In his 1790 book Reflections on the Revolution in France (RRF), Burke was surprisingly quiet on the controversial revolutionary-era political issue of the abolition of the slave trade. Wollstonecraft picked up on this pregnant silence on his part and used it against him on two levels. First, she used it to undermine his 'servile' defense of tradition, 'reverence of antiquity', 'custom', and 'property'. In the passage above from VRM, 1st edn., page 22, Wollstonecraft posed a rhetorical question about Burke's seemingly hypocritical defense of the American Revolution. In the second half of her sentence, she provided an anti-slavery political answer to her pointed query about the moral incompatibility of Burke's support of the American Revolution with his silence on the ongoing global slave trade from Africa to the British and European colonies in the West Indies to the U.S. and elsewhere: 'But on what principle Mr. Burke could defend American independence, I cannot conceive; for the whole tenor of his plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation.'  In the very next sentence, which extends from the bottom of page 22 to the top of page 23, Wollstonecraft stated that Burke's 'servile reverence for antiquity' entailed that 'it ought never to be abolished'. The gender-neutral singular pronoun 'it' referred back to 'slavery' in the previous sentence.

In the 2nd edn. of VRM, at the top of page 24, Wollstonecraft revised this passage on slavery to make it explicit that she thought Burke's 'servile reverence for antiquity' entailed that, in his view, 'the slave trade ought never to be abolished'. By substituting the noun phrase 'the slave trade' for the generic pronoun 'it', Wollstonecraft reinforced and made more explicit and specific her critique of Burke's hypocritical silence on both slavery and the slave trade in RRF. 

With this simple switch of the pronoun 'it' for the noun phrase 'the slave trade', Wollstonecraft revised VRM to forcefully attack Burke's moral failure in RRF to condemn not only the historical practice of slavery, but also the ongoing global slave trade. This was the second and deeper level of her rhetorical use of Burke's traditionalism against him. While the first level of her critical analysis of Burke's traditionalism made the provocative suggestion that 'the whole tenor of his plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation', she pushed further in the 2nd edn. to point out that the great Whig orator and defender of liberty and 'independence' had failed to condemn the enduring international trade in human flesh and labour from which he and other British elites still profited (Marshall 2019). 

With this revision to the 2nd edn. of VRM, Wollstonecraft positioned herself as a public (and woman) advocate of 'the abolition of the slave trade' and affirmed her 'religion and reason'-based view that slavery, no matter where it was practiced, was wrong. In this way, her political vision looked beyond the historic abolishment of the practice of slavery in England via the 1772 Somerset v. Stewart case—in which Chief Justice William Murray (Lord Mansfield) recognised the right of an enslaved African man, James Somerset, to live free in England against the wishes of his enslaver, Charles Stewart)—and instead looked ahead to what would become the British Parliament's eventual ending of its involvement in the international slave trade with the passage of the 1833 Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies. Although this act passed long after her death in 1797, her most prominent family heir on the issue of the abolition of slavery, the novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, lived to appreciate it. 

Intriguingly, in early 1791, Burke would vote in the minority of the House of Commons, with the abolitionist leader Wilberforce, for a bill to end the slave trade, just months before the massive slave uprising of the Haitian Revolution in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. One wonders if the Whig MP and author of RRF felt a twinge of conscience after reading Wollstonecraft's VRM. We do not know for certain if he read VRM, for he made no direct reference to it in his writings, public or private. In an unpublished 1795 letter to his friend Mrs. Crewe, however, Burke gave Wollstonecraft a backhanded compliment that suggested that he had read the VRM. In this letter to his traditionalist female friend, he dismissed the current trend of pro-revolutionary women writers as 'Mrs. Woolstenecrofts' who were 'desperate, wicked, and mischievously ingenious' (Blakemore 1995, 55). In this way, Burke heralded the beginning of anti-Jacobin discourse in Britain and beyond that used Wollstonecraft's name as a signifier of the radical and 'wicked' cause of the rights of historically oppressed groups, including the enslaved, the poor, and women.