William Fox was a radical

abolitionist Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery. In Western Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historic movement that sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and liberate the enslaved people. The British ...

pamphleteer in late 18th-century

Britain Britain most often refers to: * The United Kingdom, a sovereign state in Europe comprising the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands * Great Britain, the largest island in the United King ...

. Between 1773 and 1794 he ran a bookshop at 128 Holborn Hill in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

; from 1782 he was in a business arrangement with the

Particular Baptist Reformed Baptists (sometimes known as Particular Baptists or Calvinistic Baptists) are Baptists that hold to a Calvinist soteriology (salvation). The first Calvinist Baptist church was formed in the 1630s. The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith w ...

Martha Gurney Martha Gurney (1733–1816) was an English printer, bookseller and publisher, known as an abolitionist activist. Life The daughter of Thomas Gurney, she had Joseph Gurney as brother, and it was the memoirs of Joseph's son William Brodie Gurney t ...

, who printed and sold his and others' pamphlets.

Publications

His most famous work, published in 1791, was ''An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum''. In emotive and graphic language, it urged Britons to

boycott A boycott is an act of nonviolent, voluntary abstention from a product, person, organization, or country as an expression of protest. It is usually for moral, social, political, or environmental reasons. The purpose of a boycott is to inflict som ...

the produce of

enslaved Africans The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and i ...

in the

British West Indies The British West Indies (BWI) were colonized British territories in the West Indies: Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grena ...

, claiming: The ''Address'' became the most widely circulated 18th-century pamphlet, going through 26 editions in less than a year, with over 200,000 copies distributed in Great Britain and the United States. In his 1794 ''A Defence of the Decree of the National Convention of France, for Emancipating the Slaves in the West-Indies'', Fox defended the decision of the

National Convention The National Convention (french: link=no, Convention nationale) was the parliament of the Kingdom of France for one day and the French First Republic for the rest of its existence during the French Revolution, following the two-year National ...

of France, in the wake of the

Haitian Revolution The Haitian Revolution (french: révolution haïtienne ; ht, revolisyon ayisyen) was a successful insurrection by slave revolt, self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti. The revolt ...

, to emancipate enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. Fox criticized members of the

British Parliament The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster, London. It alone possesses legislative supremacy ...

for their refusal even to consider the emancipation of enslaved Africans: Fox asserted that enslaved Africans should be emancipated regardless of whatever consequences might ensue:

Legacy

Fox's support for immediate revolutionary emancipation was unusual among 18th-century observers of New World slavery. Leading historian of slavery and abolition

David Brion Davis David Brion Davis (February 16, 1927 – April 14, 2019) was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, a ...

, in his 1962 article "The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought," observes, "if immediatism upport for the immediate abolition of slaverywas at least latent in early antislavery thought, the dominant frame of mind of the eighteenth century was overwhelmingly disposed to gradualism. Gradualism, in the sense of a reliance on indirect and slow-working means to achieve a desired social objective, was the logical consequence of fundamental attitudes toward progress, natural law, property, and individual rights." Historian Christa Dierksheide notes that "opponents and defenders f slaverywere not the binary opposites that historians have so long supposed ... both sides endorsed gradual improvement schemes to mitigate and reform the slave trade and slavery." Historian Padraic X. Scanlan, in his ''Freedom's Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution'', further notes that "by focusing on the slave trade as a target for immediate abolition, abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic could put off the difficult question of what post-emancipation society would be like, preserve plantation economies, and coddle politically powerful planters."

Works cited

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fox, William English abolitionists 18th-century English writers