Early Quaker Antislavery

To understand the products of slave labor as stolen goods, Quakers had to first understand the enslavement of Africans as a form of theft. For many Quakers in this period, the slave trade and slavery were simply standard business practice: “God-fearing men going about their godless business,” as historian James Walvin argues. In the late seventeenth century, when individual Quakers began to question Friends’ relationship with slavery, their unease about the slave trade and slavery triggered “tiny shifts in the tectonic plates of British political life.”⁶ Early Quaker antislavery described the theft of African bodies and the appropriation of African labor. Although these early protests did not articulate an argument against the goods produced by those laboring bodies, they did provide the intellectual foundation for the abstention movement that developed in the late eighteenth century. To understand the origin of abstention from slave-labor goods, we need to begin with the organization of the Society of Friends and their first attempts to define the relationship between their religious beliefs and the social practice of the enslavement of Africans.

The Society of Friends was a product of the political turmoil of the English Civil War and the disruption of monarchical rule in the mid-seventeenth century. In the 1640s, itinerant preacher George Fox began an extended period of religious wandering that led him to conclude that the answers he sought came not from church teaching or the scriptures, but rather from his direct experience of God. “When all my hopes in them [preachers] and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell me what to do,” Fox wrote in 1647, “then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.’ ” This experience of direct revelation, coming at a time when Fox was discouraged and unable to find answers from those around him, led him to conclude that wisdom and guidance came from God rather than man. Fox’s experience of individual, direct “intimacy with Christ” is “foundational and definitional” of Quakerism.⁷ While the theological origins of Quakerism may be dated to 1647, the formal organization of the sect did not occur until 1652 when Fox traveled to the north of England. It was there that Fox attracted followers from the Seekers, a small sect that had rejected the established church and sought a return to primitive Christianity. Fox also received support from Margaret Fell, the wife of a wealthy and prominent judge. After 1652 Quakerism spread rapidly throughout England and its North American colonies despite persecution from English authorities.⁸

The Quaker experience of intimacy with Christ led Friends to develop distinct spiritual beliefs and patterns of worship. Friends believed each individual, even those who had not been exposed to Christianity, possessed a divinely inspired “light within” that if followed would allow them to become “children of the light.” Spiritual beliefs and patterns of worship flowed from this central idea. Worshipping in silence encouraged Friends to spiritually prostrate themselves before God and to wait for divine inspiration. The silence of the meeting was broken only when someone felt led by God to offer ministry. Rather than a trained or “hireling” ministry, Friends emphasized the universal priesthood of believers. This view led Friends to recognize women as spiritual leaders and ministers, a practice that distinguished Friends from other religious groups. The presence of the divine in each individual also led Friends to espouse the Golden Rule—“Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” While Quakers’ belief in the Golden Rule did not distinguish them from other Christian or even religious groups, their emphasis on the Golden Rule as a fundamental guiding principle did. The Golden Rule along with Quakers’ pacifism, or peace testimony, served as the foundation of Quaker antislavery.⁹

Quakers also developed a network of communication that aided the growth of antislavery sentiment long before the corporate body of Friends took an active stand against slavery. This network was supported by Quakers’ hierarchical structure of meetings that Friends established to facilitate worship and to direct the business of the sect. Meetings for worship met twice weekly. Preparative, monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings were established to ensure doctrinal unity, to regulate Friends’ behavior, and to provide mutual aid and encouragement. For most Friends, the preparative and monthly meetings were the most visible sign of the Quaker community. Monthly meetings represented the primary governing structure within the Society of Friends, assuming responsibility for defining membership, supervising marriages, recording births and deaths, overseeing transfers to other meetings, and identifying and recognizing ministers. Much of the work of the monthly meeting was conducted by elders and overseers who were selected by the preparative meeting and approved by the monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings. Clerks, who were appointed by each monthly meeting, recorded the consensus of each meeting, keeping careful records so the minutes could be agreed upon by all present. This system of meetings allowed Friends to remain connected to the broader Quaker community, maintaining “a continuity of Quaker spiritual values and behavior across geographic space and sparsely settled regions.”¹⁰

Friends’ spiritual beliefs also led them to adopt distinct cultural principles. “Plain dress, plain speech and plain living” separated Friends from “a corrupt and corrupting world.” Plain clothing, without superfluities such as buckles and collars, kept Friends focused on the inward light. They also rejected social customs that implied deference, believing traditions such as removing one’s hat or using the singular “you” highlighted superficial distinctions of social class and hid the divine light within each person. Friends were to tell the truth at all times; thus, Quakers refused to swear an oath in court and only bought and sold goods at a fixed price rather than haggling. The Golden Rule and the Quaker peace testimony encouraged Friends to avoid war making by refusing to serve in the military, to pay military taxes, or to take sides in times of conflict. Such cultural principles distinguished Quakers from the world around them, allowing Quakers instead to emphasize the experience of God and reject the apostasy (the falling away from faith) of the outward life.¹¹

Quaker religious beliefs did not align with the cultural ideas that encouraged the enslavement of Africans. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, in a series of protests against slavery, colonial Quakers began to question the legitimacy of slavery. The earliest of these statements, the Germantown Protest, was presented by four Pennsylvania Quakers to their monthly meeting in 1688. The authors of the Germantown Protest emphasized the relationship between the commerce in slaves and the consumers of those slaves: the slave trade would continue so long as Quakers purchased slaves. The Germantown statement described the slave trade as a violation of biblical sanctions against man stealing, as promulgated in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.¹² Quakers believed it was wrong to steal; therefore, they should avoid the purchase of stolen goods, removing any incentive for theft. Furthermore, slaves should “be delivered out of the hands of the Robbers & made free.” The protestors contrasted the oppression of Quakers in Europe against the enslavement of Africans. Whereas Quakers had come to Pennsylvania to find “liberty of conscience,” Africans had been forcibly transported to the colony to labor for life because they were “of a black colour.” Race, the protestors claimed, did not justify enslavement: where there was “liberty of conscience” there “ought to be likewise liberty of the body.”¹³ The monthly meeting referred the Germantown appeal to the quarterly meeting, who in turn referred the petition to the yearly meeting. The leaders of the yearly meeting refused to take action, citing the number of Quakers who owned slaves.¹⁴

Subsequent protests in 1693 and 1698 reinforced the argument that slaves were stolen goods. In 1693, followers of Quaker schismatic George Keith wrote An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes. After Keith joined the Friends in 1662 in Scotland, he traveled widely in the British Isles and Ireland, which brought him into contact with many early Quaker leaders including George Fox, George Whitehead, William Penn, and Robert Barclay. Keith’s move to the colonies in 1684 also brought him into contact and, ultimately, conflict with leading Pennsylvania Quakers. He believed Quakers had lost touch with the fundamental Christian nature of their faith; therefore, he sought to construct a more ecclesial structure among the Society of Friends, creating a scriptural and theological style of Quakerism. Keith’s efforts were rebuffed by Pennsylvania’s Quaker leadership. The subsequent dispute resulted in Keith becoming the head of a separatist group of “Christian Quakers.” He was condemned by Pennsylvania Quakers in 1692. He appealed his subsequent disownment to London Yearly Meeting, which upheld the decision. In 1700 Keith joined the Church of England and was ordained an Anglican priest two years later.¹⁵

Keith’s Exhortation was printed in New York in 1693 by William Bradford, a follower of Keith. Like the Germantown Quakers, Keith and his followers cited the biblical sanctions against man stealing and reiterated Quaker teachings against theft and the commerce in stolen goods. “Stollen Slaves” were “accounted a far greater Crime under Moses’s Law than the stealing of Goods … he that stealeth a Man and selleth him, if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to Death”; therefore, “as we are not to buy stollen Goods … no more are we to buy stollen slaves.” Slavery violated the Golden Rule and Quakers’ peace testimony. Africans were captives of “War, Violence, Cruelty and Oppression, and Theft & Robbery of the highest Nature”; they were “stollen away or robbed from their Kindred” and “sold to white men.” Enslavement subjected Africans to “continual hard Labour” with few “Provisions” to sustain life. Thus taken and held by violence, slaves were “Prize or stollen goods.” The Keithians urged their readers to exercise the “Fruits of the Spirit of Christ” (i.e., “Love, Mercy, Goodness, and Compassion”) and to recognize that the doctrine of the atonement applied to Africans as well as to Christians: “Negroes, Blacks and Taunies are a real part of Mankind, for whom Christ hath shed his precious Blood, and capable of Salvation, as well as White Men.”¹⁶

The third protest was written in 1698 by Robert Piles of Concord, Pennsylvania. Piles had debated for some time whether to “buy a negro, or negroes.” He considered Christ’s message of the Golden Rule and realized that he would not willingly become a slave for life; he also recognized that slaves might rise in rebellion. As Piles weighed his decision, he fell asleep and had the dream he later recounted. In his dream, as Piles and his friend were walking down a road, they came across a black pot. Piles picked it up. As soon as he did, he “saw a great ladder standing exact upright, reaching up to heaven.” Piles began to climb the ladder with the pot in hand. He soon realized that he would need both hands to climb the ladder because it was standing so upright. Placing the pot on the ground, he saw a man and asked him about the ladder. It is the “light of Christ,” the man responded, “and whoever it bee that his faith be strong in the lord, God will uphold that it shall not fall.” Suddenly Piles woke from his dream, resolving “to lett black negroes or pots alone.” Piles’s narrative mirrored the structure of the Germantown Protest: citing the Golden Rule, describing the slave trade as man stealing, and emphasizing the danger of slave rebellion. Of particular interest in the dream narrative is the depiction of slaves as the material culture of the pot. The materiality of the pot prevented Piles from climbing the ladder to receive “the light of Christ,” suggesting that slave ownership led Quakers to focus on the outward accumulation of wealth and goods rather than focus on the inward experience of God.¹⁷ The pot reinforced the idea, expressed by the Germantown Quakers and the Keithians, that slaves were corrupt goods whose consumption separated Quakers from God.

These early arguments emphasized the illicit commerce in African men, women, and children. The slave trade violated biblical sanctions against man stealing, a crime that was punishable by death under Mosaic law. Significantly, slavery and the slave trade infringed the Golden Rule and contravened Quakers’ peace testimony. Although early Quaker antislavery highlighted the theft of Africans from their families and from God, these early statements did not specifically address the theft of African labor or the benefits Quakers derived from the theft of that labor. As a consequence, early Quaker antislavery statements did not specifically characterize the consumer of African slaves. In the early eighteenth century, with the expansion of the trade in global consumer goods such as coffee, tea, chocolate, sugar, silk, cotton, and china, Quaker antislavery writers began to explicitly link the consumption of slaves to the consumption of material goods.¹⁸

Quaker Antislavery and Consumer Goods

Like their predecessors, eighteenth-century Quakers described slaves as stolen goods and denounced the slave trade as man stealing. Their arguments also reflected the contemporaneous growth in the transatlantic trade in consumer goods. Quakers like John Hepburn and Ralph Sandiford described the trade in more explicitly commercial terms, connecting the slave trade to consumer desire for new luxury goods. As a result, Hepburn and Sandiford laid the foundation for later Quaker arguments that claimed the trade in slaves was driven by the consumption of slave-labor goods.

John Hepburn, a Quaker from Middletown, New Jersey, published The American Defence of the Christian Golden Rule in 1714. Hepburn’s background is largely unknown. In his text, Hepburn claimed to have opposed slavery for thirty years before publicly expressing his opposition. There is evidence to suggest that Hepburn migrated to New Jersey around 1684 as an indentured servant. He is not listed in any meeting records; however, in attesting to his will in 1721, he identified himself as a Quaker. Historian J. William Frost suggests that Hepburn was a “backbencher,” that is, a Friend who attended meetings “but was neither minister nor elder nor ‘weighty Friend.’ ”¹⁹

Hepburn claimed the trade in African slaves and the theft of slaves’ labor was driven by consumer desire for wealth, luxury, and ease. To emphasize his point, Hepburn introduced three archetypes that would, in time, become stock figures in antislavery literature: the greedy, blood-soaked slaveholder; the vain, self-absorbed slaveholder’s wife; and the degraded slave. The slaveholder robbed the slave of his freedom and his labor and enriched himself in the “Bargain.” Further emphasizing slaveholders’ wealth and vanity, Hepburn described slaveholders’ “fine powdered Perriwigs, and great bunched Coats.” He then introduced slaveholders’ wives, who were kept “Jezebel-like” with leisure time “to paint their Faces, and Puff, and powder their Hair, and to bring up their Sons and Daughters in Idleness and Wantonness, and in all manner of Pride and Prodigality, in decking and adorning their Carkasses with pufft and powdered Hair, with Ruffles and Top-knots, Ribbands and Lace, and gay Cloathing, and what not.” This wealth of material goods was “produced by the Slavery of Negroes,” who were dressed in the “vilest of Raggs, much ado to cover their nakedness, and many of them not a Shirt upon their Backs, some of them not a Shoe upon their Foot in cold Frosts and Snow in the Winter Time.” Seeking wealth and luxury, as well as respite from labor, the slaveholder extorted the slave’s labor. The slaveholder maintained “white hands, except at some Times they chance to be besparkled with the Blood of those poor Slaves, when they fall to beating them with their twisted Hides and Horse-whips, and other Instruments of Cruelty.” The slave’s labor produced the wealth that purchased the ribbons, lace, and other finery worn by the slaveholder and his family, a point which is further emphasized by the stark contrast between the slave’s ragged clothing and the “puff and powder” of the slaveholding family. Hepburn denounced slaveholders as robbers who “Beat-Men, and sometimes kill them to take their Money from them.” Rather than money, the slaveholder stole the slave’s labor: slaveholders “beat the Negros, and take them Captives, and banish them from their Country forever, and take their Wives and Children from them, and sometimes Cause their Death, and all to get their Labour from them; which is as much worth as their Money.”²⁰

The American Defence of the Christian Golden Rule marked a significant shift in Quaker antislavery. Hepburn cataloged, as no other Quaker had done, the evils of slavery: forced labor without pay, violence, and cruelty. He described the effect slavery had on slaveholders, encouraging idleness, indolence, vanity, and greed and “establish[ed] an image of the slaveholding household as one that [was] both corrupt and corrupting.”²¹ Significantly, Hepburn described the slave’s labor as a tangible commodity that was stolen from the slave to benefit the slaveholder. Slaves were unique commodities, producing, by their labor, additional wealth for the slaveholder, as evidenced by his fine clothes and luxurious wigs. Thus the ease of slaveholding families depended upon the continued theft of Africans and their labor. As Hepburn concluded, the slaveholder had robbed Africans of the most basic provisions—their families, their labor, and, often, their lives—and, as a result, the slaveholder would receive God’s judgment.

Publication of The American Defence of the Christian Golden Rule coincided with statements, issued by London Yearly Meeting, warning Quakers of the “pernicious effects” of vanity. Parents were cautioned to “be exemplary to their children in keeping out off the vain fashions, customs and pride of the world.”²² Quaker men, women, and children (through the example of their parents) had adorned themselves with “extravagancies, as those who are not of our profession observe as marks of declension from our primitive plainness.” Rather than the “meek and quiet spirit” of godliness, Quakers had instead become “unseemly and immodest” in appearance.²³ Young Quaker men were reported to “have cut off their good heads of hair, and put on long extravagant and gay wiggs” while young Quaker women were apparently wearing their hair high and wearing gowns “like the proud fashion mongers of the world.” Parents should avoid dressing their children in “Gaudy Apparel” because children “led into such Vanities and Fineries, Come gradually to be in Love with them.”²⁴ Outward displays of fashion and vanity distracted Quakers from the inward experience of God. Hepburn connected these Quaker admonitions against luxury goods to slavery, calling on Quakers to reject both slavery and luxurious material goods.

Like Hepburn, Ralph Sandiford claimed the slave trade was caused and perpetuated by the desire for luxury goods and ease from labor and by greed. A Quaker convert from Liverpool, England, Sandiford had settled in Philadelphia at a young age. He wrote A Brief Examination of the Times in response to the Pennsylvania Assembly’s dramatic reduction in the duty on slave imports in 1729, which, as Sandiford noted, made “a revenue of the evil instead of removing it.”²⁵ Frustrated by Quakers’ inaction against slavery, Sandiford decided to speak out. Quakers had argued against slavery since the late seventeenth century; still, Friends continued to purchase slaves and Quaker meetings’ cautionary statements against slavery had brought no disciplinary action. If leading Quakers could be convinced to emancipate their slaves, Sandiford believed the meeting could also be cleared of the sin of slavery. Acting without the permission of the Overseers of the Press of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Sandiford convinced Benjamin Franklin to print his tract.²⁶

In Britain and her American colonies, the African slave trade had altered the national and the local economy in fundamental ways, according to Sandiford. Africans transformed forts into markets and sold their neighbors “for the least Bawbles.”²⁷ Sandiford believed the slave trade reflected a lack of trust in God’s providence: “Has not the Lord, by his extraordinary Providence, opened this America before the Europeans, and given us Peace and Plenty among the Natives? And shall we go to Africa for Bread, and lay the Burden which appertains to our Bodily Support on their Shoulders?” Instead, Sandiford claimed, God’s bounty had been “Crucified by this Trade.” Slaveholders had forsaken the “Providence of God, to feed upon the Flesh and Blood of Slaves instead of Christ.”²⁸ In The Mystery of the Iniquity, the second edition of Sandiford’s tract, which was published in 1730, he described the Caribbean slave market: “They are a naked figure at their first landing in the West Indies, that the buyer may inspect even their secret parts, lest they should be corrupted in their passage by the debaucheries of those that are called Christians … under such circumstances the poor creatures easily transgressing, are whipped naked to common view, until their secret pores are shamefully extended beyond what may be rehearsed, unto chaste ears; and also for seeking their liberty, racked and burned to death, as lately at the West Indies.” Lest his readers believe such brutal treatment of slaves was limited to the markets in the West Indies, Sandiford then linked the Caribbean slave market to “the churches of Philadelphia” that had been “defiled” with the horrors of the slave trade. Philadelphians, “tho’ they meet in sundry places of worship, can all agree to shake hands with man-stealers, the worst of thieves.”²⁹ Sandiford’s graphic text emphasized the ways in which the slave trade had perverted transatlantic commerce and corrupted Christians all for the sake of wealth.

Sandiford’s book was not well received by the weighty Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting who denounced the author and his publication. In his second edition, he appealed unsuccessfully to London Yearly Meeting for support. In the end, Sandiford was disowned. Afterward, he purchased a small farm outside Philadelphia where he built a log cabin and lived in “patriarchal simplicity,” as Quaker biographer Roberts Vaux noted in 1815. Here Sandiford lived out his conscious opposition to the habits of luxury: “His clothing was made in the most simple manner, and was of natural colour of the material of which it was composed.” Sandiford died in 1733.³⁰

Hepburn and Sandiford made clear the link between slavery and the consumption of luxury goods. Slavery and the slave trade catalyzed the expansion of the transatlantic economy in the eighteenth century. Slaves were among the most profitable and most consistently demanded and consumed goods in the Atlantic world in this period. In the British Empire alone, between 1700 and 1780, more than four times as many Africans as Europeans landed in the American colonies. In turn, the slave trade made possible a second tier of goods. Among other commodities, enslaved labor produced sugar, coffee, rice, and tobacco. Slaves labored in agriculture, maritime trades, military service, and skilled professions, in urban and in plantation settings. In addition to the goods and services produced by slaves’ labor, entire industries in North America and Europe, such as salt cod, pork, and certain textiles, were developed to provide goods to slave owners for their slaves.³¹ Hepburn and Sandiford’s protests against slavery are best understood within this growing consumer economy. As anthropologist Grant McCracken notes, in this period, the consumption of consumer goods “was beginning to take place more often, in more places, under new influences, by new groups, in pursuit of new goods, for new social and cultural purposes.” From 1720 on, men and women came to expect that certain consumer goods could be theirs. Moreover, an individual’s relationship to those goods changed as consumer goods, such as tea and sugar, became important signifiers of identity as well as necessities of daily life.³² For Quaker reformers like Lay and Woolman, tea and especially sugar came to symbolize the apostasy that afflicted Friends.

“Sugar Is Made with Blood”

By the mid-eighteenth century, tea had become, as historian T. H. Breen observes, “the master symbol of the new consumer economy.”³³ Of the three stimulant beverages introduced into Europe in the seventeenth century—tea, coffee, and chocolate—tea quickly outpaced the other two in consumption. Between 1725 and 1800, annual tea imports into Britain increased from £250,000 to £24 million. A pamphlet, printed at the request of tea dealers in 1744, estimated Britons consumed an average of two million pounds of tea annually.³⁴ Colonial consumption of tea experienced similar increases. In 1773, for example, a Philadelphia businessman estimated that Americans purchased six million pounds of tea annually.³⁵ Tea benefited from its intrinsic qualities; it was easily enhanced with sugar, cream, or milk and was tolerable even when served weak. Tea was also more economical than coffee or chocolate. Aided by government protection and the monopoly held by the East India Company, supplies of tea increased and prices declined throughout the eighteenth century. Significantly, tea created and sustained a substantial market in related goods: tea ware and specialized brewing equipment made from porcelain and silver, furniture made from exotic woods such as mahogany, and, of course, sugar.³⁶

Tea and sugar were inextricably linked in the eighteenth century. Like tea, sugar consumption was influenced by an increase in supply and a decline in cost. Sugar consumption in Britain rose 400 percent, from four to eighteen pounds per capita per year, during this period.³⁷ The increased consumption of tea and sugar “demonstrated the new accessibility of luxury goods and evidenced a new degree of purchasing power” while registering a “decline in nutritional values occasioned by the shift from agricultural to industrial labor, as workers gave up the time-consuming preparation of nutritious oat porridge and vegetable stock.” Tea and sugar were both objects of mercantile trade, benefiting from preferential trade duties and supporting the monopolies held by the East India Company (tea) and the West India Company (sugar). Yet, the trade in these two commodities differed in important ways. Tea was imported into Britain from China; therefore, as an import, tea did not rely on the “direct exploitation of colonial labor.”³⁸ Sugar, however, was made possible by and contributed to Britain’s stake in the African slave trade.

Sugar production was a complex combination of agriculture and manufacture that required substantial capital and a large workforce. By the late seventeenth century, in the sugar colonies, large plantations had replaced small farms and the number of African slaves rose sharply. Sugar plantations were, as anthropologist and historian Sidney Mintz notes, “a synthesis of field and factory … quite unlike anything known in mainland Europe at the time.” Sugar production required careful timing: the “cane must be cut when ready so as not to lose its juice or the proportion of sucrose in this juice; and once it is cut, the juice must be rapidly extracted to avoid rot, dessication, inversion, or fermentation.” Once the sugar cane had been cut, it was transported to the mill, where it was crushed and the juices of the pith extracted. The extracted juice was then taken to a boiling house where it was crystallized for consumption. Molasses, the uncrystallized portion of the sugar, was often taken to the distillery to be rendered into rum. Sugar production required both “brute field labor and skilled artisanal knowledge,” according to Mintz.³⁹

The sweetness of the final product did not reveal the violence of its production. Slave mortality rates on sugar plantations were very high. In Barbados, one out of three slaves died within three years of arrival; in Jamaica, the death toll was 50 percent higher on sugar plantations than on coffee plantations. Overall, the West Indian slave population declined about 5 percent per year in the eighteenth century unless new slaves were bought to replace those that had died.⁴⁰ The high rate of mortality was the consequence of deficiencies in diet, shelter, and clothing; brutal working conditions; and tropical disease. In Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, Dutch soldier John Stedman described the dangers of producing sugar in the eighteenth century:

So very dangerous is the work of those negroes who attend the rollers [through which the cane passes twice to extract the liquefied pith], that should one of their fingers be caught between them, which frequently happens through inadvertency, the whole arm is instantly shattered to pieces, if not part of the body. A hatchet is generally ready to chop off the limb, before the working of the mill can be stopped. Another danger is, that should a poor slave dare to taste that sugar which he produces by the sweat of his brow, he runs the risk of receiving some hundred lashes, or having all his teeth knocked out by the overseer.—Such are the hardships and dangers to which the sugar-making negroes are exposed.⁴¹

The brutality of sugar production remained a constant well into the nineteenth century. For example, in Jamaica, for the period 1829–1832, the slave mortality rate averaged 35.1 deaths per 1,000 enslaved.⁴² Cuban planters perhaps said it most succinctly: “Con sangre se hace azúcar”—“Sugar is made with blood.”⁴³

The exponential increase in the consumption of sugar-sweetened tea generated widespread debate. Poets and authors lauded, mocked, and criticized consumers’ new obsession with tea and its accoutrements. In one of the earliest poems on tea, Poem in Praise of Tea, also published as A Poem upon Tea, Peter Motteux claimed tea both humanized and civilized Britons.⁴⁴ In another poem, published in 1749, a woman defended her tea habit against her husband’s charge that she had devoted too much time and too much expense to her tea table.⁴⁵ Social critic Jonas Hanway, best known for his charitable interest in London’s chimney sweeps, published “An Essay on Tea” in 1756, refuting the salutary effects of tea and claiming that tea drained Britain’s economic and military resources.⁴⁶ Minister and Methodist founder John Wesley, writing in 1748, claimed tea consumption jeopardized the individual’s relationship with God.⁴⁷ Tea consumption generated similar debate among Quakers. Unlike the fine clothes and powdered wigs discussed earlier, tea is noticeably absent from the collected statements issued by London Yearly Meeting in the early eighteenth century; however, references to tea can be found in meeting minutes and in other sources, suggesting that tea consumption was for many Quakers a concern. For example, in 1714, the Yorkshire Women’s Quarterly Meeting called on Friends to “refrane from haveing fine Tea Tables sett with Fine Chenae being it is more for Sight then Service, & that Friends keep Cleare of the superfluous part in Drinking Tea.” In 1724, the Men’s Meeting at Cork described tea consumption as “too much a Worldly custome” and “a hurtfull thing creeping into Friends familys and Earnestly recommend it to the care of concerned Friends to put a stop to it.”⁴⁸ Many Friends believed the consumption of tea led Quakers to emphasize the outward life rather than the inward journey toward God.

In the North American colonies, many Quakers refused to consume tea. Woolman and Lay as well as Joshua Evans were among those Quakers who refused to consume the beverage. Colonial Quakers’ rejection of tea, in general, was not the result of the political crisis of the 1760s and early 1770s; indeed, many colonial Quakers, like Woolman, stopped using tea much earlier because tea was customarily sweetened with slave-grown sugar. Tea was also closely associated with the superfluous consumption of other goods. Evans, for example, believed “East India tea” to be unnecessarily expensive and habit forming. A contemporary of Woolman, Evans lamented how customary tea consumption had become “even amongst those who know not where to get the next meal.” Instead, Evans consumed home-grown herbal drinks, which he believed were better suited to the colonial constitution. Tea consumption, Evans lamented, “blinded, and bound [Friends] to prevailing customs.” He noted the “tea-tables set, conformably to fashion, with curious cups, saucers, tongs of bright metal, etc., etc. Are not needless eating and drinking sometimes encouraged through this custom?”⁴⁹ For Evans and Woolman, consumer goods led men and women to support “prevailing customs” such as the consumption of tea or the use of slave labor. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Woolman became the foremost proponent of a new form of antislavery, anticonsumer testimony targeting slave-labor goods.

John Woolman

Born into a New Jersey Quaker family in 1720, Woolman belonged to a younger generation of Quakers raised in a period of shifting attitudes toward slavery. In the 1730s Sandiford and Lay were disowned for their dramatic actions against slavery. Less than twenty years later, Woolman published his antislavery tract with the approval of the Yearly Meeting. The changes that allowed Woolman to speak out against slavery, with the permission of the Quaker elders, were rooted in the preliminary efforts of the 1680s and 1690s, which laid the foundation for the attacks of Sandiford and Lay in the 1720s and 1730s. That in turn supported the final assault on slavery beginning in the 1750s and led by Woolman.⁵⁰ Changes in Quaker antislavery rhetoric occurred in dynamic relationship with changes in slave ownership among leading Philadelphia Quakers. Between 1706 and 1730, more than three-quarters of leading Philadelphia Quakers owned slaves; between 1731 and 1751, that number dropped slightly to two-thirds. After 1750, however, the number of leading Quakers who owned slaves dropped steeply to less than one in three. Of these changes, scholar Brycchan Carey concludes, “All things considered, the most likely explanation [for the decline in slave ownership] is that a younger generation of Friends, brought up in a climate where antislavery discourse was current, were asserting the values of their generation by choosing not to replace the slaves that they inherited from their parents when they died, or choosing not to replace the slaves that their parents manumitted in their wills.”⁵¹

Woolman’s antislavery activism began in 1742 when his employer requested he write a bill of sale for a woman sold as a slave. He did not speak out publicly against the sale or against slaveholding among Quakers; he did, however, begin writing an antislavery essay. While the momentum of Quaker antislavery had begun to accelerate in the 1740s, it was still not an opportune time for Woolman to publish his antislavery tract. As a birthright Quaker, Woolman understood Quaker bureaucracy. He knew that a frontal attack on Quaker slaveholders, or publishing without the consent of the meeting, as Lay and Sandiford had done, would be unproductive. As Quaker historian J. William Frost observes, “Being moral for Woolman did not require being foolish, tilting at windmills.” Woolman waited to go public until after six new members were appointed to the Yearly Meeting’s Overseers of the Press, essentially reconstituting the group and creating an atmosphere more receptive to antislavery. The following year Woolman submitted Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes to the overseers, who published it in 1754. Woolman published an even more forceful antislavery essay, Considerations on Keeping Negroes, Part Second, in 1762. In all, Woolman wrote five major essays between 1746 and 1772, two of which were published posthumously. A Plea for the Poor, most likely written in 1763 and 1764 and published in 1793, is the fullest expression of Woolman’s economic views. Woolman also kept a journal that was published by Friends after his death in York, England, in 1772.⁵²

Developing a broad critique of slave trading, slavery, slave-labor goods, and the transatlantic economy, Woolman highlighted the inextricable link between slavery and the emerging consumer society. The trade in African slaves and the products of slaves’ labor were the most visible signs of an oppressive, global economy driven by the greed of Quakers and non-Quakers alike, an evil that threatened the current generation as well as future generations. Woolman abstained from slave-labor goods, such as sugar, for motives that went beyond opposition to the slave trade and slavery. Rather abstention from slave-labor goods was part of a comprehensive plan to reform the transatlantic economy, one based on what he described as “the right use of the Lord’s outward gifts.” Woolman imagined a just and simple economy that would benefit everyone, freeing men and women to “walk in that pure light in which all their works are wrought in God.”⁵³

That just economy was based on the principle that “Man is born to labor.” Labor is a “proper part” of life, Woolman wrote, and when “directed by the wisdom from above, tends to our health, and adds to our happiness in this life.” Labor opened the pores, improved the circulation of the blood, and prepared the individual “to enjoy the sweetness of rest.”⁵⁴ The fruits of labor should be received as “a trust committed to us, by HIM who formed and supports the world.”⁵⁵ “The right use” of labor and the fruits of labor created the moral economy Woolman envisioned. Woolman advocated that the hours of labor be reduced so that toil and income might be more equitably shared; however, he did not imagine an equal distribution of wealth or of labor. He recognized that men had varying capacities for labor and different needs, so he called on the wealthy to set an example by paying a just wage and living a plain and frugal life. Thus material prosperity included moral responsibility toward others who were not as blessed. Laying aside the desire for “outward greatness” and instead seeking “the right use of things,” Woolman wrote, would lead people to “be employed in things useful that moderate labour with the blessing of heaven would answer all good purposes relating to people and their animals, and sufficient number have leisure to attend on proper affairs of society.” If individual labor was guided by the inward light of Christ, receiving the fruits of that labor as a trust from God, social and economic inequities would be moderated and all men and women would be able to enjoy “the blessing of heaven.”⁵⁶ As Woolman wrote, “If one suffer by the unfaithfulness of another, the mind, the most noble part of him that occasions the discord, is thereby alienated from its true and real happiness.” The “neglect and misuse” of talents separated men and women “from the heavenly fellowship and are in the way to the greatest of evils” while the “true medium” of labor led Christians to wait with humility on “the inward teaching of Christ.”⁵⁷ In this way, “the right use” of labor and the fruits of labor restored mankind to “the true harmony of life.”⁵⁸

Woolman lauded the benefits of labor; yet, he also recognized that selfish individuals would use the principle that “man is born to labor” to exploit men. The abuse of labor led to an array of evils: indolence and vanity, immoderate consumption of alcohol and other consumer goods, and violence and cruelty toward others. Idleness caused men to neglect their families while too much labor made “understanding dull” and “intrude[d] upon the harmony of the body.” Excessive labor was contrary to “divine order,” Woolman observed. “To labour too hard or cause others to do so … is to manure a soil for propagating an evil seed in the earth.” Slavery represented the worst abuse of labor because slaveholders neglected “the true medium” of labor, forcing slaves to labor for others without benefit.⁵⁹ Contrasting African village life to African slavery, Woolman noted that in Africa men and women “with a little labour raise grain, roots, and pulse to eat, spin and weave cotton, and fasten together the large feathers of fowls to cover their nakedness, many of whom in much simplicity live inoffensive in their cottages and take great comfort in raising up their children.” Captured and enslaved, African men and women were “put to labour in a manner more servile and wearisome than what they were used to, with many sorrowful circumstances attending their slavery.” Slavery disrupted the divine order of labor; thus, the violence of slavery “belongs not to the followers of Christ.”⁶⁰

Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes reflected Woolman’s firsthand experience with southern slavery, which he encountered for the first time in 1746 when he traveled through Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Quaker traveling ministers often relied on their hosts for lodging and meals as well as the feeding and care of their horses. On this trip, Woolman struggled to reconcile his developing antislavery views with his dependence on the hospitality of slaveholders. Slaveholders, Woolman wrote in his journal, “lived in ease on the hard labour of their slaves.” Although Woolman felt “more easy” in households where slaves were “well provided for and their labour moderate,” he continued to feel uneasy about the benefits he received from slavery. Woolman was also disturbed by the effect slaveholding had on southern society. “White people and their children so generally living without much labour,” he wrote, “so many vices and corruptions increased by this trade, and this way of life that it appeared to me as a dark gloominess hanging over the land.”⁶¹ Still, Woolman kept his misgivings to himself.

Eleven years later, on a second visit to Quakers in the South, Woolman was not so reticent. By 1757 Woolman’s views of slavery and consumerism had had time to develop and mature. Among Quakers, the pace of antislavery had experienced a similar maturation. Quakers, individually and collectively, were discussing the morality of the slave trade and slaveholding, discussions that were intensified by the political and religious crisis of the Seven Years’ War. Still, Woolman felt quite alone: “Soon after I entered [Maryland] a deep and painful exercise came upon me,” he wrote in his journal. “The people in this and the southern provinces live much on the labour of slaves, many of whom are used hardly.”⁶² This second visit among southern Quakers made clear to Woolman the connection between luxury and violence. One could not love God and mammon; nor could one love God and simultaneously “exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving.”⁶³ Woolman concluded that if he accepted hospitality from slaveholders, he would, in effect, contribute to the evil of slavery and benefit from the “gain of oppression”: “As it is common for Friends on such a visit to have entertainment free of cost, a difficulty arose in my mind with respect to saving my own money by kindness received, which to me appeared to be the gain of oppression. Receiving a gift, considered as a gift, brings the receiver under obligations to the benefactor and has a natural tendency to draw the obliged into a party with the giver.”⁶⁴ Woolman worried that his slaveholding hosts offered hospitality to him out of respect for his reputation as a Quaker minister rather than in a spirit of unity with his antislavery views. Thus by accepting the hospitality of slaveholders, Woolman believed he would encourage Quaker slaveholders to feel at ease with slaveholding. After an intense period of reflection, Woolman decided on a course of action: “When I expected soon to leave a Friend’s house where I had entertainment, if I believed that I should not keep clear from the gain of oppression without leaving money, I spoke to one of the heads of the family privately and desired them to accept of them pieces of silver and give them to such of their Negroes as they believed would make the best use of them; and at other times I gave them to the Negroes myself, as the way looked clearest to me.”⁶⁵ By the mid-eighteenth century, many Quakers described the commerce in African slaves as a “gain of oppression,” a reference to the prophet Isaiah’s exhortation to the faithful to reject everything related to evil commerce.⁶⁶ Woolman broadened the definition of a “gain of oppression” to include all “social and economic benefits that free people derived from slavery.”⁶⁷

The journey into Maryland in 1757 marked a transitional moment for Woolman as he began a “lifelong, rigorous struggle to distance himself from the operations of the slave economy.”⁶⁸ In his journal, he described the lives of slaves in greater detail than in the past. Woolman noted the tattered clothing of slaves: “Men and women have many times scarce clothes enough to hide their nakedness, and boys and girls ten and twelve years old are often stark naked amongst their master’s children.”⁶⁹ The rags worn by African slaves were used to fix in white minds that slaves were “a sort of people below us in nature.” Slaves had “little else to eat but one peck of Indian corn and salt for one week with some few potatoes.” Slaveholders destroyed slaves’ humanity and claimed their actions were justified by slaves’ miserable living conditions. The labor of slaves supported their masters, “many of them in the luxuries of life”; yet, slaves had “made no agreement to serve us and [had] not forfeited their liberty.” Woolman warned that all would face divine judgment for the treatment of enslaved Africans: “These are souls for whom Christ died, and for our conduct toward them we must answer.”⁷⁰

Woolman’s trip deepened his understanding of the ways in which slavery violated the morality of labor and the divine order of the economy. He does not indicate exactly when he decided to reject slave-labor goods as a “gain of oppression”; still, his decision was likely influenced by this second trip to the South. In 1769 Woolman noted in his journal that he had “some years ago, retailed rum, sugar, and molasses,” but having learned of the “oppressions too generally exercised” in the West Indies, decided to forgo such products.⁷¹ In the 1760s Woolman began to criticize other aspects of the transatlantic economy, “associating transatlantic commerce with warfare, economic inequality, godlessness, intemperance, and cruelty to animals” as well as the enslavement of Africans. Increasingly, Woolman associated his economic choices with a sense of prophetic calling. As his biographer Geoffrey Plank observes, “By the end of his life he believed that the clothes he wore, his manner of speaking, the gifts he accepted and refused, the way he traveled, where he slept, the food he ate and his choice of spoons were freighted with moral significance.”⁷² Woolman recognized the interdependent character of transatlantic commerce. Using his economic choices, Woolman chose to serve as an example of how to engage in moral commerce.

In the most visible sign of his new calling, Woolman adopted a unique style of dress in 1762. As one contemporary noted, “His shoes were of uncurried leather, tied with leather strings, his stockings of white yarn, his coat, waistcoat, and breeches of a strong kind of cloth undyed, the natural colour of the wool, the buttons of wood with brass shanks; his shirt of cotton unbleached, about 14d. pr yard, fastened at the neck with three large buttons of the same stuff, without either cravat or handkerchief about his neck; his hat a very good one was white.” Another said simply, “he was all white.”⁷³ In A Plea for the Poor, Woolman discussed his objections to dyed cloth and “fine-wrought, costly apparel.” Such goods were rooted in a self-pleasing spirit that separated men and women from universal love. The desire for such goods constituted a “gain of oppression,” encouraging consumers to purchase goods for reasons of fashion rather than necessity. Dyes damaged cotton, linen, and wool, shortening the life of the fabric; additionally, dyes served no purpose other than “to please the eye and partly hide the dirt,” Woolman claimed.⁷⁴ Instead, Woolman encouraged men and women to “lay aside curious, costly attire, and use that only which is plain and serviceable” and thus “contribute toward lessening, that business which hath its foundation in a wrong spirit.”⁷⁵

By adopting simply tailored attire, Woolman affirmed traditional Quaker tenets about plain clothing; however, he was also part of a tradition that was gaining traction in the American colonies. In the late seventeenth century, antislavery activist Thomas Tryon encouraged Quakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey “to dress only in locally made textiles, with natural, locally produced colors, as part of his broad scheme to promote a just and simple economy.”⁷⁶ Likewise, Ralph Sandiford and Benjamin Lay wore coarse, simple clothes in protest against slavery.⁷⁷ By the 1760s, other Quaker opponents of slavery were adopting similar forms of dress. Joseph Nichols, founder of the “New Quakers,” or Nicholites, urged his followers to “keep from making or buying any dyed, striped, flowered, corded or mixed stuff” and to avoid “all needless cuts and fashions in their clothes.” In 1780 a visitor to the Nicholites noted that they dressed only in white.⁷⁸ Joshua Evans made a similar commitment to avoid dyes, opting for a utilitarian form of dress as part of a “broader project for economic and spiritual reform.”⁷⁹ Fashionable dyed clothing, like East India tea, was inconsistent with “the dictates of the blessed Truth,” Evans observed. He longed for the day when this “pure influence may spread more and more” so that the “hungry would be fed, and the naked, clothed.”⁸⁰ Woolman and Evans had been neighbors and had attended the same Quaker meeting. Likely, the two men discussed cloth dyes in 1761 or 1762 because both men decided almost simultaneously to reject dyed clothing. Woolman likely influenced Joseph Nichols, too, having visited Nichols and his followers in 1766. These connections suggest that Woolman’s arguments against slavery “resonated within a vibrant, if small, American tradition.”⁸¹ For this small group of reformers, simply tailored, undyed clothing became an important statement of anticonsumer, antislavery identity.

The desire for consumer goods led men and women to engage in habits that disrupted God’s divinely ordered economy. Woolman believed that oppressive practices, such as the enslavement of African men and women or the pursuit of fashionable clothing, impacted the entirety of the Atlantic economy. He was not the first to recognize the interdependent nature of transatlantic commerce. In 1713 novelist and economic journalist Daniel DeFoe argued for the importance of the African slave trade: “The case is as plain as cause and consequence: Mark the climax. No African trade, no negroes; no negroes no sugars, gingers, indicoes, etc; no sugars etc no island, no islands no continent; no continent no trade.”⁸² DeFoe recognized the interconnected nature of transatlantic commerce and concluded that the slave trade, regardless of the violence done to African men and women, was vital to that commerce. Woolman, however, reached a different conclusion. In his journal, he recounted a dream he had in the spring of 1770, a dream that seemingly collapsed the global economy into a single horrific vision of violent consumption:

I dreamed a man had been hunting and brought a living creature to Mount Holly of a mixed breed, part fox and part cat. It appeared active in various motions, especially with its claws and teeth. I beheld and lo! many people gathering in the house where it was talked one to another, and after some time I perceived by their talk that an old Negro man was just now dead, and that his death was on this wise: They wanted flesh to feed this creature, and they wanted to be quit of the expense of keeping a man who through great age was unable to labour; so raising a long ladder against the house, they hanged the old man.

One woman spake lightly of it and signified she was sitting at the tea table when they hung him up, and though neither she nor any present said anything against their proceedings, yet she said at the sight of the old man a dying, she could not go on with tea drinking.

I stood silent all this time and was filled with extreme sorrow at so horrible an action … but none mourned with me.⁸³

The central action of this dream is the execution of the old slave and the consumption of his body. In the marginalia of his manuscript, Woolman noted the cunning of the fox and the leisure of the cat and the connection between tea and sugar and African slavery. The slave’s execution and the subsequent consumption of his corpse by the creature suggests the literal consumption of slaves in the agriculture and manufacture of sugar. The tea drinking woman witnessed the execution of the slave and experienced firsthand the process by which her use of tea and sugar was made possible and, as a result, she was unable to continue the tea ritual.⁸⁴

Woolman believed the slave trade and slavery encouraged the consumption of African slaves as well as consumer goods. The more consumers traded in goods produced by the oppressive labor of slaves, the more at ease slave traders and slaveholders became in the immoral traffic. That ease with slavery also made men and women much more comfortable with other oppressive economic habits such as the consumption of fashionable clothes or the relentless pursuit of wealth. Although Woolman worked within the structure of the Society of Friends, he consistently challenged Quakers to reconsider their relationship with the transatlantic economy. It was important for Quakers to realize how thoroughly the “gain of oppression” had infiltrated the Atlantic world. Woolman’s unique clothing served as a visible statement of his disengagement with the status quo. Using his words, his social interactions, and his appearance to protest the oppression of the Atlantic economy and to demonstrate to others the benefits of moral commerce, Woolman sought to “make the world better by living well, trusting God, and serving as an example to others.”⁸⁵ For Woolman, the restoration of “the true harmony of life” required fundamental changes in the social and economic basis of the global economy, including but not limited to the abolition of slavery.

Quaker abstention from slave-labor goods focused on the ascetics of the boycott, urging Friends to disengage from the marketplace and, in particular, from slavery by refusing to benefit from the “gain of oppression.” While such rhetoric provided the ideological basis for the boycott of slave-labor goods, it had limited appeal beyond the Society of Friends. For many consumers in Britain and the United States, the source of their goods mattered little. Indeed, many agreed with DeFoe, believing the commerce in slaves and the products of their labor were critical to success of the nation. “The … motives of commercial policy [require] that the claims of religion and morality ought to be subservient to those of avarice and luxury,” British Quaker Joseph Woods observed in 1784. “It is better a thousand poor unoffending people should be degraded and destroyed [than] the inhabitants of Europe should pay a higher price for their rum, rice, and sugar.” The slave trade, he claimed, had corrupted British commerce, implicating the government, merchants, and consumers in the “disgraceful commerce.”⁸⁶ Woods, like Woolman, worried about the impact of the consumer revolution on Friends; yet, Woods did not connect his call for the abolition of the slave trade to a specific religious creed. Rather, he gave abolition a nonsectarian voice. Thoughts on the Slavery of Negroes is an important transitional moment, emphasizing both the beginning of British Quaker involvement in the abolition campaign and broader consumer activism against slavery and the slave trade. Seven years after Woods published his tract, London Baptist printer William Fox published his own tract on the slave trade and slavery, sparking a national boycott of slave-grown sugar.