Where Sympathy Falls Short: British Evangelical Abolitionism

Abstract

During the late eighteenth century, British abolitionists often invoked religion in their rhetoric against the slave trade. Evangelical abolitionists warned that God would impose a providential retribution on all of Britain for its complicity in the ungodly abuses of enslaved Africans. Within their providentialist language was the appeal to sympathy, namely images of bodily pain. Among the most vocal evangelical abolitionists were poets, such as William Cowper and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. This paper focuses on Cowper’s “The Negro’s Complaint” (1788) and Barbauld’s “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade” (1791). Cowper’s and Barbauld’s poems embody quintessential features of evangelical abolitionist rhetoric: appeals to Providence and sympathy. In this paper, I will examine how Cowper’s and Barbauld’s use of providential and sympathetic language advanced the abolitionist cause in the eighteenth century and whether their rhetoric holds up today.