Covert Challenges: Antislavery before Abolition and Work at Sea

This paper considers the challenges which Northern working-class writers with experience of transatlantic slavery faced in publicising opposition in the years preceding the abolition watershed of 1787/8. Focusing on the early writings of two later avowed abolitionists — Edward Rushton (1756-1814), a blind ex-slave ship sailor born in Liverpool, and the Scottish naval physician Thomas Trotter (1760-1832), who had been demobilised in Liverpool in 1783 before joining a slaving voyage on The Brooks — the paper considers how these experiences led to early forms of opposition which remain overlooked in histories of British slavery and abolition. Reading their works as written against the grain of local and national/naval interests, my paper challenges the conventional notion of a sudden ‘revelation’ about slavery’s evils among the British public in 1787/8, and seeks to draw attention to the social contexts which paradoxically worked to silence those who were in many ways best positioned to oppose the institution.

In this antecedent period, I argue, working-class anti-slavery expression took more covert forms which require a careful recalibration of historical and literary approaches to properly recognise. Reevaluating Rushton and Trotter’s writings with an understanding of the often double-voiced nature of working-class poetry, I offer a new approach that illuminates the literary strategies they adopted to broach troubling questions about Britain’s role in the institution of slavery. Complicating the ‘revelation’ thesis, I show how working-class writers were beginning to grapple with their own and their country’s implication in slavery well before the abolition watershed, and navigating the difficulties of speaking out on such matters from a position of social and economic dependence.