ABSTRACT
William Fox was a member of the radical fringe of the abolitionist movement. Fox’s firm belief in the equality of the African slave and the need for immediate emancipation was exceptional in the period immediately following the slave revolts in St Domingue. Estimates vary but 70,000 copies were said to have been printed in only four months, running through some fourteen or fifteen impressions. The Methodist Samuel Bradburn’s Address to the People Called Methodists, concerning the evil of encouraging the slave trade counselled his fellow believers to abstain from West Indian produce and explicitly appealed to the female half of the denomination. The young Unitarian Coleridge made similar arguments to Fox in his ‘Lecture on the Slave Trade’ of 1795.
