance is a gesture of triumph and defiance:

Receive me falling, and your suppliant hear
To you this unpolluted blood I pour,
To you that spirit which ye gave restore.

The final two lines were to become the epitome of the Black's unquenchable spirit in “Noble Negro” mythology. They were some of the most frequently quoted lines in abolitionist writing.

Day's poem had its objective equivalent not only in an actual suicide but also in the famous case of James Somerset, the determination of which was to be a milestone in the abolitionists' struggle. Somerset's victory was to furnish the legal precedent on which Blacks in England could thereafter stake their claim to self-possession and resist forcible constraint by slave agents.

Somerset had accompanied his master James Stewart from Virginia to England in 1769 and deserted him there in 1771. Stewart had him recaptured and placed on a ship, intending to sell him into slavery in Jamaica. Granville Sharp and other African sympathizers procured a writ of habeas corpus and had Somerset released. They sought to have this case resolved on the principle of the individual's right to personal liberty and to declare that no man could be a slave in England. Much tactical stalling and many procedural complications delayed the course of justice, some of them expressly in the interests of the slave lobby. Finally in June 1772, Chief Justice Mansfield gave his judgment that a slave owner could not forcibly remove a slave from England. Although Mansfield adeptly circumvented the pivotal issue of slavery's legality, his decision was widely interpreted as conferring absolute freedom on slaves in England, and that assumption further intensified literary protest in the decade following the publication of Day's poem.

The Abolition Committee gave active support to writers of antislavery verse, and it devised a thoroughly effective machinery for the dissemination thereof. One of the first productions that was given to the public under the committee's aegis was William Roscoe's poem, “The Wrongs of Africa” (1787-88). Roscoe's poem paints Africans sympathetically and upbraids Britain, the champion of liberty, for its rapacious greed and cruelty in the slavery business. Roscoe's hero, Cymbello, is, like Day's, a fierce, spirited, apocalyptic figure; his deeds presage the imminent collapse of the West Indian system.

The committee was also instrumental in influencing England's most popular poet of the last two decades of the century to wield his pen in the service of the slaves' cause. William Cowper, that poet, was neither by temperament nor by inclination fitted for political movements, but he was a truehearted humanitarian and an intense Evangelical. He found slavery indefensible and censured the ruthlessness of Britain's commercial and imperialistic designs upon African and other primitive peoples.¹⁰ Cowper believed in the equal brotherhood of all men under the fatherhood of God. He also believed that Africans, like all primitive peoples, possessed souls that made them just as worthy of freedom as “civilized” Europeans.

Cowper's earliest attacks on slavery came in “Charity” (1782). There he characterized the slave trade as loathsome and deplored its destruction of the social bonds that knit humankind together as a single race. In The Task (1785) he expressed an equally vehement distaste for the idea of slaves as personal property:

I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and gold have earned.

(29-32)

Cowper became an unwitting propagandist for the abolitionist campaign when the committee distributed thousands of copies of his poem “The Negro's Complaint” (1788) all over England. The verses of this poem, along with those of two other Cowper pieces, “The Morning Dream” (1788) and “Sweet Meat Has Sour Sauce” (1788), were set to music and sung as popular ballads in the streets. “The Morning Dream” proclaimed a vision of Liberty, a female figure, sailing to the West Indies to free the slaves. Oppression is vanquished at her sight and thousands of Black voices raise shouts of joy at their release from enslavement.

Among the eminent literary figures of the eighteenth century, Cowper undoubtedly holds first place for the volume of his work specifically addressed to slavery and the impact that it had on the popularization of antislavery. As the wave of abolitionist writing crested in the 1790s, other major poets raised their voices too. The Romantics paid tribute to the humanitarian revolution in modest but memorable tokens.

Coleridge won the Browne Gold Medal at Cambridge University for his “Ode on the Slave Trade” (1792), and he lectured at Bristol on the slave trade in 1795. Southey wrote a series of “Slave Trade Sonnets” (1794) condemning the slave traders and invoking the injured Africans to drive the European intruders out of their country with all their native strength. Wordsworth's enthusiasm was hesitant and belated. He had been disillusioned by the sorry turn in the tide of French revolutionary affairs, after he had thrown his full moral support behind its high ideals at the outset in 1789. In 1792 he confessed a deepening disenchantment with political movements, as the reign of terror and orgiastic bloodshed gripped France. But with the abolition bill bidding fair for passage in Parliament, he wrote a sonnet to Thomas Clarkson (1807) and another to Toussaint L'Ouverture, the black Haitian revolutionary (1807).

As might be expected, the saturation of the mass media with antislavery propaganda satiated the public mind. As enthusiasm for the original ideals of the French Revolution began to flag with the coming into leadership of extremists, so too in the 1790s abolition showed a decline, as slave uprisings in the West Indies, some of them bloody and terrifying to white supremacists, occurred with increasing frequency. Anna Letitia Barbauld, an uncommonly gifted woman and an earnest campaigner for antislavery, complained in her “Epistle to Wilberforce” (1791) that the country had grown impervious and deceitful through its love of ease and pleasure:

Each flimsy sophistry by turns they try;
The plausive argument, the daring lie,
The artful gloss, the moral sense confounds,
The acknowledged thirst of gain that honour wounds.

(25-30)

Thomas Campbell's “Pleasures of Hope” (1799) reflects the waning of the “Noble Negro” sentimental fashion. No longer is the sad plight of the enslaved African the burden of poetic song; that theme has diminished to mere allusions. Campbell strains more toward a vision of universal improvement as the source of healing for a troubled and imperfect world:

Where barbarous hordes on Scythian mountains roam,
Truth, Mercy, Freedom, yet shall find a home;
Where'er degraded Nature bleeds and pines
From Guinea's coasts to Sibir's dreary mines
Truth shall pervade the unfathom'd darkness there,
And light the dreadful features of despair.

(1, 350-55)

Only James Montgomery seemed not to have lost the old fervor, the revolutionary optimism that characterized abolitionists of the two preceding decades. Montgomery had long been an uncompromising foe of slavery and a friend of the Africans. His poem, “The West Indies” (1807), depicts Africans in their familiar surroundings as industrious, peaceful, and hospitable. Montgomery never doubted the human identity of his subjects:

Is he not man by sin and suffering tried?
Is he not man, for whom the Saviour died?
Believe the Negro's powers:—in headlong will,
Christian! thy brother thou shalt prove him still;
Belie his virtues; since his wrongs began,
His follies and his crimes have stampt him Man.

(2, 107-12)

But even Montgomery, for all his ardor, was forced to acknowledge the declining enthusiasm for antislavery at this time. He observed that “Public feeling had been wearied into insensibility by the agony of interest which the question of the African slave trade excited during three and twenty years of intense and almost incessant discussion.”¹¹ Now in the first decade of the new century, other causes and other issues were claiming priority in politics and literature. The antislavery movement had not died, but it was obviously cooling. The forces of reaction had started to brand abolitionists as anarchists, levellers, whose principles, they feared, would bring on Britain the same political instability and social unrest that were currently rife in France.

It only remains now to consider the role played by periodical literature specifically, in spreading abolitionist ideas, and also generally, in stimulating public awareness about the condition of the African. The eighteenth century saw the rise and flourishing of periodicals and literary magazines. And just as the older literary genres turned increasingly to the defence of common humanity and human integrity, the periodicals likewise reflected the widespread discussion of the problem of slavery. In general, the last three decades of the century saw the same intense agitation and debate in the periodicals as in verse, drama, and fiction.

In no journal were the twin issues of slavery and the slave trade debated with greater animation than in the Gentleman's Magazine. Undoubtedly one of the most widely circulated magazines of the day, this journal began noticing the Black presence in 1764. Between 1770 and 1780, as antislavery protest mounted, the magazine's pages resonated with the claims and counterclaims of spokesmen on either side of the debate. When later on, the African became a figure of sentimentality and heroic romance, the Gentleman's Magazine also reflected the fashion by printing dozens of the “Noble Negro” poems. The delineations of this idealized African were not significantly different from those described above, but the Gentleman's verses seemed to emphasize the idyll of an illustrious past. Snatched from the clinging arms of wife and children, the noble African, who had spent his early years in feats of bravery and adventure, is now dragged away to sea, to a life of fear and coercion:

Everything I see affright me
Nothing I can understand,
With the scourges white man fight me,
None of this is Negro land.

(“The African's Complaint on-Board a Slave Ship,”The Gentleman's Magazine 63 [1793]: 749)

The periodicals popularized the image of the African as a child of Nature who felt deeply the pangs of separation from his pastoral haunts, who pined for the felicities of hearth and home, who practiced hospitality to strangers, and whose generosity and innocence were nearly always betrayed by the white man's guile. Thomas Adney's “The Slave,” which appeared in the European Magazine (July-December 1792), vilifies the European by its ironic compliments and humanizes the African slave by underscoring his moral virtues:

What tho' no flush adorn my face,
Nor silken tresses deck my hair,
Altho' debarr'd of polish'd grace
And scorn'd by those more haply fair;
Yet in my veins does honour roll,
Tho' subject to a tyrant's call;
Heav'n gave to man a noble soul,
And not to seek a Brother's fall.

(160-68)

Natural goodness was but one of the Black person's virtues celebrated in the pathetic verses of the popular journals. Mungo, a stock symbol of the suffering, abused African, was also capable of feeling:

I am a slave when all things else are free.
Yet I was born, as you are, no man's slave
An heir to all that lib'ral nature gave:
My thoughts can reason, and my limbs can move
The same as yours; like yours my heart can love.(12)

(“Mungo's Address,” 10-14)

By taking the rhetoric of their cause to the pages of the periodical press, the abolitionist agents ensured that their ideas received optimal exposure through the frequent publication and mass circulation of the popular journals. In this way, favorable notions about African character were disseminated and became fixed in the public mind, eventually transforming themselves into myths useful to abolitionist propaganda. The soul of the dead slave, for instance, always returned to its native Africa where it was welcomed in ceremonies befitting a hero. The daring hope of a revitalized Africa, rising up to visit revenge on her foes and to restore the arts of liberty and peace to the land, remained a cherished vision in these poems until as late as 1809:

Now Christian, now, in wild dismay,
Of Afric's proud revenge the prey,
Go roam the affrighted wood;
Transformed to tigers fierce and fell
Thy race shall prowl with savage yell;
And glut their rage for blood.

(“Ode on Seeing a Negro Funeral,” 31-36)

The Edinburgh Review, in the liberal tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, lost no opportunity to come to the defense of Blacks, traduced as they often were by proslavery polemicists. One contributor to the Review stoutly controverted the claims of a detracting work, in which Africans were stigmatized as foul-smelling, ill-favored and “only one step removed from the state of beasts.” The reviewer maintained that Africans, as part of mankind, were capable of improvement like all other members of the human family. He pointed to the Blacks' successful strategy and execution of the Saint Domingue revolt (1791) as compelling evidence of their superior capabilities.¹³

The foregoing survey of the broad intellectual background to abolition illustrates a timely convergence of powerful ideological currents that created a more favorable climate for Blacks to live in and a more receptive audience for Black literary expression than would otherwise have prevailed in eighteenth-century Britain. The cult of benevolism established the principle that all human beings were capable of sensations of pleasure and pain and urged the desirability of working for the increase of the one and the avoidance of the other, particularly on behalf of one's fellow creatures. It forced people to reexamine the proslavery polemicists' rationalization that Blacks were suited to slavery because they were incapable of feeling its rigors. As the Enlightenment promoted the systematic study of humanity and human socieites, Europeans began to reconcile themselves to the idea that the African was a legitimate member of the human race and that it would be highly beneficial to universal progress to accept Africa into the community of nations.

Gradually, the pronouncements of leading humanitarians rejected the assumption of Black inferiority and asserted the moral and intellectual equality of the Black slave with the white master. The result was bound to undermine the philosophical foundations on which the colonial slave system was established. For some, the African slave became humanized. Once it was acknowledged that Blacks had a moral nature and intellectual capacity, it was reasonable to believe that they could attain the humanistic ideal of perfectibility.

Enthusiastic negrophiles were fascinated by the thought that the pure blood and robust strength of the African could serve as a potent force in the shaping of a new civilization, the image of which was often mirrored in the mythology of “Noble Negro” poems.¹⁴ Some abolitionist visionaries went further and predicted that European civilization would be eclipsed and eventually supplanted by an Africa revivified and restored to become the center of universal culture and progress. But a great number of abolitionists—and progressivists generally—shared the optimistic view of continuing progress for Africa as well as for Europe. They envisioned the replacement of the lopsided, antihumanitarian trade in slaves by a flourishing trade in more conventional material goods, a system of enlightened commercial relationships and cultural exchange that would ideally yield equal benefits for both Africans and Europeans. …

Notes

1. For a discussion of this ignorance and the consequences for literature, see Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings, 29.

2. Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings, 110.

3. The Works of Samuel Johnson (London, 1810), 10:315, 356-59.

4. Johnson, The World Display'd (London, 1759), in Works 2:276.

5. Johnson, The World Display'd, 274.

6. Boswell, Life of Johnson 2:154.

7. Boswell, Life of Johnson 2:156.

8. Sypher recognizes this inconsistency in eighteenth-century publicists: the posture they adopted in their literary opinions was often quite radically different from that of their practical and political life.

9. Curtin, Image of Africa, 49.

10. Perhaps the most balanced appraisal of Cowper's life and work in a humanitarian light is Lodwick Hartley's William Cowper, Humanitarian (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1938).

11. James Montgomery and James Grahame, Poems of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London, 1809), ii.

12. The Bee (Feburary 1793): 215-16.

13. Gentleman's Magazine 79 (1809): 1149.

14. Edinburgh Review 6 (1805): 326-50. The following is a selection of further periodical contributions to antislavery: Robert Burns, “The Slave's Lament” (1792); Samuel Rogers, “The Pleasures of Memory” (1792); Robert Southey, “To the Genius of Africa” (1795), “The Sailor in the Slave Trade” (1798); William Bowles, “The Dying Slave” (1798); Thomas Campbell, “The Pleasures of Hope” (1799); Leigh Hunt, “The Negro Boy” (1802); Amelia Opie, “The Negro Boy's Tale” (1802), “The Lucayan's Song” (1808). After Sypher's book, the single most scholarly attempt to relate abolition literature to the wider history of ideas is undoubtedly Richard Kain's article, “The Problem of Civilization in English Abolition Literature 1772-1808,” Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1936): 103-25. I am in Professor Kain's debt for some of the major insights and bibliographical resources that went into planning this chapter.