SOURCE: “The Slave Trade and Abolition in Travel Literature,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 34, No. 2, April-June 1973, pp. 185-208.

In the following essay, Heffernan surveys the depiction of the slave trade in travel literature by eighteenth-century white authors, which he argues provides greater insight into public opinion than does imaginative writing of the same period. Travel writing about Africa, he maintains, was a genre that shaped white attitudes toward blacks and provided the substance for pro- and anti-abolitionist arguments.

Much has been written about the relationship between the anti-slavery poems, plays, and novels that appeared with extraordinary profusion in the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the abolition movement. Thomas Clarkson's history of the abolition movement contains a long bibliography of imaginative literature which aided the cause of abolition, and modern studies by Wylie Sypher, Hoxie Neal Fairchild, Eva Beatrice Dykes, N. Verle McCullough...