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. 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. A third work, Considerations on the Slave Trade and the Consumption of West Indian Produce, was published at London in 1791.