Vociferous Visuals Condemning the Slave Trade

I find it interesting that the text remarks that "gender played a significant role in the arguments for the abolition of slavery"(54). Indeed, women were active in the social scene, protesting against the slave trade through boycotts, condemning writings, etc. It was not women alone, however, who were building and reinforcing abolitionist sentiment.

A male artist named J.M.W. Turner found his method of sharing abolitionist sentiment in the artistic rendering of the Zong incident with his painting "The Slave Ship."  Turner, to generalize and place him as a symbol for the male gender at large, takes a seemingly more subtle approach--subtle, that is, at first glance. His disdain or, at the very least, disagreement with the way that the slave trade was currently being handled was implied through his brilliant, frenzied depiction of the 1781 incident. The painting's emotive inclusion of a fiery orange-red center and iron shackles and manacles clasping the wrists and ankles of drowning slaves captures the bleak, aggressive event inimitably. The Romantic Period's glorification of nature was dually reinforced in the piece: Turner illustrates the immense power of nature over humanity with his relatively minuscule human forms in comparison to the vast sea and overarching sky. He lends a sort of unearthly element to the painting which reinforces the disconnect between what is acceptable in reality and what is being permitted to transpire: the evils of slavery and the slave trade. Though his perspective is merely implied through a rash representation, his motives and feelings are quite clear. In fact, the power of the piece to elicit and provoke negative responses by audience members is, perhaps, more effective as a device of persuasion than words themselves.

On a similar note, Cowper's two poems against the slave trade were printed in illustrated editions. This further lends support to the supposition that abolitionists and anti-slave-trade thinkers of the time believed that combining the art of written rhetoric with an evocative pictorial rendering would best expose readers and viewers to the harsh reality of the practice of slavery, arousing antipathy toward the institution of slavery itself or the trade process.