The largest takeaway from our last class that I had was the use of the pro-abolitionists own feelings. A lot of their arguments were not discursive but emotional. Yes, the discursive was there, however; it was not always the crux of the argument. In particular, the argument that slavery was detrimental to the whole of society was very interesting to me. They were not saying that slavery’s effects would harm only the Africans but that the British would also be hurt morally and emotionally. I found that their pulling at the heart strings of their readership to be a powerful message. It pulls the reader into the story beyond simple human compassion to the horrors that other humans are being forced in to.
Hannah More’s poem Slavery was powerful in her use of capitalization and italics to draw attention. More demands that her work be noticed and uses styles of text to enforce this. I found her use of religion impactful in this piece.
“For he has learned to dread the Christian’s trust:
To him what mercy can that God display,
Whose servants murder, and whose sons betray?” (More).
In this section, More is blatantly asking for the “Christian” slave owners and proponents to look into their own doings before trying to push “morality” onto others. She is powerfully arguing that it makes sense why the African slaves would be hesitant to Christianity. The only sense of white religion that they may have encountered is one that believes that it is alright to enslave and torture another group of people. Why would they ever want to be apart of that?
Romanticism Blog 