Guest Kickass Women in History: Elizabeth Heyrick

This guest post for Kickass Women in History was written and researched by J.A. Miller:

“I am a retired systems analyst and ex-historian who now writes political fantasy. I became involved with the Quakers here in Lenni Lenape lands thanks to General Smedley “War is a Racket” Butler, aka the Fighting Quaker. Though I have left academic-style history behind I still love to snoop historically and have been delighted to learn about the numerous and eminently admirable English Dissenters and Radicals, among them Quakers Martha Simmonds, James Nayler, Benjamin & Sarah Lay and of course Elizabeth Heyrick.”

Elizabeth Coltman Heyrick, Immediatist Hell-Raiser

It was hurled, one historian wrote, “like a bomb in the midst of battle.” [1] The bomb in question was Elizabeth Coltman Heyrick’s 1824 anti-slavery pamphlet entitled: Immediate, not gradual abolition, or, An inquiry into the shortest, safest, and most effectual means of getting rid of West Indian slavery. The word radical derives from the Latin for root, and Elizabeth Heyrick went after the institution of slavery root, branch and jugular without let or hindrance.

For the British anti-slavery movement, her pamphlet was incendiary. The all-male club of public abolitionists led by William Wilberforce (nicknamed “the Saints’) had been confident that banning the transatlantic slave trade 1807 would cause West Indian slavery to wither away without parliament having to dirty its hands in the matter. Seventeen years later nothing had changed.

Chagrined by their failure, the Saints began to discuss gradual solutions. Two methods considered were raising money to purchase freedom for female slaves only or a slow manumission stretching over thirty years. Anything to avoid outlawing the brutal, lucrative practice outright and enraging the planters who were, after all, members of their own class.

Elizabeth Heyrick was the first Briton to publicly challenge the Gradualists. American abolitionists, among them William Lloyd Garrison, hailed her pamphlet. Lydia Maria Child, also a supporter of Native American rights, wrote in 1838: “Has not the one idea that rose silently in Elizabeth Heyrick’s mind, spread until it has almost become a world’s idea?” [2]

Born in 1769 into a Dissenting manufacturing clan in Leicester, Elizabeth married at nineteen to disoblige her family. The Coltmans opposed the “tempestuous love match…the work of a moment” with erratic lawyer John Heyrick [3] and their fears seemed justified when Heyrick abandoned the law to join the Dragoons and thence descend into drinking and raking. “How they lived together,” a friend wrote, “I know not, it was always either my plague or my darling.” [4]

When Heyrick died unexpectedly in 1796, Elizabeth’s family welcomed her back without question. She apparently grieved the loss of her husband with whom she shared abolitionist and reformist sentiments and solemnly marked the anniversary of his death each year. Turning inward to religion, she eventually joined the Quakers, known for their strong abolitionist sentiment and the prominence of women in their meetings.

Reenergized, Elizabeth began writing pamphlets on social reform issues ranging from vagrancy laws, capital punishment, animal cruelty, bullbaiting, the Poor Laws, prison reforms and labor rights. Her writings display a “fierce moral clarity” [5] and keen grasp of political economy; with a sharp eye for the double standard, she pointed out that though a man could be hanged for petty theft, robberies impoverishing millions went unpunished.

Elizabeth’s public actions display a certain physicality. She visited prisoners and paid poacher’s fines. To understand the plight of migrant workers she lived with an Irish family in their hut and once purchased a bull about to be baited, dramatically leading it to the safety of a nearby cottage until the angry crowd dispersed. And true to the Dissenting tradition of individual judgement, Elizabeth openly supported a Leicester weaver’s strike though her brother owned a factory.

But her prime focus was the immediate cessation of West Indian slavery. And by 1824 it was clear that the institution still flourished. So Elizabeth waded into the fray with her white-hot radical pen and wrote her most famous pamphlet. Mincing no words, she launched a frontal attack on the saintly Gradualists:

“GRADUAL ABOLITION has been the grand marplot of human virtue and happiness; the very master-piece of Satanic policy.”

Comparing Saint Wilberforce with Old Nick was practically heresy.

Nor did she did not stop there:

“The interests…of the West Indian planters, have occupied much too prominent a place in the discussion of this great question. The abolitionists have shown a great deal too much politeness and accommodation towards these gentlemen…Towards [the planters] there has been extended a great deal too much delicacy and tenderness. They are culprits, in the strictest sense of the word…”

Not content to skewer just the Gradualists and planters, Elizabeth then puts in the boot:

“We are all guilty (with shame and compunction let us admit the opprobrious truth) of supporting and perpetuating slavery. The West Indian planter and the people of this country, stand in the same moral relation to each other, as the thief and the receiver of stolen goods.” [emphasis added]

The anonymous, explosive pamphlet displayed such a “boldness of thought and vigour of style” [6] many readers were sure the author was a man. The pamphlet was read out in parliament as “’the work of some gentleman’, thanks to its fiery insistency”. [7]

It seemed as if Elizabeth’s pamphlet had “given women permission to speak.” [8] More than 70 female anti-slavery societies sprang up in the wake of the 50-page bombshell. An alarmed Wilberforce attempted to suppress information about the pamphlet, citing divine authority as he forbade his followers to speak at any of the new female societies: “…for ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions—these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in scripture.” [9]

Not one of these new female societies advocated Gradualism. A Wiltshire member wrote, “Men may propose only gradually to abolish the worst of crimes and only mitigate the most cruel bondage, but why should we countenance such enormities?” [10]

Declaring that women were “especially qualified to plead for the oppressed”, [11] Elizabeth led a group of like-minded Leicester ladies in a campaign to boycott sugar and other slave-produced goods. Petitioning parliament was useless, she said. Women could do the job better themselves.

And so they did, fanning out, pounding the pavement, house to house, merchant to merchant, distributing Elizabeth’s pamphlet, convincing the citizenry by moral and religious argument to support the boycott. She personally visited every grocer in Leicester, urging them to cease stocking all slave-grown goods. Inspired by the Leicester ladies, Birmingham Immediatists visited 80% of residences, rallying support for the boycott.

During the 1826 parliamentary elections Elizabeth was the first to urge voters to only back candidates supporting immediate abolition. Moreover, she made the unprecedented demand that slaves be compensated for their “long years of uncompensated labour, degradation, and suffering.” Two hundred years later, pearls are still anxiously clutched when reparations are mentioned.

Elizabeth stood virtually alone in supporting West Indian slave insurrections. Were these insurrections not, she asked, “in the cause of self-defense from the most degrading, intolerable oppression?” Her hypocrisy radar was acute: “How preposterously partial and inconsistent are we in the extension of our sympathy,” she wrote, pointing out that any list of Englishmen providing financial support to the Greek rebels (among them Lord Byron parading about in his fustanella) included men who also advocated hanging any enslaved person who fought for their freedom.

Additionally, the female Immediatists proved to be crack fundraisers and generously shared their proceeds with Gradualist groups until Elizabeth advised withholding the cash to bring the gentlemen to heel. Eventually the Gradualists capitulated and adopted the banner of Immediatism, acknowledging that without the women’s hard work of fundraising, writing, lectures, petitions and canvassing for boycott “we never should have kept standing.” [12]

But those years of hard work seemed to have taken a toll and Elizbeth sank into depression. [13] “Nothing human can dispel that despairing torpor into which I have been plunging deeper and deeper,” she wrote to her friend Lucy Townsend, as the abolition of slavery seemed to recede ever farther. She died in 1831 at age sixty-one. Three years later West Indian slavery would finally be abolished.

Only Elizabeth’s published pamphlets remain; most of her letters, diaries and personal papers have vanished. No portrait of her exists; the Quaker site posts a generic female silhouette under her entry. The Anti-Slavery Reporter, the main abolitionist journal of the era, did not even note her passing.

Despite her melancholy end and subsequent near erasure from history, it is heartening to know that throughout her career Elizabeth enjoyed the warm friendship, unstinting support, and collaboration of a group of talented and outspoken Leicester women. They met constantly to discuss and plan, worked on the boycott, and collaboratively published a journal, The Hummingbird promoting the ideals of Immediatism.

Today the Leicestershire Record Office preserves a large, worn ledger “bursting with letters, drawings, poems and ephemera” chronicling the era in which Elizabeth and her friends made their indelible but uncelebrated achievements. Assembled by Elizabeth’s best friend Susanna Watts—a poet and artist in her own right—the ledger contains an unpublished poem in which Susanna slyly mocks male scorn for their efforts.

Susanna shall have the last word with her poem, which may or may not contain a double entendre. I like to think that it does.

On a Gentleman saying that,
Some ladies, who were zealous in the
Anti-Slavery Cause, were brazen faced
Thanks for your thought — it seems to say.
When ladies walk in Duty’s way,
They should wear arms of proof;
To blunt the shafts of manly wit —
To ward off censure’s galling
And keep reproach aloof; — [14]

Citations

  1. Ware, p. 71
  2. Jones & Shuttleworth, p. 48
  3. Jones & Shuttleworth, p. 50
  4. Quoted in Hochschild, p. 350, loc. 5052
  5. Hochschild, p. 353, loc. 5091
  6. Dr. Isobel Gandy, https://womenshistorynetwork.org/black-history-month-elizabeth-heyrick-1869-1831/
  7. Jones & Shuttleworth, p. 49
  8. Hochschild, p. 350, loc. 5042
  9. Jones & Shuttleworth, p. 56
  10. Hochschild, p. 351, loc. 5065
  11. Hochschild, p. 350, loc. 5042
  12. Quoted in Hochschild, p. 353, loc. 5088
  13. Hochschild, p. 353, loc. 5090
  14. Jones & Shuttleworth, p. 55

 

Sources and further reading:

Heyrick, Elizabeth, Immediate not Gradual Abolition, London, 1824. Electronic or hard copies of Heyrick’s famous pamphlet may be purchased online or downloaded from several sites, including the Library of Congress and Cornell University.

Hochschild, Adam, Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, NY 2005. Kindle edition, 554 pages.

Jones, Felicity and Rebecca Shuttleworth, “Susanna Watts and Elizabeth Heyrick, Midlands 1820-34” a chapter in Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism, A Tribe of Authoresses, eds. Winckles and Rehbein, Liverpool University Press, 2017.

Midgley, Clare, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780-1870, Routledge, 1992.

Ware, Vron, Beyond the Pale, Verso, 1992, 2015.

https://womenshistorynetwork.org/black-history-month-elizabeth-heyrick-1869-1831/

http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/146

 

Comments are Closed

  1. Venetia says:

    I am really delighted to read this. I just read The Interest: How The British Establishment Resisted The Abolition of Slavery by Michael Taylor, and Elizabeth Heyrick’s efforts were mentioned several times and I was curious to learn more. She sounds like a remarkable woman.

  2. TN says:

    Thank you for bringing this remarkable woman to light. What an overlooked example of woman speaking truth to power. She should have been celebrated.

  3. Tracey Kassman says:

    this is awesome! I just finished a meeting with some of my fellow UU’s planning a summer service on anti-racism stuff. So, a tiny bit of synchronicity to come across this really interesting article. Inspiring!

  4. Karin says:

    Great post, thank you! I am not too familiar with the British abolitionists, so this was a revelation.

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