Views on Slavery

A slae trade committee was set up in 1787 to discuss the barbarities of the slave trade. The Manchester Group sent Cooper and Thomas Walker to London to communicate with the Committee, to assist in its deliberations, and to attend Parliament while the slave trade was being discussed. Therefore, it is likely that Cooper was present when Pitt made the motion that Parliament consider the petitions that had been presented about the slave trade - the first legislative legislation reflecting the emancipation spirit that had flooded England. This biil, then pending in Parliament, undoubtedly gave rise to Coopers Letters on the Slave Trade.

In October of 1787 Cooper published Letters on the Slave Trade. The book paints in vivid colors the brutality of the slave trade and of slave life in the West Indies and America, computes the enormous losses of lives involved, and appeals to the commerical sense as well as the sympathies of his fellow townsmen to arrest the traffic. Cooper would later republish his work for free distribution in order to attract as much attention as possible. The pamphlet was composed of a brief, although inaccurate, historical sketch of the slave trade from it's beginning to contemporary times. The conclusion, a plea for more more interest in reform and for more money to spread propaganda, is followed by an appendix that denies the moral right of one man to make a slave out of another.

A "Supplement" to the Letters was printed in 1788 which computes at length, with statistics, the number of negroes sacrificed, directly or indirectly, to the slave trade. "Hence, one million eight hundred thousand people are annully murdered...that the gentle folk of Europe may drink sugar in their tea."

According to Maurice Kelley of WVU, "Coopers's prophecies regarding the future development of the trade show a disregard, if not an ignorance, of such American social conditions as made for the limitation of the traffic: the fear of slave insurrection, the efforts of some southern colonies to prohibit further importation, and the growing spirit for emancipation in the North were factors that should have influenced his computations." A third work, Considerations on the Slave Trade and the Consumption of West Indian Produce, was published at London in 1791.

Cooper was not long interested in this reform. The French Revolution, firing his radicalism, turned his humanitarian interests to politics. The movement toward abolition, however, went on without him, and in 1807 culminated in a bill that abolished the slave trade.

Reversal of Opinion

After Cooper moved to South Carolina, his views changed; he became pro slavery. This is suprising because throughout his life Cooper had held strongly to his ideals (for example he was prisoned for libel against the President because he refused to falter on his beliefs)