“What do you say, Batavians! is there any play more appropriate for those, who support and defend human rights, and yet participate in the Slave Trade?—Or, are we only humans because we are white, not Black?” Thus wrote Bernardus Bosch in his Patriot-minded weekly Janus Janus-Zoon of March 26, 1801. The play he is referring to is Dirk van Hogendorp’s Kraspoekol, of de slaaverny (Kraspoekol, or Slavery), which would have premiered in the Casuariestraat theater in The Hague one week earlier, had not a number of state officials and members of the Council of the American Colonies and Institutions started blowing cheap whistles as soon as the curtain rose. Kraspoekol, set in what is now Jakarta, encompassed a vigorous attack on the Dutch institution of slavery and, as another witness relates, the protesters clearly hoped “to keep in darkness [what was] never intended for the light.” When the tumult got worse, star actor Ward Bingley, who directed the Kraspoekol production in The Hague, came onstage to ask that the show be allowed to continue in silence. Probing the mixed responses in the auditorium—curious spectators shouting “yes!” and demonstrators yelling “no!”—he decided to call the entire play off. The day after the riot, however, all copies of Kraspoekol were immediately sold out and booksellers claimed that they could have sold ten times more.

Having read the drama text in its entirety, Bosch applauded van Hogendorp for taking such a bold stand against the terror of slavery and Bingley for having Kraspoekol staged. He considered the play particularly appropriate, it seems, because it exposed to his compatriots how the institution of slavery violated their own hard-won fundamental principles. The Dutch, with French military aid, had only recently resisted the near-monarchical yoke of the Stadtholderate and successfully established the democratic Batavian Republic on January 1, 1795. With the Dutch Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen close to hand, the Batavian revolutionaries subsequently discussed the blueprints of the new body politic. However, the vehement debates about notions such as natural rights and humanity did not lead the new Batavian government to cement the prospect of abolition in its eventual constitution.