William Fox (pamphleteer) facts for kids
William Fox was a radical abolitionist pamphleteer in late 18th-century Britain. Between 1773 and 1794 he ran a bookshop at 128 Holborn Hill in London; from 1782 he was in a business arrangement with the Particular Baptist Martha Gurney, who printed and sold his and others' pamphlets.
Legacy
Fox's support for immediate revolutionary emancipation was unusual among 18th-century observers of New World slavery. Leading historian of slavery and abolition David Brion Davis, in his 1962 article "The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought," observes, "if immediatism [support for the immediate abolition of slavery] was at least latent in early antislavery thought, the dominant frame of mind of the eighteenth century was overwhelmingly disposed to gradualism. Gradualism, in the sense of a reliance on indirect and slow-working means to achieve a desired social objective, was the logical consequence of fundamental attitudes toward progress, natural law, property, and individual rights." Historian Christa Dierksheide notes that "opponents and defenders [of slavery] were not the binary opposites that historians have so long supposed ... both sides endorsed gradual improvement schemes to mitigate and reform the slave trade and slavery." Historian Padraic X. Scanlan, in his Freedom's Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution, further notes that "by focusing on the slave trade as a target for immediate abolition, abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic could put off the difficult question of what post-emancipation society would be like, preserve plantation economies, and coddle politically powerful planters."
