The number of deaths speaks for itself (18), announced William Wilberforce on May 13, 1789, as he introduced the resolutions that would precede his first attempt to pass a bill abolishing the slave trade. However, if the debates over the future of the British slave trade indicate anything on the matter, it is that neither numbers nor deaths speak for themselves. They are made to speak by others in complex and often contradictory ways.As one of the first large-scale humanitarian movements, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST) enshrined many of the techniques that have become keystones in the Western activist repertoire, utilizing petitions, rallies, and boycotts throughout the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century (d'Anjou 69-70). The group's representational politics, meanwhile, have had a more ambiguous legacy: in framing Blacks as (implicitly inferior) objects of pity to generate an affective reaction, it frequently demonstrated the kind of paternalism still evident in the infantalizing portrayals of Africans by many aid organizations today.Historians and literary critics have long taken a nuanced view of this movement, which presented itself as a courageous crusade to activate the conscience of the British public by appealing to its Christian sympathies. Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery triggered complex debates about the manner in which abolitionists' actions reflected their class interests,1 while Christopher Brown's Moral Capital examines how key figures used the abolitionist cause to pursue other agendas, promoting religious revival and understandings of the British Empire as virtuous.2 Literary scholars, including Debbie Lee, Deirdre Coleman, and Brycchan Carey, frequently focus on the relationship between abolitionism and emerging discourses of Romanticism. Nevertheless, this has not precluded criticism of the voyeurism, racism, and support for moral colonial expansion often implicit in abolitionist documents, with cultural historian Marcus Wood going so far as to call abolitionist literature pornographic in its depictions of suffering that subsume slave subjectivity within the creator's fantasy. That said, while both historians and literary critics have paid ample attention to abolitionists' use of sentiment and manipulation of empathy, they have neglected one of their other key strategies that, on the surface, seems diametrically opposed to emotional appeals: the critical use of statistics.This essay tackles the co-existence in abolitionist publications of detailed, individual portraits of suffering and dying slaves with numbers, or numerical gestures, that seek to establish their pain as representative on a larger scale. These same numbers, meanwhile, take on a different valence in pro-slave trade literature-they remain abstract, surrounded by descriptions of death in collective terms, obscuring the slave body with a catalog of inevitable causes of mortality. The question then is: why did the number become a necessary accompaniment to the suffering slave for abolitionists, and how did both change by being placed side by side?As I demonstrate, in an era that predated the modern census and most common statistical methods, abolitionists nevertheless claimed rhetorical authority from their ability to interpret numbers plausibly-even when those numbers were fictive. Statistics, especially those related to death, were crucial to counteracting two main pro-slave trade arguments: that abolitionists were ignorant about the conditions of slaves in the Middle Passage and the West Indies, and that the horrific sufferings they described were unfortunate exceptions to the rule. Responding to these criticisms required, first, a very specific construction of the number as a transparent bearer of information, and second, a massive effort of data collection that tightened the link between estimates and documented accounts while depicting verifiable trading practices. …