Abstract
the four Quarters of the Globe groan beneath the intolerable iniquity of this nation!' (Mann, p. 58). An opponent of the slave-trade, Coleridge sought to make his listeners and readers feel guilty about their country's exploitation of its colonies. He depicted British 'iniquity' destroying the pastoral fields and villages of peaceful peoples. Britain's war against its colonists in North America provided a prime example, for the 'Scalp-Merchants' in the British army had paid Indians to kill unarmed American settlers. As I have shown elsewhere, this policy had been opposed at the time of Burke and the elder Pitt, who made it an emblem of Britain's dishonour. In parliamentary speeches they depicted the Indians as 'hell hounds' of'savage war', as blood drinkers and savages.1 In 1778 Britain's use of Indians to fight on its behalf culminated in what became a cause celebre forWhig opponents of the war, the massacre of white American settlers at Wyoming in Pennsylvania. Coleridge imagined the massacre as the destruction of a virtuous community reminiscent of Pantisocracy:
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