Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Edward Rushton: Timeline
- Introduction: Rushton Edward, Bookseller, 56 Paradise Street
- I Local Radicalism
- II Global Radicalism
- 4 Writing Against Empires
- Interlude: Of Commerce, Empire, and the Banality of Evil
- 5 West-Indian Eclogues, or, The Opacity of Form
- 6 Envisioning the Unthinkable History, Agency, and the Haitian Revolution
- 7 Washington, Rushton, Garrison, (and Paine) Following the Transatlantic Currents of History
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Washington, Rushton, Garrison, (and Paine) Following the Transatlantic Currents of History
from II - Global Radicalism
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Edward Rushton: Timeline
- Introduction: Rushton Edward, Bookseller, 56 Paradise Street
- I Local Radicalism
- II Global Radicalism
- 4 Writing Against Empires
- Interlude: Of Commerce, Empire, and the Banality of Evil
- 5 West-Indian Eclogues, or, The Opacity of Form
- 6 Envisioning the Unthinkable History, Agency, and the Haitian Revolution
- 7 Washington, Rushton, Garrison, (and Paine) Following the Transatlantic Currents of History
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[H]e watched with curiosity and interest the operation of a republican form of government on the continent of north America. Here, though he found much to applaud, he could not but deem it a sad instance of inconsistency, that a nation which had struggled so long […] in the assertion of its own freedom, should tolerate the slavery of negroes in its own dominion. But above all, he thought it lamentable that Washington, the great champion of independence, should hold several hundreds of his fellow men in bondage. On this subject, in the year 1797, he addressed to the General a letter of remonstrance. This letter is ably written, and its principles are irrefragable. It is, however, more strong than courteous – more convincing than conciliatory: and the Ex-President of the American republic testified to his displeasure at its contents, by returning it to the writer in a blank cover. (Shepherd 1824, pp. 22–23)
And reflect that your rights are the rights of mankind,
That to all they were bounteously given,
And that he who in chains would his fellow-man binds
Uplifts his proud arm against Heaven.
(‘Stanzas on the Anniversary of the American Revolution’ (1794))The habitual scarcity of factual records testifying to Edward Rushton's intellectual and political action is especially vexing when it comes to the ebullient end of the 1780s and the 1790s. Over that critical decade, in the face of local, national, and global turmoil, Rushton experienced the troubled cessation of his short-lived editorship of the Liverpool Weekly Herald, the establishment of his business in bookselling, and a difficult period of ‘political persecution’ following his explicit support of the French Revolution – which apparently caused a serious drawback in his trading activity, and only relented, according to his biographer, with the increase of public ‘irritation’ against a bloody and long ‘unsuccessful’ war (Shepherd 1824, p. xxi).
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- Talking RevolutionEdward Rushton’s Rebellious Poetics, 1782–1814, pp. 186 - 207Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2014