ABSTRACT
In 1808 when the British activist Thomas Clarkson celebrated the recent abolition of the slave trade, he introduced his history with graphic descriptions of slaveholders’ cruelties and slaves’ sufferings. Such accounts were needed “to affect the heart-to arouse our indignation and our pity,” so that readers would properly “value the blessing of abolition.”1 Today, scholars similarly tend to view emotional or graphic invocations of slaves’ suffering as obvious, even natural, rhetorical strategies for fighting slavery.2 As historians have recently rediscovered, Anglo-American ideas about pain shifted dramatically during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pain had once been seen as a necessary (if unpleasant) part of life, something to be grudgingly accepted. Now, its deliberate infliction inspired
1 Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (London: E. Taylor and Co., 1808), 10.
