ABSTRACT
Sparked by a report in The London Courant about a recaptured runaway slave who killed himself rather than face being shipped back to the West Indies, Thomas Day and John Bicknell co-authored their bestselling anti-slavery poem, The Dying Negro (1773, see vol. 4 of this edition). The poem energised the abolitionist cause, just victorious from the Mansfield judgment having rendered slavery moot on English soil. Day’s most explicit abolitionist statement, however, is to be found in his Fragment of an Original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes. Written in 1776, it was unpublished until 1784 because of the American Revolutionary War. Decrying the legal, historical, and humanitarian injustice of slavery with considerable eloquence, Day proposes that ‘slavery is the absolute dependence of one man upon another; and is, therefore, as inconsistent with all ideas of justice as despotism is with the rights of nature’ (Day, Fragment, p. 24). As the quote demonstrates, Day’s humanitarianism derived largely from a Rousseauistic sensibility. He died of a fall from an unruly horse that he was trying to domesticate, at the age of forty-one in 1789.
