The Abolitionist Who Rejected Incrementalism
Once people could be persuaded to tolerate slavery for “one year, or for one month,” they could just as easily be conditioned to tolerate it indefinitely.
Incrementalism versus immediate abolition is not a modern debate. The two approaches were fiercely contested among opponents of the slave trade itself. While some slavery opponents argued for gradual reforms and incremental improvements, others insisted that anything short of immediate abolition was itself a moral compromise with evil.
Elizabeth Heyrick (1769—1831) was among the earliest and most influential abolitionists to demand what became known as “immediatism.” Heyrick argued that slaveholders had effectively manipulated abolitionists into accepting the idea that emancipation must come gradually, while, at the same time, discouraging them from demanding anything more.
The strategy, she warned, was intentional. For Heyrick, calls for gradual emancipation would inevitably produce a gradual indifference to emancipation itself. But to compromise with such evil, she said, was “the very masterpiece of satanic policy.”
Heyrick's concern was that once people could be persuaded to tolerate slavery for “one year, or for one month,” they could just as easily be conditioned to tolerate it indefinitely.
If Christians could accept, even temporarily, the stripping away of a man’s humanity, rights, and dignity, then they had already surrendered the moral principle entirely.
In Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, Heyrick writes:
By converting the cry for immediate, into gradual emancipation, the prince of slave holders, ‘transformed himself, with astonishing dexterity, into an angel of light,’ and thereby ‘deceived the very elect.’ He saw very clearly, that if public justice and humanity, especially if Christian justice and humanity could be brought to demand only a gradual extermination of the enormities of the slave system; if they could be brought to acquiesce, but for one year, or for one month, in the slavery of our African brother, — in robbing him of all the rights of humanity, — and degrading him to a level with the brutes; that then, they could imperceptibly be brought to acquiesce in all this for an unlimited duration.
Heyrick went on to argue that Satan understood “the most effectual way” to crush a righteous cause was simply to delay it — to postpone action to “a more convenient season,” until the original conviction of duty had cooled.
Over time, she said, zeal fades, sympathies grow dull, and the difficulties of the task begin to outweigh the sense of urgency. Familiarity with violence, misery, and outrage gradually dulls the conscience, until what once provoked horror eventually produces indifference, she said.
“If the great work… be not now accomplished…it may be despaired of,” she said.
What’s more, Heyrick warned that gradualism assumes a kind of guaranteed continuity of moral resolve across generations, which may not exist. As such, the incremental approach assumes that future generations will continue to advance the ground already gained, rather than gradually surrendering it.
One obvious objection Heyrick faced was the accusation that she was aiming too high. Pursuing “perfection” in an imperfect world is an endless and impossible pursuit, according to critics. The oppressors, they say, will never concede—you are asking too much of them.
Although emancipation in the British Empire would eventually occur through staged legislation and transitional arrangements, Heyrick believed such measures weakened the moral stance of the abolitionist cause by treating justice as something negotiable and indefinitely postponable.
For Heyrick, however, the notion that justice must wait upon the willingness of the oppressors is itself a moral inversion, as though wrongdoing could only be corrected once its perpetrator consents.
In her view, abolitionists had erred in granting too much consideration to the “interests and prejudices” of slave-owners, thereby allowing perpetual compromises and delay to define the entire movement’s strategy.
The abolitionists have shown a great deal too much politeness and accommodation towards these gentlemen... The spirit of accommodation and conciliation has been a spirit of delusion. The abolitionists have lost, rather than gained ground by it; their cause has been weakened, instead of strengthened. The great interests of truth and justice are betrayed, rather than supported, by all softening qualifying concessions.
In contrast, Heyrick argued that a direct appeal to the enslaved person’s right to freedom, grounded in moral and Christian principles, would have been more effective in sustaining public sympathy, demand, effort, and sacrifice than the gradualist measures could ever muster.
Ultimately, Heyrick argues that gradual emancipation is not an effective or realistic compromise, but the principal obstacle to meaningful progress. It is, she said, a “grand marplot”1 that prolongs injustice, dulls the sense of moral urgency, and risks normalising what should be immediately condemned. Immediate emancipation, she argued, is both the only just course and the most effective means of securing genuine change.
And yet for those who may accept the moral principle of her position, yet remain sceptical that it could ever gain sufficient support to achieve its aim, Heyrick offers the following consideration:
Should your example not be followed; should it be utterly unavailing towards the attainment of its object; still, it will have its own abundant reward; it will be attended with the consciousness of sincerity and consistency,—of possessing ‘clean hands,’ of having ‘no fellowship with the workers of iniquity;’ still, it will be attended with the approbation of conscience,—and doubtless, with that of the Great Searcher of hearts, who regarded with favourable eye the mite cast by the poor widow into the treasury, and declared that a cup of cold water only, administered in Christian charity, ‘shall in no wise lose its reward.’
In essence, Heyrick argued that even if individual action failed to bring about the wider social reform she hoped for, it was obedience to Christ, nonetheless. Integrity, she argues, is not measured by outcomes alone but by fidelity to conscience and obedience to God’s word.
You can learn more about Elizabeth Heyrick in this short video from Proud Of Us UK:
“Grand marplot” is an old English expression meaning the chief spoiler or principal person who ruins a plan or scheme.