ABSTRACT
Edward Rushton's poem presents him outside, free, addressing his 'sable warriors' as ships carrying the 'vaunted legions' sent by Bonaparte appear in the distance. Rushton's colorblind radicalism makes him stand out among the poets of his day, but also among the abolitionists, and not merely because it was informed by his personal experience of the slave system. Rushton presents slave revolution as both rational and divine, a law of nature and enlightened spirituality. For Rushton, the practice of slavery insured the oppression of sailors. Rushton the blind poet posited that the forms of exploitation fostered by rising global financial systems condemned ocean's sons, slaves and jack tars, to a darkness produced by economic domination and reinforced by complacent literary representation. Rushton speaks a language of enlightenment radicalism but his way of accentuating class and race shows that he learned it on the trade routes of the Atlantic rather than in the coffee shops of the metropole.
