Patterns of Positioning examines, in the time span prior to the U.S. abolition of the trade of enslaved Africans in 1808, how the early transatlantic discourse of abolition unfolded in a North American sphere. It sets out from the premise that abolition was a set of formalized practices--a poetics--which gave formal shape to abolitionist discourse. By accessing canonical and non-canonized as well as previously unexamined material, and identifying argumentative patterns, narrative figures, and generic frames, this study provides a newly-informed and complex perspective on abolition. It considers how the poetics of abolition reconfigured the discursive positioning of the enslaved and the protagonists of the poetics of abolition themselves. This way, Patterns of Positioning highlights how strategies geared toward overcoming structural inequality potentially reified such inequality and allowed for the personal self-aggrandizement of those who publicly denounced the apparatus of enslavement.