[ABOLITION]
An Address to Her Royal Highness the Dutchess of York, against the Use of Sugar.
"Let sugar never be brought into your presence! Let it be proscribed in your household, till its connection with fraud, robbery, and murder, be entirely broken!"
A scarce entreaty addressed to the Duchess of York, Princess Frederike Charlotte Ulrike of Prussia. This pamphlet builds on William Fox’s wildly successful An Address to the People of Great Britain on the utility of refraining from the use of West-India Sugar and Rum, published in the previous year, by asking one of the most famous woman in the country to join the movement in boycotting good produced by enslaved labour.
“It is then the buyer and consumer [of sugar] who form the first spring which sets in action the several engines of injustice and oppression, which annually destroy several hundred thousands of our fellow-creatures.[…] In this manner it is, that we, unthinkingly, sacrifice whole crowds of human beings every year to a paltry gratification. When we consider the matter in this light, your Royal Highness will not wonder, that most of us resolve no longer to be partakers of this drug” (p.13).
The mobilisation of domestic activism was a key tactic of the anti-slavery movement. By appealing to the feminine coded attributes of compassion and sympathy, abolitionists were able to engineer widely successful boycotts of West Indian sugar. The acknowledgement of moral influence within the home, as well as understanding that the commodity products of enslaved labour were largely purchased at the discretion of female heads of household, meant that addressing abolitionist rhetoric to female readers had real impact on the ground, alongside the painstakingly slow legislation moving through the Houses of Parliament.
ESTC: T6243; Sussman, C. “Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792.” in Representations, N. 48. University of California Press, Autumn 1994.
