American Literature
Slave Trade was established with the express goal of gaining popular acceptance and political legislation for the abolition of the British slave trade,
which by the end of the eighteenth century was responsible for supplying nearly 50,000 slaves annually to British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese
colonies in the New World. Over the next few years, numerous English poets and authors--among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey,
William Blake, Anne Yearsley, Hannah More, and William Cowper--helped further the cause of the Abolition Society by writing poems and essays
meant to prod parliamentary debate and the reform of the slave trade. Although these literary efforts were instrumental in gaining support from the
public and for petitions for legislative reform, the abolition drives of the late 1780s and early 1790s were repeatedly unsuccessful because of the
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