I found The Negro's Complaint to be a fairly bold strategy in confronting issues of the British Slave Trade. I think we can assume that, until this point, giving the Black man an actual, palpable voice (even if it is a manufactured mouthpiece for a white poet) had not been done before. Likewise, Cowper uses a couple of embedded techniques to very convincingly make his argument: a heartfelt appeal to Christian morality, and even acknowledging that, though skin and hair is different (these being two of the accepted anatomical indicators of blacks' inner substandard nature in the period), thoughts, hopes and dreams are still comparable.
That said, I would be interested to see how truly effective it would have been in context. One of the major beliefs regarding blacks in the period was their supposedly reduced mental abilities. This leads one to consider whether or not the largely white audience would have merely written Cowper's work of as a sort of hypothetical.
although I obviously dont know how it was accepted at the time, I believe that Cowper uses some very convincing rhetorical strategies that may have caught the attention and sympathy of the contemporary reader. Through his use of the first person slave (though obviously he was white himself), served to call upon the readers emotions through lines such as "prove that you have human feelings" and "deem our nations brutes no longer." Here he is painting the slave as a hopeless character who must depend on the decisions of others regarding his own fate, calling the reader to action. Additionally, he uses some very strong imagery such as "matches, blood-extorting screws/are the means that duty urges.." which paints a horribly scaring image in the readers mind. For these reasons, I do think this poem would have been convincing to the general public.
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