Notes

The Negro's Complaint
The Negro's Complaint written by the well-known poet William Cowper in 1788. This poem emerged when an anti-slavery campaigner John Newton asked his friend William Cowper for some poetry. The Negro's Complaint was so well-liked that it spread all over Great Britain and was sometimes performed as a ballad. The question that has been shunned on is, did the Negro's Complaint implement any change during the Transatlantic Slave Trade times. We shall begin by knowing what the Negro's Complaint was about. The Negro's Complaint is about a person who is bought in Africa and taken to America to work as a slave. The poem really showed people the pain of the slaves and the lack of freedom they had through the arts of poetry. The poem had a small but meaningful impact as William Cowper pulls on moral and religious questions through the character of an African slave to argue against slavery and wrote in the first person to speak with the voice of an enslaved African and to make the argument more convincing. William Cowper hoped to give the slaves a voice and to humanize them in the eyes of their captors as shown in multiple stanzas "Sighs must fan it, tears must water, / Sweat of ours must dress the soil."