Andrew Burn

Andrew Burn (1742-1814) described himself on the title page of A Second Address to the People of Great Britain; Containing a New and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar, a pamphlet sold by the Baptist bookseller Martha Gurney in London in 1792, as “an eye witness to the facts related,” enjoyed a long career as a military seaman. In his pamphlet, he drew on his experiences as a clerk on a Jamaican plantation in 1759 (Second Address 25). Like so many other participants in this controversy, Burn offers the usual tribute to the radical pamphleteer William Fox:  “What the Wisdom of a British Senate could not effect, the worthy Author of a late Address to the Public, is likely to accomplish, by rousing to powerful exertions, those sentiments of humanity, which it is to be hoped, are more or less implanted in every breast” (Second Address 3). Burn, however, intends to use a different approach than Fox -- less sentimental and more graphic. In one scene he describes mothers being whipped while carrying their infants on their backs and when nursing: “Think on this,” he exclaims, “ye Mothers who use Sugar!” (Second Address 4). His allusions to cannibalism, however are still merely echos of Fox’s rhetoric. “Abstain from Sugar,” Burn writes, “and Slavery falls.  The consequence is as clear as the noon-day Sun; yet how difficult to persuade some, that when they eat Sugar, they figuratively eat the Blood of the Negro” (Second Address 8). See Olinthus Gregory, ed., Memoirs of the late Major-General Andrew Burn, of the Royal Marines; Collected from his Journals, 2nd ed. (London: W. Winchester and Son, 1816), xv-xvi.