In Chapter 11 of Adam Hochschild’s book, Bury the Chains, we learn about the Privy Council hearings in 1789. “This was the first time in any country that the slave trade had been subject to an official investigation, and the resulting testimony is a crucial source of information to us still.” Abolitionists feared that if British ships stopped carrying slaves, the French would in turn pick it up. An influential slave diagram helped the case by representing hundreds of miserable, ill, or dead slaves aboard a vessel. This diagram was impossible to argue and remains the most widely reproduced political graphic of all time.
Pages 167 to 174 describe Equiano’s book tour as he traveled all over the world. Wherever he traveled, he found local abolitionists to help him with sales. His journal became a best seller and the timing could not be better because the Privy Council were winding up their hearings. Equiano was ahead of his time with skills of promotion and diplomacy. Pages 192 to 198 account the sugar boycott after the 1791 Parliament abolitionist bill. This boycott was symbolic because sugar was popularly consumed which made slavery advocated horrified. This chapter also introduces The Abstract, a journal filled with graphic descriptions of slave life. To this day, The Abstract is the most widely read piece of nonfiction antislavery literature of all time.
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I definitely thought that the diagram was so very useful. However,nothing is really "real" until you see it firsthand. Although that might've been difficult back then, given the situation, these days you'd have to take some body to the slave ship for them to believe how truly terrible it is. I hate to compare this to global or hurrican katrina but in order for someone to really know how devestating global warming has become, you would have to take them to those parts of greenland that are melting and polar bears are dying. In order for someone to understand the damages of hurrican katrina fully, you would have to take them down to the gulf coast for them to touch and smell the devestation. Pictures can say a thousand words, as in Clarkson's diagrams, but actually being there can say that one word or evoke that one emotion that a picture can't.
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