Shared suffering as a determining factor in the construction of self-identity qua collective is shown as a peculiarly subversive driving force in the body of Rushton's writing concerning the ‘foulest stain’ of slavery. A fifteen-year gap, as a minimum, separates the cycle of West Indian Eclogues, published in 1787, from the far-reaching epic of ‘Toussaint to his Troops’, whose protagonist and speaking voice is the hero of the Haitian Revolution. In both cases black agency is explored and conveyed in distinctly unconventional terms; in both cases, poetic form is crucial in establishing the space where the unspeakable residing in the experience of enslavement – the physical and mental trauma deriving from its bleak, sheer diminishing of humanity – is tentatively mediated as from the inside.

In West Indian Eclogues, Rushton carried out a sustained experiment in a form whose inherent dramatic power had proved to be particularly apt to respond to many late eighteenth-century concerns, including the metropolitan questioning of the far distant and yet all-too-close institution of transatlantic slavery. Significantly, eclogues that articulated anti-slavery feelings were produced in the environment of the two main slaving ports of Liverpool and Bristol. Three African Eclogues by the ‘Neglected Genius’ and Bristol citizen Thomas Chatterton, dating back to 1770, are an early and distinctive example; in the first in particular, ‘Heccar and Gaira’, the dramatic dialogue between two stylized African warriors revolves around a tragic tale of enslavement carried out by the ‘palid shadows’ of European slave traders. In the early 1780s, two American Eclogues were published in the Gentleman's Magazine, plus an ‘African’ one by transplanted Irishman and Liverpool resident Hugh Mulligan. Of the two American Eclogues, one was ascribed to ‘A Gentleman of Liverpool’, and in fact was most probably by Mulligan himself; the other by Revd George Gregory, another transplanted Irishman who was well acquainted with the town's commercial milieu before leaving for London in 1782.