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). His Two Essays on Government, Lectures on the Elements of Politcal Economy, and his magazine articles, "Colored Marriages " and "Slavery" express this new pro-slavery attitude. The First is a mild arguement based on States' Rights; the second, and economic disccussion of slavery; and the third and fourth are spirited discussions compared in tone to his previous, anti-slavery, articles.

In dealing with anti-slavery agitators, Cooper, who was formerly anti-slavery, is unfair: he denies the honesty of their intentions, and brands abolition as philanthopy at the expense of others. "These arguments illustrates the narrowness of his point of view, and shows him a paradoxical advocate who saught to gain tolerance by arguments as intolerant as those he sought to refute."

Coopers contact with the negro partly accounts for his change of opinion. Nowhere in his late work appears the idealized primitivism of his Manchester days; the negro, whom he had once depicted as the noble child of Nature, is now a shiftless black, ignorant, and incapable of improvement, for, says Cooper, the posterior position of the negro's brain renders him unfit for education and unable to appreciate the finer things of life. Cooper also held that marriage of a black with a white was not merely a breach of public decorum but an indictable offense.

To support his contentions for slavery, Cooper draws arguements from religion, from philosophy, and from economics. Cooper used the Bible as a sanction for slavery and held that since it was nowhere prohibited, and since the Patriarchs, the Jews, and the Christians at the time of Christ were slave-holders, slavery was not contrary to the will of God. Slave owners often commonly resorted to this arguement.