Abstention and Free Labor

Quaker arguments against slave labor asserted the morality of free labor, or the labor of free men and women. Woolman, as we have seen, believed the right use of labor to be the foundation of a moral economy. He praised the African subsistence economy, contrasting the benefits of such an economy where the labor of all sustained all, to the immoral economy of slavery, where the abuse of labor promoted violence and greed.⁷ Woolman and like-minded Quakers claimed slave labor degraded all aspects of life. Even the landscape reflected the ruinous effect of slavery. Traveling in North Carolina in 1796, Woolman’s contemporary Joshua Evans observed, “The country looks poor, barren, and desolate.” Slaveholders “fare sumptuously every day, and waste that which might be a comfort to those poor, oppressed slaves.” Slavery caused both physical and spiritual poverty. According to Evans, “Religion is in the talking, the country is poor [and] barren as are the people, and the land is poorly cultivated.” Slavery seemed “to hang over the land” like “a thick cloud of darkness.”⁸ For Woolman and Evans, the morality of free labor was more important than its efficiency. Morality rather than economy was the goal.

Indeed, in the mid and late eighteenth century few individuals argued for the economic efficiency of free labor. Conventional wisdom defined slave labor as more productive than free labor. Thus, when individuals such as Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush argued for the moral and the economic superiority of free labor, they helped create a new understanding of labor. Franklin and Rush, like Woolman, contrasted the honor of labor against the dissipation of luxury. Writing in 1751, Franklin framed his argument for free labor in terms of population growth, claiming slavery diminished productivity by limiting slave owners’ ability to support many children. Free labor encouraged men to “Frugality and Industry,” he noted. Whereas the slave would neglect his “Business,” the free man would tend more closely to it because he would reap the benefits of his labor: “Neglect is natural to the man who is not to be benefited by his own care or diligence.” Rush made similar arguments about the productivity of free labor, citing as evidence Monsieur Le Poivre’s observations of sugar cultivation by free labor in Cochin China (present-day southern Vietnam). “Liberty and property form the basis of abundance and good agriculture,” Le Poivre observed. “The earth, which multiplies her productions with a kind profusion, under the hands of the free-born labourer, seems to shrink into barrenness under the sweat of the slave.” In addition to the productivity of labor, Rush emphasized the ways in which free labor suppressed luxury and vice and promoted the equal distribution of property for the good of society.⁹

Arguments for the economic superiority of free labor often appeared alongside traditional arguments that slave labor was the source of wealth, suggesting that in this period ideas about labor were in transition. For example, an essay by “Rusticus,” which appeared in the New York Daily Advertiser in 1790, argued for the efficiency of free labor while emphasizing slaveholders’ claims that slave labor was cheaper, in other words, more efficient. Such contradictions reflect the variable and protean nature of ideas about free labor. Outlining the transition of ideas about free labor from the 1750s to the 1810s, historian Eva Sheppard Wolf argues that Franklin and Rush were at “the leading edge of a new intellectual and cultural wave.” Although free-labor ideals such as those put forth by Franklin and Rush were unusual in the mid-eighteenth century, by the 1790s those ideas assumed “a more frequent and central place in antislavery writing.”¹⁰

As a result in 1790, when William Cooper sought support for maple sugar as an alternative to slave-grown cane sugar, he and his supporters were able to deploy multiple arguments in favor of maple sugar, including an explicitly moral-economic argument that included free labor. Cooper, who founded Cooperstown, New York, and was the father of the writer James Fenimore Cooper, had acquired a patent on a large tract of heavily forested land on New York’s Lake Otsego in the late 1780s. He then sold parcels of land to farmers for commercial development.¹¹ In 1789 Cooper partnered with Philadelphia Quaker and dry goods merchant Henry Drinker, who had purchased 24,000 acres along the Delaware River. Drinker had his agent establish Stockport on the Pennsylvania side of the river and invited Cooper to sell and settle his frontier lands. At the same time, Cooper drew Drinker into his maple sugar enterprise.¹² Drinker also provided Cooper with important links to antislavery Philadelphians, including Rush, who along with Tench Coxe, James Pemberton, John Parrish, and Jeremiah Parker, agreed to organize an association to purchase annually a quantity of maple sugar to encourage its manufacture, thus reducing American dependence on slave-grown West Indian sugar. The group attracted seventy-two subscribers, primarily in Philadelphia. For the Quaker Drinker, maple sugar promised the ideal combination of morals and economics. No longer would his sugar kettles support the “polluted and wicked” sugar industry of the British Indies.¹³

Rather than invest large amounts of capital to start the maple sugar manufacturing operation, Cooper and Drinker relied on farmers motivated by promotional literature. Drinker and Rush each produced pamphlets promoting the benefits of maple sugar. In 1790, Drinker assisted in the publication of a tract titled, Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar: With Directions for Its Further Improvement.¹⁴ It was subsequently reprinted in New York and London along with reprints in British and American newspapers such as the New-York Magazine, or Literary Repository.¹⁵ Rush’s An Account of the Sugar Maple-Tree of the United States, and of the Methods of Obtaining Sugar from It was published in 1792. Although Rush claimed his Account had been written as a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the work was actually created as an address to the American Philosophical Society, which counted Drinker, Rush, and Jefferson among its members. This publication was also reprinted in London.¹⁶ Drinker’s and Rush’s efforts were further bolstered by the French abolitionist Jacques Brissot de Warville, founder of the French abolitionist society, the Société des Amis des Noirs, who also lauded sugar made from the maple tree. Although not directly involved in the efforts to manufacture maple sugar, Brissot nonetheless praised the morality of maple sugar. Brissot had encountered the commodity during his 1788 trip to the United States. When he published his New Travels in the United States of America three years later, he celebrated the moral benefits of maple sugar. “Providence,” he observed, had placed on the North American continent a “powerful and infallible means of destroying” the evil of slavery: the sugar maple. According to Brissot, “Since the Quakers have discerned in [maple sugar cultivation] the means of destroying slavery, they have felt the necessity of carrying it to perfection; and success has crowned their endeavors.” Brissot also called for the cultivation of great orchards of sugar maples in France in an effort to reduce European dependence on slave-grown sugar.¹⁷

Advocates of maple sugar emphasized both its economic and its moral benefits. Maple sugar production required little labor while generating great wealth. As one optimistic supporter enthused, “a farmer … could raise nothing on his farm with less labor, nothing from which he would derive more emolument, than the sugar maple tree.”¹⁸ Supporters often borrowed liberally from the rhetoric of the British boycott of slave-grown sugar to highlight the morality of maple sugar. One writer contrasted the “buxom health and voluntary labor” of American girls in gathering and processing maple sap to the dismal West Indian “scene” of “the famished mother on the parched mountain with her child tied to her back.”¹⁹ The editors of the Daily Advertiser noted that maple sugar was “obtained by the willing labor of freemen” whereas West Indian sugar “cost four lives” for every hogshead, and was therefore “stained with blood.”²⁰ The editors of the New Jersey Journal calculated the human cost of West Indian slave-grown sugar: “One hundred and eighty millions of human beings have been deprived of life, to gratify the palates of those who consume the produce of their labour—that Europeans might be supplied with sugar!” The editors also published reports from “Philadelphia, New-York, and Hudson” that consumers who used slave-produced molasses had been purposely poisoned. “Why should we risk the poison and filth of the West-India negroes in our sugar and molasses,” the author asked, “when we can have the pure juice of the maple for nothing?”²¹ Supporters also appropriated the free-labor arguments that were gaining traction in the late eighteenth century, which resulted in interesting promotional experiments. For example, activists organized an association to encourage the manufacture of maple sugar, offering premiums of up to seventy-five silver dollars to the top three producers of maple sugar. To qualify, applicants for the premiums had to sign an affidavit that only they or their family and no more than five “persons exclusive of the said family” had manufactured the sugar.²² As historian David Gellman concludes, the cultivation of maple sugar “demonstrated the benefits of household prerogative, speculative landownership, and nature’s well-managed bounty.”²³

Still, these efforts failed to overcome some pragmatic problems, in particular, that maple sugar was an imperfect substitute for cane sugar. Sugar maples, although indigenous to North America, grew only in certain areas and produced limited quantities of sugar. Moreover, maple sugar lacked the versatility of cane sugar; among other problems, it was too moist for some purposes such as most types of candy making, and its distinctive taste meant it could not function as an anonymous sweetener like cane sugar.²⁴ Although activists continued to laud maple sugar as an ethical alternative to slave-grown sugar well into the nineteenth century, the consumption of maple-sweetened goods never caught on with consumers. Writing in 1884, Anna Davis Hallowell, granddaughter of Quakers James and Lucretia Mott, described maple sugar candies as “an abomination,” noting that “free sugar was not always as free from other taints as from that of slavery.”²⁵

However, the lack of an American boycott of slave-grown sugar in the 1790s cannot be blamed on the shortcomings of the maple sugar enterprise. Instead, we must look to the American political and economic context. Where British Quakers were successful in generating support for antislavery sentiment, American Quakers were thwarted by political compromise. When American reformers reorganized the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1787, they consciously timed the group’s new founding with the organization of the British Society for Establishing the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Supporters of the PAS and the SEAST hoped the concurrent founding of the two groups would stimulate competition between the two nations to see which would be the first to rid itself of the slave trade. This shift in strategy is evident in the number of non-Quakers associated with both groups. Franklin and Rush helped write the PAS’s new constitution, and Franklin served as president of the organization.²⁶ However, supporters found their efforts derailed by the compromises of the Constitutional Convention. In addition to delaying action against the international slave trade for twenty years, the delegates to the convention agreed to the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. One result of the Three-Fifths Compromise was southern dominance of the presidency over the next seventy years. As historian Edward Baptist concludes, the compromises of the Constitutional Convention assured that “the upper and lower South would get to expand slavery through both the Atlantic trade and the internal trade” while “the Northeast would earn profits by transporting the commodities generated by slavery’s growth.” The compromises of the convention stalled the antislavery movement and with it the boycott of slave labor. Those compromises also made boycotters’ task more difficult because it “helped to imprint an economy founded on the export of slave-made commodities onto a steadily widening swath of the continent.”²⁷

While the political compromises of 1787 and the subsequent expansion of slavery forestalled the development of a widespread, ecumenical boycott of slave labor in the United States, many American Quakers continued to encourage abstention from slave-labor goods. Increasingly, these arguments incorporated new ideas about the superiority of free labor. By the early nineteenth century, more Americans were beginning to share Franklin’s assumptions about free labor even as consumers became more dependent on slave-labor goods. Discussions of the future of Louisiana, for example, suggested that westward development would prove a boon for free labor. Newspaper editor William Duane claimed that in Louisiana “three or four hundred white farmers with their families will produce more sugar than a negro estate with two thousand slaves.” According to Alan Magruder, “The free white man who owns the soil he works, will double the quantity [produced by a Negro slave].”²⁸ As Quakers such as Enoch Lewis, Elihu Embree, and Benjamin Lundy asserted a moral-economic argument in support of abstention from slave-labor goods, they helped create new connections between abstention and free labor that aided the development of the free-produce movement in the 1820s.

Quakers and Free Produce

The promotion of maple sugar and the boycott of slave-grown sugar by Britons signaled an important shift in the abstention movement. In the mid and late eighteenth century, the majority of Quakers, including Woolman and Evans, opposed both the products of slave labor and the growing market economy. Indeed, these Quakers believed slavery and commerce functioned in dynamic relationship, each fueling an expansion of the other. In the 1790s advocates of maple sugar in America and boycotters in Britain introduced into the movement two key ideas. First, supporters on both sides of the Atlantic made clear the connection between domestic purchases and slave-labor goods. Slavery would continue so long as consumers continued to purchase its products. Thus, consumers could use their economic power to promote socially responsible commerce and to bring about the end of slavery. Second, the maple sugar debates, in particular, “helped introduce into public dialogue the notion that certain types of labor harmonized better than others with the standards of a just and economically healthy society,” as Gellman notes. “They indicated free labor’s superiority to slave labor.”²⁹ Because this shift in the intellectual understanding of abstention was critical to the development of the free-produce movement in the 1820s, it is worth examining more closely the Quaker community influenced by Woolman’s example before turning to the impact of free-labor ideas on Quaker abstention.

Quakers who were at the origins of the abstention movement protested “the systemic oppression produced by war, greed, and slavery.” Motivated by a vision of a new and universal society premised on the Golden Rule, “to do unto others,” these reformers adopted the practice of abstention as part of what historian Ellen Ross describes as “a theologically connected network of commitments.” Abstention was one of several practices, or habits, adopted by reformers who were committed “to cultivating a society that recognized the equality of all people.”³⁰ For example, Woolman and Evans eschewed most consumer goods, not just those made by slave labor, because such goods hindered the individual’s relationship with God and contributed to the oppression of others. Both men protested the expansion of the market economy. Woolman, in particular, believed the commercialization of agriculture had led to the abuse of animals. “Near large towns there are many beasts slain to supply the market, and from their blood, etc., ariseth that which mixeth in the air,” Woolman observed. “This, with the cleaning of the stables and other scents, the air in cities in a calm, wettish time is so opposite to the clear pure country air that I believe even the minds of the people are in some degree hindered from the pure operation of the Holy Spirit.”³¹ According to Evans, consumers had become too dependent on imported goods, which he believed contributed to creating a warlike economy. “I believe the vast extensive trade that has and now is carried on in this once favored land,” he remarked, “has and will prove a curse instead of a blessing.” Instead, he claimed time should be spent raising crops to provide food for local consumptions because such goods were healthier for American constitutions. Woolman, Evans, and other Quakers, such as Anthony Benezet, also adopted a vegetarian diet. As Evans’s testimony became more nuanced, he assumed an even more austere diet, forgoing salt, for example, because the tax on salt was used to retire revolutionary war debt. Eventually, he consumed only bread and water so that he could live more consistently with his spiritual values.³²

In adopting such “singularities,” Evans recognized that his commitment to live in full accord with his spiritual values was a “a way different from [his] dear brethren.”³³ In 1779 New Jersey Quaker David Cooper observed that many Friends had made a “Religion” of “disusing all Spirits, Cider, Wine, &c., all Sweets that came over tea, wearing coloured Clothing, Eating Flesh, wearing, or Eating out of Silver, &c.” Cooper made this observation after witnessing Evans’s unsuccessful attempt to gain permission from his meeting to visit in ministry Friends in Long Island. When Evans told his meeting that he planned to travel on foot “without Money” as a “Pilgrim in a Strange Land,” his meeting refused to grant him a certificate. Though sympathetic with Evans’s desire to travel in ministry, Cooper worried that his “singularities,” which by that time had included wearing a beard, had not come from “the Life,” that is, from God.³⁴ Still, Evans and Quakers like him persisted believing their example would make visible God’s love and encourage others to seek personal transformation.

Among Quakers who sought personal transformation through such singularities, there were those who sought religious and political changes as well as personal change. Like their co-religionists, these Quakers abstained from slave-labor goods as one aspect of a larger program of reform. For example, Delaware Quaker Warner Mifflin abstained from foreign imports, slave-labor goods, and salt. A former slaveholder, Mifflin liberated twenty-one slaves he had received as a gift. In 1785 he prepared a petition to the Delaware state legislature. After receiving approval from the Meeting for Sufferings in Philadelphia, Mifflin gathered more than one hundred signatures on the petition, which he then forwarded to the state legislature in early 1786. The petition was introduced along with a bill calling for the gradual abolition of slavery. The legislature passed instead a milder bill encouraging voluntary emancipation. In 1792 Mifflin submitted an individual petition to Congress asking that action be taken to limit the slave trade and to ameliorate the condition of slaves. Southern legislators objected. Representative William Smith of South Carolina claimed the right of petition did not justify the “mere rant and rhapsody of a meddling fanatic.”³⁵

While Mifflin sought political change, Long Island Quaker Elias Hicks sought sectarian change. Like his “beloved friend” Evans, Hicks was critical of the growing market economy. As a Quaker minister, Hicks had been actively involved in ending slave trading and slaveholding among Friends. In 1776, under the authority of New York Yearly Meeting, which had three years earlier directed that Friends be disowned if they continued to buy and sell slaves, Hicks and his fellow committee members visited slaveholding Friends. Although the committee found “a great unwillingness in most of [the slave owners] to set their slaves free,” the committee did succeed in drawing up papers of manumission for eighty-five slaves owned by the members of Westbury Monthly Meeting. Seven years later Hicks visited families in Westbury and Jericho warning Friends about the dangers of debt, which he believed was the result of Quakers’ growing worldliness. For Hicks, as it was for Woolman and Evans, the enslavement of Africans and the expansion of the market economy were symptomatic of a general decline in society caused by selfish desire for wealth.³⁶

All members of New York Yearly Meeting had freed their slaves by 1787; yet, they remained dependent on slavery through their consumption of slave-labor goods. To be truly antislavery, to live fully the principles of Quakerism, Hicks believed Friends should also abstain from the products of slave labor. In 1793 Hicks influenced Jericho Preparative Meeting to endorse his opinion that Friends should abstain from slave-labor goods. The Monthly and Quarterly Meetings approved the minute, or record of the decision, from the Preparative Meeting. The following year New York Yearly Meeting approved the minute and amended the ninth query of the discipline to include a statement asking whether members were implicated in slaveholding through the use of slave-labor goods. Queries, which consist of a question or a series of questions, were meant to provide a framework for prayerful reflection rather than a set of outward rules. While the content of queries has varied, the queries consistently reflect Quaker testimony such as simplicity, peace, and community. By adopting the change to the ninth query, New York Yearly Meeting urged Friends to prayerfully consider their use of slave-labor goods. From 1797 through 1810, New York Yearly Meeting discussed abstinence and, at the annual query, several Quarterly Meetings reported that some members regretted using slave-labor products. In 1810 members of New York Yearly Meeting approved a revision of the discipline, omitting the reference to slave-labor goods. The change came as many New York Friends decided that it had become impossible to distinguish between free- and slave-labor goods.³⁷

Returning home after the yearly meeting had concluded, Hicks wrote Observations on the Slavery of Africans and Their Descendants, and on the Use of the Produce of Their Labour, a vigorous protest against Quakers’ continued use of the products of slave labor. Slavery, according to Hicks, was established and continued by tradition and normalized as consistent with justice and social order. In a series of queries, Hicks asserted the traditional Quaker argument that slaves were prize goods and, as a result, the products of their labor were also prize goods and contrary to Quaker discipline. Slaves were captured in a state of war, a war caused by “an avaricious thirst after gain,” Hicks argued, for the express purpose of “profit[ing] by the slave’s labour.” Thus, slave-labor goods were “the highest grade of prize goods, next to his person.” Those who claimed to oppose slavery yet continued to use the products of slave labor “strengthen[ed] the hands of the oppressor.” While Hicks emphasized abstention from slave-labor goods, he did not limit his critique to those goods. Like Woolman, his argument was both antislavery and anticommerce. The Meeting for Sufferings approved Hicks’s publication, which was widely circulated among American and British Friends after its publication in 1811. It was reprinted in 1814 and 1823.³⁸

Although Hicks was arguably the most visible proponent of abstention in the early nineteenth century, his support for the boycott more closely resembled eighteenth-century Quaker abstention than it did nineteenth-century free produce. Hicks, like Woolman and Evans before him, opposed the growing market economy, believing it was fueled in part by the oppression of Indians and Africans, by the export and import of goods such as grain and rum, and by the purchase of slave-labor and luxury goods. As Ross concludes, “For Evans and others such as Hicks, objections to slavery arose out of an overarching concern for ‘reformation’ that included a critique of a spectrum of human interactions that were ‘warlike’ and a commitment to cultivating a society that recognized the equality of all people.” Although the later movement shared with the earlier movement a concern for social justice, the earlier movement had a distinctly antimarket ethos. In contrast, Quakers such as Elihu Embree, Enoch Lewis, and Benjamin Lundy, who helped propel the abstention movement forward in the 1810s and 1820s, argued for moral commerce out of contempt for slavery and not as part of a broader critique of the market. The market-orientated arguments of Embree, Lewis, and Lundy helped transform the abstention movement of the eighteenth century into the free-produce movement of the 1820s.³⁹

The three men—Embree, Lewis, and Lundy—were born in the last quarter of the eighteenth century: Lewis in Pennsylvania in 1776, Embree in Tennessee in 1782, and Lundy in New Jersey in 1789. Lewis worked as an educator, surveyor, editor, and writer. He taught at Quaker schools in Radnor, Westtown, and New Garden, Pennsylvania, and in Wilmington, Delaware. Embree, who was a distant relative of Woolman, was an iron manufacturer and a former slaveholder before he became an editor. A saddler by trade, Lundy embraced abolitionism at a young age after seeing slave coffles (a line of slaves tied together) on the streets of Wheeling, Virginia. All three men were influenced by Quaker arguments for abstention, by the spread of free-labor ideas, and by the congressional debates preceding the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and all three used the pages of their respective publications to promote antislavery and free produce.⁴⁰

Of the three men, Embree had the shortest career in free produce. In 1819 Embree established the Manumission Intelligencer, which was renamed the Emancipator a year later. In his paper, Embree combined traditional Quaker arguments against slavery, British abstention rhetoric, and free-labor ideas. Slaves and the products of their labor were prize goods, he asserted. Describing slave traders and consumers as the alpha and the omega of the slave trade, Embree claimed consumers who used slave-labor goods had become cannibals in their quest for luxury. “The feast of the luxurious may be called banquets of human flesh and blood; and the partakers thereof considered as cannibals devouring their own species,” according to Embree, adopting the rhetoric of the 1790s. He called on his readers to abstain from slave-labor goods, believing the trade in slaves would cease if demand for slave-labor goods ceased. After Embree’s premature death in 1820, Lundy acquired Embree’s printing equipment.⁴¹

Lundy had apprenticed with Charles Osborn, publisher of the Philanthropist, before leaving for the Missouri territory in 1818. In Missouri he came into contact with ambitious proslavery men who wanted to expand slavery beyond the South. Lundy’s experience in Missouri led him to conclude that journalism could be a potent weapon in the fight against slavery. In the early 1820s Lundy established his own antislavery paper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Published from the 1820s to the 1830s, sometimes irregularly, the Genius was the first white-run abolitionist paper to last for more than a few issues. Although Lundy has been described by some as a gradualist, often in contrast to the immediatism of William Lloyd Garrison, Lundy believed slaves should be freed regardless of the consequences. As he wrote in the pages of the Genius, “Let justice be done, and the God of nature will do the rest.”⁴² By mid-1820s, Lundy’s support of abstention began to reflect the influence of the emerging ideas about free labor. “How different it is with the man of freedom;—though he may be black, he enjoys the fruit of his labor, and labors with animation, spurred by ambition, incited by the hope of one day enjoying the fruits of his industry,” Lundy wrote. “With such incitements to emulation, how can it be otherwise expected, than that the freeman should excel the slave in industry and enterprise, who, without one single ray of hope, is doomed to perpetual bondage.”⁴³

Lundy’s support for colonization of freed slaves originated in the conviction that free labor was more efficient than slave labor and in the desire to hasten the abolition of slavery. In the 1820s and 1830s, he explored colonization opportunities in Haiti and Mexico and Texas. Haiti’s proximity to the United States made it an attractive alternative for Lundy, whose Haitian plan would make possible the transport of thousands of free blacks and freed slaves. In the summer of 1824, Lundy held a series of antislavery lectures among Quakers in North Carolina and Virginia. Quakers in Goose Creek, Virginia, were convinced to establish the Loudoun Manumission and Emigration Society, which hoped to abolish slavery as well as “aid and encourage … the emigration of our colored population to Hayti.” The following year Lundy announced that he had opened an office in Baltimore to transact business for the Haitian Emigration Society, which had organized in Philadelphia in 1824. In 1826 he reported that North Carolina Quakers had agreed to send seven hundred freed slaves to Haiti. Seven northern Virginia antislavery societies met in Loudoun County in 1827 and adopted a Constitution of the Virginia Convention for the Abolition of Slavery. This group also supported the voluntary colonization of free and enslaved blacks to Africa or Haiti. Lundy’s Haitian plan ran into considerable opposition, however, including opposition from the supporters of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which had organized in 1816 to support the transport of free blacks to Africa. In 1825 the Haitian government withdrew its financial support of the venture. As support for the Haitian plan began to deteriorate, Lundy sought out alternatives for a colony somewhere in the South, believing the establishment of a free-labor colony of free blacks and freed slaves would place economic pressure on slaveholders to free their slaves. Lundy’s plan called for the purchase of slaves from their owners. Those freed slaves would then raise cotton on a cooperative system in which each slave would have returned their purchase price and expenses through their labor after a period of years. Having fulfilled their obligation, they would then settle elsewhere, potentially Haiti or Texas, which was at the time a part of Mexico. This plan would demonstrate the superiority of free labor and would provide a means for the speedy abolition of slavery. Lundy believed slaveholders could be convinced to free their slaves if economic motives were applied. As part of his plan to apply economic pressure on slaveholders, Lundy joined with Michael Lamb to establish a free-labor store in Baltimore in 1826, only the third such store to open. (Charles Collins opened the first free-produce store in New York City in 1817, and Jane Webb the second in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1825.) Opposition to Lundy’s free-labor colony and to Haitian emigration continued to build. In 1827 he and Lamb closed their free-labor store. That same year articles about Haiti in the Genius peaked, dropping significantly the following year.⁴⁴

In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Lundy turned his attention to Mexico, specifically Texas, as a possible site for a free-labor colony. Lundy had read H.G. Ward’s Mexico in 1827, which included an account of sugar and cotton production in Mexico. Vera Cruz alone could supply all of Europe with sugar, Ward claimed, while American colonists in Texas had experienced success growing cotton. Coffee, tobacco, and indigo were also successfully grown in Mexico.⁴⁵ The fecundity of Mexico coupled with the Mexican government’s abolition of slavery in 1829 made the country an ideal location for Lundy’s colony. In 1832, Lundy traveled to Texas to explore the possibility of locating a free-labor colony in Mexico. This was the first of several trips Lundy would make to Texas and Mexico. At the beginning of 1836, prospects for Lundy’s colony in Texas looked promising. That spring Texans forced Mexican troops to move south of the Rio Grande. As a result of the Texas Revolution, the land for Lundy’s colony lay within the boundaries of Texas, not Mexico, effectively dooming the free-labor experiment.⁴⁶

As the eldest of the three men, Lewis had a much longer history of antislavery activism. His antislavery views urged compassion for both the enslaved and the enslaver. “While it is our duty to bear a faithful testimony against African slavery, and against the laws that support it,” Lewis wrote in 1850, “we are not to forget that righteous ends are to be attained by means compatible with the spirit and precepts of the gospel.” Lewis encouraged an open, frank discussion of slavery by its opponents and supporters. Such well-reasoned arguments rather than impassioned denunciations would bring the two sides together and would in time lead slaveholders to realize the truth of slavery. “Denunciation was not the means by which [slaveholders] were to be persuaded, convinced or conciliated,” Lewis believed. “The truth has nothing to fear from the most rigid examination,” Lewis wrote. “It is error, not truth that seeks concealment.” In addition to discussion, he also urged three other antislavery tactics: compensated emancipation, eradication of proslavery laws, and abstention.⁴⁷ Together these tactics would reform the American political and economic system, ending all support of slavery.

Lewis continued to promote a reasoned discussion of slavery even as he was forced to confront its shortcomings. In an incident that resonated long afterward, the Quaker teacher experienced firsthand the limits placed on abolitionists by slaveholding laws. While teaching at Westtown in 1803, Lewis learned that one of the black residents of the village had been seized as a fugitive slave. “Now it happened that this man told me, some time before, that he had escaped from slavery,” Lewis later recalled. Setting out with another neighbor, Lewis located the party of slave catchers and demanded “the most rigorous proof on the part of the claimant.” When the slave catcher provided “overpowering” evidence of ownership, Lewis realized he was “reduced to the alternative of abandoning the poor victim of an unrighteous law, to the mercy of a master who did not seem to be overcharged with humanity, or of trying what could be done by way of purchase.” When he “tried the effect of moral reasoning on the subject,” Lewis “was answered by derisive laugh.” Finally, he negotiated a reduced price for the slave, paying four hundred dollars for the man. Lewis and others raised one hundred dollars. He advanced the fugitive the remaining three hundred dollars at considerable sacrifice to himself because he made only five hundred dollars annually as a teacher at the time. Fifty years later, reflecting on the incident, Lewis defended his action as a moral expedient: “The practice has long and extensively prevailed, of contributing to the purchase of slaves in cases of unusual hardship, not as an acknowledgement of any right in the possessor but as the only method which the laws and usages of our country have left within our power.”⁴⁸

Lewis supported abstention from slave-labor goods as an economic and a moral tactic. Abstention appealed to the slaveholder’s sense of pragmatism: render slavery unprofitable and emancipation would follow.⁴⁹ Much of Lewis’s discussion of abstention focused on the ways in which the economics of the movement supported the morals. As editor of the short-lived African Observer, Lewis lauded the efforts of the “industrious families and religious societies [of the upper counties of Virginia] who have for a length of time depended on voluntary labor.” In language reminiscent of Evans and other eighteenth-century Quakers, Lewis compared the slaveholding South and the free-labor North. While New England was characterized by “populous towns” and “prosperous villages,” the South was marked by “large tracts of land ruined by bad cultivation” and “the cabins of the slaves, [which] exhibit the extreme of wretchedness.” Free labor promoted “public enterprise, general intelligence, and virtuous habits.” If the products of free labor were brought into competition with the products of slave labor, the products of slavery would be forced from the market.⁵⁰

The use of an economic as well as moral argument by Lewis and Lundy in support of abstention reflects changes in the broader antislavery movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This change is particularly evident in the actions of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race, the annual meeting of antislavery delegates which began in 1794. The presence of Quaker delegates at the convention influenced the group’s support of abstention, which was articulated in 1796 and again in 1816. However, by the mid-1820s, delegates were linking abstention to ideas about free labor, taking more concrete action to promote their view that free labor was more efficient than slave labor. In 1823, for example, the convention agreed to purchase two hundred copies of Adam Hodgson’s A Letter to M. Jean-Baptiste Say, on the Comparative Expense of Free and Slave Labour that was being reprinted by the New York Manumission Society that year. Two years later, convention delegates offered a premium to the inhabitant of the United States who could give “an accurate statement of the nett profits arising from the employment of his slaves, and the nett profits arising from the same number and description of persons when manumitted, or employed as freemen in his service, and in the same species of labour.”⁵¹ This emphasis on the superiority of free labor was driven by new intellectual understandings about labor. It was also influenced by the growth of black activism.

Black Founders and Abstention

As Quakers and non-Quakers asserted the moral and economic superiority of free labor in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, black activists asserted their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, arguing that the theft of their labor had denied them of these fundamental rights. In the 1770s and 1780s, in a series of freedom petitions, African Americans described the losses they had incurred as the result of whites’ theft of their labor. A Petition of Many Slaves, submitted to the Massachusetts legislature in January 1773, emphasized this loss, stating that “neither they, nor their Children to all Generations, shall ever be able to do, or to possess and enjoy any Thing, no not even Life itself, but in a Manner as the Beasts that perish. We have no Property! We have no Wives! No Children! We have no City! No Country!” A Connecticut petition made a similar argument, describing how enslaved African fathers and mothers “not only groan under our own burdens, but with concern & Horror, look forward & contemplate, the miserable Condition of our Children, who are training up, and kept in Preparation for a like State of Bondage, and Servitude.” A petition by four slaves from Boston compared English and Spanish treatment of slaves. While “the Spaniards … have not those sublime ideas of freedom that English men have,” they were still “conscious that they have no right to all the services of their fellow-men.… [thus] the Africans, whom they have purchased with their money [were] allow[ed] one day in a week to work for themselves, to enable them to earn money to purchase the residue of their time.” Slaves of the English were granted no such opportunity to purchase their freedom. The Boston petition emphasized the value of Africans’ stolen labor, claiming it “would be highly detrimental to our present masters, if we were allowed to demand all that of right belongs to us for past services.” Despite its deferential tone, the petition asserted both the value of African American labor and the right of blacks to receive that value. Even after emancipation, blacks suffered from the theft of the labor. In protest against taxation, a group of free blacks from Massachusetts claimed their earlier service as slaves had denied them the opportunity to accumulate property, and if forced to pay taxes they would be reduced to a state of “beggary”: “by reason of long bondage and hard slavery we have been deprived of enjoying the profits of our labour … and … we have been & now are taxed both in our polls and that small pittance of estate which through much hard labour and industry we have got together to sustain ourselves & families withal.”⁵² These early statements from enslaved and free blacks emphasized Quakers’ arguments that white slaveholders had robbed African Americans of their labor.

The late eighteenth century witnessed the rise of black institutions and black print production. The slave population doubled, increasing from about five hundred thousand to nearly one million. Emancipation in the North gave way to segregation. While many whites remained silent, black activists did not. African Americans organized independent churches, Masonic lodges, insurance organizations, and mutual aid societies. Focused on community building and racial uplift, these groups provided important support for the free black communities that were developing and expanding in this period. Black print production supported the efforts of these African American institutions. Creating a distinct tradition of publication—a “counterpublic,” as scholar Joanna Brooks argues—black authors’ texts were “informed by black experiences of slavery and post-slavery, premised on principles of self-determination and structured by black criticism of white political and economic dominance.” These early black texts expressed for the first time a corporate consciousness.⁵³ Men like Richard Allen and Prince Hall provided vital leadership for the developing black communities in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. These so-called Black Founders shaped civil rights activism well into the nineteenth century.⁵⁴

Black activists organized numerous independent black institutions to provide valuable support to free blacks and freed slaves. The exponential growth in slavery in the South took place at the same time as the North and the Midwest experienced substantial growth and maturation of free black communities. While the slave population doubled, the free black population quadrupled.⁵⁵ In Boston, in 1775, Prince Hall, a freed slave, started the first black Masonic lodge in the world. Two years later Hall and seven other African Americans petitioned the Massachusetts state legislature for the abolition of slavery. Hall was a leader in the Boston black community in the 1780s and 1790s. The African Masonic lodge stood at the center of this community, serving as a place of education, political organization, and equality. In Philadelphia, newly freed slaves Richard Allen and Absalom Jones organized the Free African Society in 1787, the same year that white activists established the Society for Establishing the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the newly reorganized Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Modeled on white benevolent societies, the FAS organized “without regard to religious tenets … to support one another in sickness, and for the benefit of their widows and fatherless children.”⁵⁶ Allen established the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in the 1790s. The AME Church grew from several dozen congregants in the 1790s to nearly fifteen hundred in the 1820s. In the 1820s Allen supported Haitian emigration, and in the 1830s joined the free-produce movement.⁵⁷ The FAS, the AME Church, and the African Masonic lodges were among the dozens of the institutions organized as part of the growing free black community.

The Black Founders of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were critical to the development of black opposition to colonization in the 1810s. In 1816, white activists organized the American Colonization Society to promote the establishment of an American colony in Africa for freed slaves and free blacks. Procolonizationists linked the potential for slave revolt to the presence of a large free black population, claiming slaveholders would be encouraged to free their slaves if those freed slaves were sent to Africa. Emigration would reduce the population of free blacks in the United States, especially in the South. Moreover, colonizationists claimed emigration to Africa would resolve racial problems and provide racial uplift. African Americans, colonizationists argued, could never attain equality in a white society. Initially, some black abolitionists supported the ACS; however, many abolitionists regardless of race came to believe the ACS was antiblack rather than antislavery.⁵⁸ African Americans used the language of Quaker abstention and the slave-sugar boycott to protest colonization. In 1817, at a gathering at Allen’s church in Philadelphia, black activists asserted their right to citizenship: “Whereas our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America, we their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil, which their blood and sweat manured; and that any measure or system of measures, having a tendency to banish us from her bosom, would not only be cruel, but in direct violation of those principles, which have been the boast of this republic.” William Lloyd Garrison later reprinted the text in his Thoughts on African Colonization, published in 1831, repudiating the colonization movement and embracing the immediate abolition of slavery.⁵⁹

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, black activism focused on building and sustaining an independent black community. Although African Americans did not explicitly articulate support for abstention, as the Quakers did, they used language reminiscent of the boycott of slave labor to describe their oppression. In 1811, speaking on the anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, Adam Carman attacked the economic basis of slavery, the slave trade, and the system of European commerce. The slave trade had reduced African Americans to “commercial commodities.” Blacks had become “interwoven into the system of commerce, and the revenue of nations,” Carman remarked, thus “the merchant, the planter, the mortgagee, the manufacturer, the politician, the legislators, and the cabinet minister” were all implicated in the trade in African slaves. Rendered a “vendible article,” blacks were sold to the “highest bidder.”⁶⁰ Black activism transformed Quaker abstention rhetoric, informing traditional sectarian ideas about the theft of black labor with the lived black experience of slavery and postslavery.

The Quaker Schism and Abstention

Of the cultural forces that influenced Quakers’ understanding of abstention from slave-labor goods—the ongoing debate about the relationship between slavery and religious beliefs, the advent of new ideas about labor, the rise of black activism, and the expansion of evangelical Christianity—none was so influential as the growth of evangelicalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Evangelicalism affected Quakers’ understanding of abstention; more importantly, evangelicalism shaped Quakers’ participation in the boycott of slave labor as they found their support for abstention tested by the strong current of revivalism that had begun to infiltrate the quietism of British and American Friends. Quietism emphasized a personal, mystical knowledge of God through the experience of the inward light or the still, small voice of God within each individual. The experience of the inward light could be contaminated by “any involvement of the human will, reason, emotions, and intellect.”⁶¹ Thus, intermediaries such as priests, sacraments, and offerings were unnecessary and interfered with the experience of the inward light. Evangelicalism, in contrast, emphasized external rules and behaviors such as Bible reading, settled ministry, temperance, and restraint as a means to instill moral discipline. Rather than relying on individual interpretation of correct faith, such outward rules placed authority to weigh scriptural truth in the hands of a select few individuals.⁶² Quietist Quakers emphasized gradual, individual growth into salvation whereas evangelicals emphasized conversion, the “profoundly emotional” experience of rebirth that established a relationship between the individual and God.⁶³

In the early nineteenth century, in response to the spread of evangelicalism, some Quakers sought to create more uniformity among Friends. In the 1810s, American yearly meetings, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, considered plans to create a uniform discipline, uniting all of the yearly meetings into some central organization. Ohio Yearly Meeting considered a similar proposal in 1821.⁶⁴ Although these efforts failed, other efforts for evangelical orthodoxy did succeed. In 1806, both Philadelphia and Baltimore Yearly Meetings wrote into their discipline that any person who denied “the divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the immediate revelation of the Holy Spirit, or authenticity of the Scriptures” should be disowned.⁶⁵ The revisions to the discipline of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Yearly Meetings marked the first time Quakers had set a doctrinal standard. While Friends had never denied these beliefs, they had never found it necessary for Quakers to affirm them.⁶⁶ In 1810, New York Yearly Meeting also modified its discipline in ways that reflected the growing influence of evangelicalism. In 1783, when Hicks had been a member of the committee that drafted the New York discipline, the only mention of the Scriptures was found in the Query, “Are Friends careful … in the practice of frequent reading of the holy Scriptures?”⁶⁷ By 1810, however, Friends, “especially parents and heads of families,” were advised to impress on the minds of the young, a “due regard and esteem for those excellent writings, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.” Friends were advised to “frequently … read and meditate therein.” Such “pious care” to “youthful minds” would lead them “into a firm belief of the christian religion … Particularly in those parts which related to the miraculous birth, holy life, blessed example, doctrine and precepts, of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”⁶⁸

Hicks and other like-minded Quakers opposed these evangelical tendencies. While Hicks acknowledged the importance of the Scriptures among Christians, he continued to assert his belief in the inward light, claiming the scriptures must be interpreted by the Spirit and not by human effort.⁶⁹ Hicks worried that the reform activities of evangelicals were not guided by the Holy Spirit, believing that such activities had originated in “man-made ministry.”⁷⁰ In the 1810s and 1820s, the conflict deepened between Hicks and his supporters, on the one side, and evangelical Quakers on the other. Increasingly, evangelical Quakers questioned Hicks’s theological views, fearing Hicks’s attempts to lessen the authority of the Bible. French émigré Stephen Grellet, for example, claimed Hicks had attempted “to lessen the authority of the Holy Scriptures, to undervalue the sacred offices of our holy and blessed Redeemer, and to promote a disregard for the right observance of the first day of the week.”⁷¹ In 1818, Phebe Willis, an evangelical elder from Jericho (New York) Monthly Meeting, asked Hicks to clarify his views on the Bible. In a hastily composed letter, Hicks claimed the Scriptures, as interpreted, “have been the cause of four-fold more harm than good to Christendom.” Hicks believed “the light and spirit of truth in the hearts and consciences of men and women, [was] the only sure rule of faith and practice, both in relation to religious and moral things.” He urged Friends to remain “close to the leading and inspiration of the spirit of truth” and to allow nothing “whether books or men, to turn them aside from their ever-present and ever-blessed guide.” Hicks’s letter was published without his consent and was, as one historian notes, “like a bombshell” among Quakers, going “to the very heart of the conflict developing among Friends” in the early nineteenth century.⁷²

Historians, as well as Friends at the time, disagree on what caused the schism among American Quakers in the 1820s. In the United States, the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening coincided with religious disestablishment, creating the sense that the country was in the midst of what historian Robert Abzug describes as a “spiritual free-for-all.” As a result of disestablishment, Americans were free to select their church, or to create a new church, or to forgo church altogether. Dissenting religious groups, such as the Baptists and Methodists, competed with previously state-supported religions for potential converts. Revivalism encouraged the growth of voluntary associations, often staffed by paid agents. Voluntary associations, such as Bible and Sunday School associations, were seen as the means by which the world would be made a better place. The expansion of religious benevolence led Quakers to make more explicit their definition of appropriate religious activism. There were many Quakers who, in opposition to Hicks, welcomed the opportunity to join with other evangelicals in various forms of benevolent activity, including abstention and antislavery societies. Often, though not exclusively, these evangelical Quakers were also more likely to have benefited from the spectacular growth in the nation’s economy, becoming successful businessmen and merchants, including Philadelphia elder, Jonathan Evans, who was one of the more vocal critics of Hicks.⁷³

The conflict between Evans and Hicks came to symbolize both the Hicksite schism and the role of free produce in the separation. Writing in 1801 to his wife, Evans claimed he no longer felt the need to abstain as it had become too difficult to distinguish between free- and slave-labor goods.⁷⁴ Described by one contemporary as “sound as a bell, and firm as a rock,” Jonathan Evans was a formidable opponent. Evans’s family roots dated to the early days of Pennsylvania. A lumberman, Evans had also speculated in landownership in Delaware County, just outside Philadelphia, amassing a substantial fortune. In 1817, when he retired from the lumber business, Evans had accumulated a fortune worth nearly $43,000. (In 2015 dollars, Evans’s net worth would be near three-quarters of a million dollars.) During the American Revolution, he had been jailed for refusing to serve in the militia. At the center of Orthodox power in Philadelphia, Evans held appointments in his monthly meeting as well as the powerful and influential Meeting for Sufferings of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.⁷⁵ The complete “breech of unity” between Evans and Hicks occurred in 1819 at Pine Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia.⁷⁶ Hicks arrived in Philadelphia in late October to attend several meetings. On October 27, Hicks visited Pine Street meeting where he preached against the products of slave labor and noted that some Friends who had previously abstained from these products had taken a “retrograde course,” as his testimony was later described, making a rather pointed reference to the lapsed abstinence practice of Evans.⁷⁷ After Hicks finished his testimony, he asked permission of the meeting to attend the women’s business meeting at the other end of the building. All of the members except Evans agreed to Hicks’s request. After Hicks’s departure, Evans called for an adjournment of the meeting, suggesting members could finish their business at a later time. Though some members opposed the move, Evans was successful in adjourning the meeting. When Hicks returned to the men’s meeting, he was surprised to find the meeting dismissed. Picking up his coat, Hicks observed that it was kind of the men to leave his coat for him. At the time, Hicks was traveling with certificates from his monthly and quarterly meetings. The incident, for Hicks’s followers, demonstrated the hostility Evans and his supporters had toward Hicks. For many Quakers, Evans’s behavior was “a mark of great disrespect and public hostility to that dignified minister of the Gospel.”

The incident at Pine Street became “almost legendary among Hicks’s followers,” as historian H. Larry Ingle argues.⁷⁸ Evans attempted to make amends, visiting Hicks at the home of Samuel Fisher where he was staying. Evans objected to Hicks’s appeal to the youth to disregard their elders’ authority, and Hicks reminded Evans that the elders had objected to John Woolman’s testimony. Evans responded that Woolman “bore his testimony in simplicity, but never called his friends thieves and murderers” as Hicks had described those who used the products of slave labor. The two men then began to discuss whether Hicks had misquoted the Bible when Hicks called for an end to the conversation until Evans had apologized. Evans refused.⁷⁹ Evans’s biographer denied that the “rift” between Evans and Hicks had any connection to Hicks’s free-produce testimony. The breech between the two Quakers, William Bacon Evans remarked, “occurred at least on the part of Jonathan Evans because of a difference in doctrine.”⁸⁰

Between 1819 and 1827, tensions increased between supporters and opponents of Hicks. The causes of those tensions were complex. The economic success of Orthodox Friends, such as Evans, contributed to the growing divide between Hicks’s opponents and supporters. Likewise, questions of authority and power, particularly as it was wielded by Quaker elders and members of the Meeting for Sufferings, became entwined with theological debates, as well as personalities, heightening tensions among American Quakers. Hicks’s support for free produce exacerbated these debates among Quakers. Philadelphia elders like Evans were correct in their belief that Hicks’s sermons on free produce attacked their religious and business practices. Hicks emphasized the ascetic character of abstention and challenged Quakers’ continued dependence on slavery through the consumption of slave-labor goods. Renunciation of slave-labor products was a visible sign that an individual upheld the traditional Quaker testimony on plainness and simplicity and had rejected the temptations of the emerging market economy, an economy based in large part on slave labor. As American abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child later claimed, Hicks’s “zeal on the subject” of abstention caused in some Quakers, like Evans, “a disposition to find fault with him.”⁸¹ Still, it is important to emphasize that in April 1827, when supporters of Hicks walked out of the yearly meeting and set up a reformed yearly meeting, supporters of abstention were aligned on either side of the schism.

Hicks’s opponents cited his testimony against slave-labor products as evidence of the unsoundness of his theological views. Elisha Bates, a member of Ohio Yearly Meeting and an opponent of Hicks, denied in 1819 that the use of slave produce was sinful. Bates outlined four reasons why the boycott of slave-labor was misguided. First, the boycott was an act of coercion rather than persuasion. Describing the boycott as “a non intercourse act,” Bates argued that it applied a physical rather than a moral solution “to the evil.” Second, God provided for the good and the evil. “The bounties of Providence,” he claimed, were “to be received with meekness, and with gratitude to the Divine Giver.” Third, slaveholders should be the object of Christian charity. According to Bates, “we are taught to believe that there is still in [the slaveholder’s] heart a principle of good, and we are prompted to hope that this may be reached and raised by the language of Gospel Love.” Finally, Bates claimed, it was impossible to avoid the taint of slave labor: “The blood and the tears of the victims of cruelty may be showered on the soil from which my bread is drawn … the sighs of anguish, may mix with the air that I breathe.”⁸² Bates questioned Hicks’s soundness and reasoning. Hicks “tells [Friends] that he never dares lay his head down to rest till he has consulted respecting the actions of the day, and feels approved of God,” Bates claimed. “But how a fallible being is to be always able to feel the divine approbation at stated times, is not easy to be conceived.”⁸³ For Bates and other like-minded Orthodox Quakers, Hicks’s free-produce testimony provided more evidence of the minister’s unsound theology.

Those Orthodox Quakers who supported free produce took refuge in the testimony of eighteenth-century Quaker ministers, most notably John Woolman. Philadelphia Quaker George W. Taylor, for example, focused his criticism of Hicks on theological questions rather than Hicks’s support for free produce. Taylor “became in boyhood thoroughly antislavery.” Reading Woolman’s Journal convinced Taylor “that if slavery was wrong, it was wrong to assist in the wrong by giving the motive to perpetuate the wrong.” Taylor described abstention as a practical antislavery activity and “not merely [a] speculative notion” such as colonization.⁸⁴ For Taylor, the decision to join with the Orthodox Quakers against Hicks was distinct from his decision to support free produce.

Among Hicksites, support for abstention and free produce was not as universal as might be expected given Hicks’s support for abstention and free produce. For example, Hicksite John Comly no longer practiced abstinence, citing reasons that were similar to those given by Orthodox Quaker Jonathan Evans. In his Journal, Comly described his early participation in the boycott as a means of spiritual discipline rather than a political statement against the slave trade. During the eighteenth-century boycott of slave-grown sugar, Comly had been influenced by Thomas Clarkson (and perhaps William Fox) to abstain from the use of West Indian produce. Motivated by a desire to remain “clear of innocent blood” and to avoid “upholding the cruelties of the African slave trade,” Comly maintained his testimony “against the injustice, cruelty, and oppression” of the trade for “a considerable number of years” until the slave trade was abolished in the United States and Britain. Comly realized that “the habit of not using sugar” had become well established, yet the ground on which his testimony stood had been removed with the abolition of the international slave trade. “I had nothing left to support it,” he observed, “unless slavery itself should seem to require it.” Comly concluded that the way had appeared for him to resume “the moderate and temperate use of ‘whatever is sold in the shambles, (or stores) asking no questions for conscience’ sake.’ ” In examining his years of abstinence, Comly questioned the purpose of his boycott of West Indian produce. He believed his individual abstinence had had no effect on the eventual abolition of the slave trade. Comly concluded that the benefit of abstinence had been in the disciplining of his own mind: “Even though no good had been done to any other, to my own mind it had been of incalculable benefit. It had been a school of discipline to me—a discipline that led to obedience to the light of truth on many subjects to which my attention had been directed, and to which it might yet be called.”⁸⁵ For Comly, as it was for many Quakers on either side of the schism, abstention from slave-labor goods was an individual decision, a matter of spiritual discipline, rather than a political statement against slavery.

In the early nineteenth century, as Quakers weighed theological questions such as the authority of the Scriptures, abstention and free produce became for many a powerful means with which to discredit the opposition. That supporters and opponents of free produce could be found on either side of the Hicksite schism suggests the protean meanings of abstention for Quakers. For some, including Hicks, abstention from slave-labor goods was an essential aspect of Christian identity whereas others, including Comly and Evans, believed abstention had little relevance in spiritual matters. The spread of evangelicalism deepened the theological fracture lines that had first appeared among Friends in the late eighteenth century. Abstention became entwined in these debates, emphasizing, in particular, Friends’ varied responses to the religious, economic, and social changes of the period.

Despite Quaker discussions of abstention, the boycott of slave-labor goods waned significantly in the early nineteenth century in the United States and Britain. After the abolition of the international slave trade by Britain (1807) and the United States (1808), attention shifted to enforcing the ban on the slave trade. The abolition of slavery remained the goal; yet, it hovered in the distance, coming no closer to fruition than before the abolition of the slave trade. Absent an active antislavery movement, there was little need or interest in continuing to promote the boycott of slave labor. What support remained was found primarily among the Quakers, who were preoccupied with other religious matters, and among other individuals, who like the Quakers emphasized the moral commitment of avoiding the tainted products of slave labor. That changed by the early 1820s. Several key events contributed to a renewal of interest in abolitionism and abstention. These events included the continued fight to enforce the ban on the international slave trade, the organization of the American Colonization Society in 1816, and the debates surrounding the admission of Missouri in 1820. Massive slave rebellions in Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823) and the exposure of plots in Charleston, South Carolina (1822), and Jamaica (1823) also emphasized the danger in allowing slavery to continue.⁸⁶ The 1820s witnessed the revival of antislavery agitation in Britain and the United States. That agitation breathed new life into the abstention movement, particularly through the efforts of two Quaker women, one British and one American.

These two women are the focus of the next two chapters. The first woman, Elizabeth Heyrick of Leicester, England, had witnessed the slave-sugar boycott of the 1790s. Connected to two dissenting religious groups—the Unitarians and the Quakers—Heyrick had been active in social reform and radical politics since the early 1800s. In 1824 she turned her attention to the abolition of slavery, claiming the boycott of slave-labor goods was the safest and most effectual means of bringing about emancipation. The second woman, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, had been raised in the Quaker community of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Nearly forty years younger than Heyrick, Chandler began writing as a teenager, composing romantic verses about nature. In 1825, her poem, “The Slave Ship,” brought her to the attention of Quaker editor Lundy. She shared Heyrick’s emphasis on the morality of the boycott of slave labor. Chandler believed that women who boycotted slave-labor goods could influence political change through the power of their virtuous example. After Chandler was hired by Lundy in 1829 to edit a woman’s column in his abolitionist paper, she reprinted and often commented on the work of Heyrick. Together these two women reinvigorated interest in the boycott of slave labor in the 1820s and early 1830s. Yet, both women worked within very different social and political contexts that shaped their understanding of activism. Comparing Heyrick and Chandler highlights the differences between the British and the American social and political milieu. Such a comparison reveals the ways in which religion, gender, and race influenced the transformation of abstention and the subsequent development of the free-produce movement.