Quakers and Free Produce

The divisions of the 1830s continued to influence Quakers’ response to antislavery and free produce in the 1840s and 1850s. While Quaker meetings on either side of the Hicksite schism continued to issue statements on slavery, abolitionism, and free produce, earlier debates intensified, resulting in additional schisms among Friends. Among Orthodox Quakers, schism came after the visit of British evangelical Quaker minister Joseph John Gurney, who traveled among American Friends from 1837 through 1840. His views were similar to those found in mainstream evangelical culture. Gurney supported Quaker efforts to work with non-Quakers in a variety of reforms, including antislavery, temperance, Bible reading, and prison reform. Rhode Island Quaker John Wilbur, described by one scholar as “a model of the quietist Friend,” attacked Gurney’s teachings, claiming the British minister’s views were unsound. The Gurney-Wilbur conflict led to formal separations in New England and Ohio Yearly Meetings and increased divisions in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.⁷ In the 1840s and 1850s, Hicksites experienced similar divisions as disaffected Friends left their established meetings to form independent associations of Congregational, or Progressive Friends. As it did in the Orthodox split, social reform played a role in the Hicksite division.⁸ By the 1850s, there were four distinct groups of Quakers. Among the Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers were others who attempted to tread a middle ground of compromise. Despite these conflicts, Quakers continued to support abstention from the products of slave labor, either individually or collectively in the various free-produce societies.

Among Orthodox Quakers, debates about slavery focused on Friends’ participation in abolitionist societies. Of the eleven Quarterly Meetings that composed New York Yearly Meeting (Orthodox), Farmington was most active in promoting antislavery measures. In 1836, for example, in an Address to Its Members, the meeting suggested that Friends had failed to make a thorough exertion of “moral influence” in the “cause of emancipation” and, as a result, manifested “a degree of apathy.” Farmington Quarterly Meeting urged its members to reject indifference and to exercise “active virtue” on behalf of the slave. Farmington urged New York Yearly Meeting to prepare petitions to the national government and to establish a standing committee on slavery. New York Yearly Meeting, however, continued to limit Friends’ antislavery activism to public statements—such as those issued by the Yearly Meeting in 1837, 1844, and 1852—and to abstinence from the products of slave labor. In 1842, Farmington Quarterly Meeting’s Committee on Slavery issued its own statement on free produce. Reiterating Quakers’ traditional stand against the products of slave labor, Farmington Quarterly urged abstinence as a moral duty. In 1845, New York Yearly Meeting issued a similar address on free produce.⁹ In the 1840s, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Orthodox) issued its own statements on slavery, including a tract on free produce written by Samuel Rhoads in 1844. Rhoads challenged Friends to examine their testimony on slave-labor produce. Citing the example of John Woolman, Rhoads argued that Friends had for more than a century practiced individual abstinence from slave-labor products. Still, Quakers as a sect had failed to adopt abstinence despite the society’s stance against slave trading and slave owning. “We are told that we shall have no reward for attempting to do good in our own wills,” Rhoads wrote quoting New York Quaker Charles Marriott. “Would it not be as well to inquire what our reward will be for persisting to do evil in our own wills,” he asked, countering conservative Friends’ claims that joining secular antislavery societies was an attempt to correct that which was better left to divine guidance.¹⁰ The debates among Orthodox Quakers in New York and Philadelphia reveal Friends’ efforts to discern the limits of Quaker antislavery. Despite admonitions to avoid “mingling with the world,” many Orthodox Quakers continued to actively promote free produce and antislavery, joining in both sectarian and secular societies.¹¹

Of the Orthodox Quakers active in these free-produce associations, the majority were Gurneyites. In the 1840s, Orthodox Friends in the Philadelphia, New York, Ohio, and New England Yearly Meetings organized free-produce associations. Rhoads, Abraham Pennock, and George W. Taylor organized the association for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Following a meeting in April 1845, the three were part of the committee charged with drafting a constitution and issuing a call for a general meeting in June.¹² In his history of the Underground Railroad, William Still described Rhoads as having “a keen sense of justice and humanity … he never wavered, but as long as slavery existed by law in our country his influence, both publicly and privately, was exerted against it.” Rhoads adopted early the traditional Quaker testimony against the products of slave labor, later joining the American Free Produce Association in 1841. He traveled to England twice, in 1834 and again in 1847. It was on his second trip that Rhoads “enlarged his connection and his correspondence with antislavery friends there,” including British Quaker Anna Richardson. Rhoads assisted the Vigilance Committee with material assistance and often supplemented his own financial assistance with funds from Richardson and other English supporters. In the 1850s he supported financially Myrtilla Miner’s efforts to educate free black girls in Washington, D.C. Working with Pennock and Enoch Lewis, Rhoads edited the Non-Slaveholder. He served as editor of the Friends’ Review from 1856 to 1867, taking over after Lewis’s death in 1856.¹³ Pennock helped establish the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania in 1827 and was active in the AFPA, recruiting Gerrit Smith to the organization. He was also active in the Bible Association of Friends, which organized in 1829. Pennock was one of the few Orthodox Friends to play a prominent role in the secular abolitionist movement, hosting British abolitionist George Thompson when he lectured in Philadelphia, for example. Pennock’s abolitionist activities were not without controversy among his co-religionists. In 1845, British Quaker Alex Derkin cautioned Pennock against taking “too active a part in the Abolition societies.” While Derkin did not want to discourage Pennock from doing all he could for the slave, he cautioned him to work within the bounds of the society in order to preserve his “use & influence” in it.¹⁴ Taylor had studied with Enoch Lewis, later graduating to teach at Quaker schools in Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Long Island where he had come under the influence of Lindley Murray Moore. As a result of his friendship with Moore, Taylor had joined with the Orthodox Quakers when Friends divided in 1827–28. Taylor had been active in the Bible Association of Friends and served as a publishing agent for the Friend, an Orthodox Quaker publication. Taylor was also active in the temperance movement.¹⁵ The three men, who exemplified the reformist activity of Gurneyite Quakers, formed the core leadership of the new organization and also assumed editorial responsibilities of the Non-Slaveholder, the free-produce newspaper that was established in January 1846.

The Free Produce Association of Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting pledged to increase the manufacture and production of free-labor goods.¹⁶ The economic basis of the organization was quickly established as the board of managers announced, at the first annual meeting, the manufacture of ten thousand yards of cloth. In 1847, sixty thousand yards of cloth were manufactured with similar increases in quantity and quality reported in 1848. In addition to increasing supplies of free-labor goods, members of the association corresponded with British Quakers to promote the use of free-labor products and to share information including an address to the aging Thomas Clarkson, requesting from him any information about the effect of the 1791–1792 boycott on the abolition of the slave trade. Similar groups were formed in New York (1845), Ohio (1846), and New England (1848). All four organizations focused on the supply of free-labor goods. The Philadelphia group maintained close ties to Taylor’s free-labor store in Philadelphia and Levi Coffin’s store in Cincinnati while the New York society’s store was operated by George Wood, Lindley M. Hoag, and Robert Lindley Murray.¹⁷ Although the focus of these free-produce associations remained on increased supplies of free-labor goods, the organizations also urged Friends to remember their moral duty to the slave. For example, the board of managers of the Ohio group issued The Plea of Necessity in 1851, examining Friends’ plea that necessity led them to use the products of slave labor. “It is … to be regretted that many, even of those who believe abstinence from the use of slave products is called for at the hands of sincere opponents of slavery, have, to too great an extent, admitted the weight of this plan,” the managers noted. The tract examined the question of abstinence and denied the legitimacy of “the plea of necessity.” “The Plea of Necessity” was the second of two free-produce tracts produced that year by the Ohio group. The previous year the group had reissued Farmington Quarterly Meeting’s 1836 Address to Its Members.¹⁸ Despite The Plea of Necessity and the other antislavery tracts, the various Free Produce Associations of Yearly Meetings focused more on economic principles, leaving explicit statements of moral commitments to the various yearly meetings.

Free-produce activism deepened the divisions that already existed between Wilburite and Gurneyite Orthodox Quakers. The supporters of Wilbur and Gurney held distinct theological views that shaped their response to social reform. Wilburites emphasized the writings of early Friends, investing them with a sort of infallibility in the belief that “early Friends had been given a greater measure of understanding than others in grasping the truths of Christianity.” Those Wilburites who were committed to the complete guidance of the Holy Spirit refused to read the Bible unless they felt a special leading. Although the Gurneyites read the early Friends, they based their religious views on the Bible. In matters of social reform, the two groups adopted distinct stands. Wilburites emphasized disengagement with the world, participating in exclusively Quaker organizations. Gurneyites, in contrast, were active in reform and often joined with non-Quakers in social reforms such as free produce and antislavery. For Wilburites, reform work drew Friends into the spirit of the world. Reform work originated in self-will rather than waiting to learn the divine will. Ohio Quaker Joseph Edgerton warned Friends that “joining with those who do not believe in the immediate direction of Christ in such matters, and therefore do not wait for it, you will very likely become like them.” Edgerton was one of the most influential ministers in Ohio Yearly Meeting and one of the foremost opponents of abolitionism, describing it as an “overactive, restless spirit” that “like the locust, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar” was “ready to eat up every green thing.” Participation in reform, Wilburites believed, would result in an inability to discern the moving of the Holy Spirit. “What a pity! What a pity!” a voice in a dream warned Indiana Quaker Charles Osborn in 1833, “that for the abolition of slavery, and the spreading of the Bible, people should be turned against Christ.” In 1842, Osborn was one of the radical Quaker abolitionists removed from Indiana Yearly Meeting’s Meeting for Sufferings, later helping to organize the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-Slavery Friends. For Friends like Osborn and Gurney, good works were an essential part of Christianity.¹⁹ The divisions among Orthodox Quakers influenced individual participation in reform movements, such as free produce, and limited the effectiveness of such movements as supporters were forced to defend their activism.

Orthodox Quaker merchant William Bassett of Lynn, Massachusetts, was a member of New England Yearly Meeting’s Meeting for Sufferings. In the late 1830s, Bassett came to believe that Quakers had “lost the spirit of Him who was no respecter of persons and who came to ‘preach deliverance to the captive.’ ”²⁰ During this period, he came out in support of the American Anti-Slavery Society, presided at the Requited Labor Convention in 1838, and was active in the American Free Produce Association. Bassett also helped found the New England Non-Resistance Society. When he was criticized by Quakers for his antislavery activism, Bassett responded by publishing a number of pamphlets and articles condemning New England Quaker leaders for closing the meetinghouse to antislavery lecturers and for their objections to reform societies. He also attacked Quaker meetings that segregated seating for white and black members. Bassett published a Letter to a Member of the Society of Friends, defending his participation in antislavery societies. In 1840, after several years of tension between Bassett and the New England Quaker leadership, Bassett was disowned. In 1844, Bassett decided to move with his family to the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI), a cooperative community founded in 1842 to produce free-labor silk as an alternative to slave-grown cotton.²¹

The NAEI occupied 470 acres about two and a half miles from the center of Northampton, Massachusetts, on a site that included “farm- and woodland, a four story, brick silk factory, a boardinghouse, various outbuildings, and several private houses.” The factory building included manufacturing space as well as a dormitory, a common kitchen and dining room, and schoolrooms. Members worked a variety of trades in addition to the community’s primary activity, raising silkworms and manufacturing thread. Membership was based on the purchase of stock as well as on shared principles. As Bassett explained to British abolitionist Elizabeth Pease, “Our association is based on the principle of a community of interests—not on that of a community of property. Each person is credited with the amount he invests, and on withdrawal he is entitled to receive the amount to his credit.” From its incorporation in 1842 until its dissolution in 1846, the community attracted 240 men, women, and children, including black abolitionists David Ruggles and Sojourner Truth. William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass were also active in the association’s activities.²²

Bassett joined the NAEI in 1844 after experiencing several years of financial difficulties as well as problems with Quaker leaders. Unemployed and disowned by the Quakers, Bassett saw in the NAEI an opportunity to address the injustices of an economic system that oppressed wage workers as much as it did slaves. As he recounted in a letter to Elizabeth Pease in 1844, “When I was engaged in manufacturing business, with 150 persons in my employ, I became deeply impressed with the ways of the system in which I was involved. I could not reconcile with my ideas of justice the inequality that exists between the employer & the employed. I could not see why those who were laboring for me 15 or 16 hours a day should receive only just enough to sustain life, while I, with leisure for intellectual improvement, was accumulating of the products of their industry.” Bassett’s description of the injustices of wage labor sounds very much like John Woolman’s pleas for an equitable economy in A Plea for the Poor. Bassett connected his own behavior as a manufacturer to that of the slaveholder: “If the Southern Slaveholder is guilty of robbery in appropriating to himself the earnings of others, how much better am I?” The solution, Bassett decided, was a radical reordering of the relationship between employer and employee:

It seemed to me as clear as the sun at noon-day, that if an equal amount of labor were bestowed by me and my journeymen, the proceeds of our joint industry should be equally distributed amongst us. On investigating the subject I soon became convinced that the evils which I saw and deplored were inherent in the system and that no remedy could be provided but in its subversion. I was satisfied that the system of hired labor was false & necessarily unequal in its operation. In short, it seemed that the existing institutions of civilization were based on a most mischievous falsehood, ie. that the interests of men are diverse—and, hence, that no change in those institutions could satisfy the demands of humanity—The defect was radical and fatal; and a Reorganization of Society alone could provide a remedy. Instead of individual competition, humanity demands mutual cooperation.

The pursuit of wealth had corrupted American society, according to Bassett. Slaveholding was but one symptom of that problem. “If the God of Love were worshipped with half the devotedness that is bestowed upon Mammon, what a Paradise this earth would be!” Bassett concluded.²³ However, as historian Christopher Clark argues, Bassett’s time in Northampton marked “the high point of his radicalism.” After he withdrew from the community and returned to his home in Lynn, Massachusetts, Bassett drifted away from Garrisonian radicalism and toward political abolitionism. Bassett later became a Unitarian.²⁴

Hicksite Quakers were as divided as the Orthodox on the issue of Friends’ participation in popular reform movements, particularly abolitionism. One area of conflict centered on the use of Quaker meetinghouses for antislavery lectures. This prohibition, which was generally a matter of local option, applied equally to all advocates of reform, including antislavery and temperance. Even gatherings of free-produce supporters were subject to censure because some Friends believed such meetings “desecrated” the meetinghouse.²⁵ As New England Yearly Meeting explained, “to open our meetinghouses to lecturers whose opinions and principles on many subjects that we consider of primary importance are widely different from ours … will have a tendency to draw off the minds of our members from an establishment in the Truth of those principles which have ever been maintained by us.”²⁶ In Indiana, the Yearly Meeting closed meetinghouses to antislavery lecturers in response to criticism from British Friends, such as Joseph Sturge, who believed American Friends were too conservative on the question of slavery.²⁷ One of the more dramatic closures came in East Fallowfield, Pennsylvania, where a riot broke out during a meeting of the Chester County Anti-Slavery Society in January 1845. The meeting included three antislavery lecturers, including the well-known Abby Kelley from Massachusetts. On the second day, a large crowd gathered for the evening lecture. Quaker Joseph Pennock, who was present, noted the presence of “half a dozen or dozen mobocrats, and a few loose fellows of the baser sort.” Just as Quaker physician Edwin Fussell commenced speaking, a riot broke out. Pennock described what ensued: “A mobocrat, in the back part of the house, cried out, ‘There, you have talked enough, you talk as if you were going to talk all night.’ Then came the din of war. Whistling, shrieks, cries of ‘drag him out, clear the house,’ resounded on all sides. The stove-pipe was knocked down: brimstone was flung on the stove; panes of glass were knocked out; the women rushed from the house.… Some others leapt out the windows; and all was delightful confusion … Benjamin Jones stood up on a bench in the midst of the disturbers, and asserted to good purpose the right of every human being to utter his free thoughts upon any question.”²⁸ In the wake of the riot, Fallowfield Preparative Meeting debated whether the meetinghouse should be closed to any meetings other than those of worship and discipline of the Society of Friends. After extensive discussion, Friends decided to close the meetinghouse even though the majority of the membership supported keeping the meetinghouse open for antislavery lecturers. That summer the more radical among the local Quakers opened the People’s Hall. Located next to Fallowfield Meetinghouse in Ercildoun, the People’s Hall would serve as a “Free Hall wherein to discuss any and every subject of Interest in Religion, Morals, Physics, Politics, or any subject of interest to the family of man irrespective of clime, class, cast, sex, sects, or party.”²⁹ The closure of meetinghouses to antislavery and free-produce activists exacerbated theological conflicts among Hicksite Quakers. Similar to the divisions among the Orthodox, divisions among the Hicksites centered on theological questions as well as concerns about Quakers involvement in secular reform movements. This division is particularly evident in the ministry of New York Hicksite George Fox White.

White’s crusade against secular reform movements reflects the ways in which Quaker involvement could simultaneously advance and limit the boycott of the products of slave labor. Quaker historian Thomas Hamm describes White as “the most controversial, most polarizing figure in Hicksite Quakerism.” In the 1840s, White’s crusade against popular reform movements “help[ed] fracture every Hicksite yearly meeting except Baltimore and change the course of Hicksite Quakerism.”³⁰ White’s theological views were consistent with the positions espoused by leading Hicksites in the 1820s. White’s “antireform argument was a logical and consistent outgrowth of the Hicksite Reformation,” Hamm argues. “Its roots lay in a quietism that eschewed undertaking any action without a clear divine leading, in worries about the impact that joining with non-Friends even in good causes would have on Quakers, and in fear of the ambitions and influence of evangelical Protestant reformers, especially the clergy, in American society.” White was an opponent of slavery who, when he felt led, could denounce slavery in terms consistent with the most fervent of abolitionists. White also abstained from the products of slave labor. Yet White vehemently opposed nonsectarian reform societies, believing they were a threat to Quakerism. Non-Quaker abolitionists, notably Oliver Johnson, who was editor of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s newspaper the National Anti-Slavery Standard, criticized White. In 1840, Johnson and White exchanged a series of letters in which Johnson took White to task for a range of failures. In February 1841, Johnson published the exchange. The following month Johnson published “A Rare Specimen of a Quaker Preacher,” an even more scathing attack on White. Johnson’s conflict with White led to charges being brought against Quakers Isaac T. Hopper, Charles Marriott, and James S. Gibbons, who as members of the board of directors of the AASS were held responsible for promoting discord and disunity among Friends. When Hopper, Marriott, and Gibbons denied any wrongdoing, they were disowned. White also attacked Lucretia Mott for her participation in antislavery and nonresistance organizations. Joining with like-minded Hicksite leaders, White posed a threat to Mott’s membership in the Society of Friends. In the end, Mott was able to resist her enemies and retain her membership.³¹

White’s crusade against nonsectarian reform divided Hicksite Quakers, contributing to the polarization among Hicksites over the issue of antislavery. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, Hicksite Quakers in New York, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania withdrew from their respective yearly meetings. In New York, the separation came in 1848 when about two hundred members of the Genesee Yearly Meeting withdrew and established the Congregational Friends. The Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends rejected the structure of the Society of Friends; they also embraced reform causes such as antislavery and temperance. That same year witnessed similar divisions among Hicksites in Michigan and Ohio. In Pennsylvania, the split came later, in 1851, in Kennett Monthly Meeting. That split culminated in 1853 with the formal establishment of the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends.³²

In the 1840s and 1850s, Quaker debates about Friends’ involvement in nonsectarian reform movements, such as free produce and antislavery, influenced both the participation in and the development of those movements. The schisms of the 1840s resulted in four distinct groups of Quakers: Gurneyite Orthodox, Wilburite Orthodox, Hicksite, and Progressive. The presence of supporters of abstention in each of these groups suggests the enduring importance of free produce as a form of Quaker antislavery. While the practice of abstaining from the products of slave labor could transcend theological differences, it also deepened the divisions among Quakers, for example, when individuals such as George Fox White used the practice of free produce as a weapon to attack the reform work of their coreligionists. Significantly, for the boycott of slave labor, the Quaker schisms of the 1840s limited the effectiveness of abstention. Of the four groups formed out of the separations of the 1840s, only the Gurneyite Quakers actively promoted the economic objectives of abstinence. While Hicksites such as Lucretia Mott continued to assert the moral commitment of abstinence as a form of ideological consistency, it was Gurneyites such as George W. Taylor who worked to accomplish the economic principles of abstinence. As the most radical of Quakers, Progressive Friends seemed most likely to carry the mantle of free produce. Yet, many Progressives such as Chester County Quaker J. Williams Thorne, an ardent opponent of slavery, did not practice free produce.³³ For those Progressives who did support free produce, abstention was an element of a broader practice of social reform, including antislavery, women’s rights, and temperance.

Britain, Black Abolitionists, and Free Produce

British Quakers provided critical support to the Free Produce Association of Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and, by extension, to the American free-produce movement in the 1840s and 1850s. Joseph Sturge, founder of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, provided financial support to aid the free-produce association as well as making funds available to Samuel Rhoads for the use of the Vigilance Committee.³⁴ In 1846, the American pacifist Elihu Burritt joined the free-produce cause, providing a vital link between Sturge in Britain and Rhoads and Taylor in the United States. In the fall of that year, Burritt traveled to England at Sturge’s expense to promote his newly formed peace organization, the League of Universal Brotherhood. While in England, Burritt made the decision to include free produce in his plan for the league. He intended “to adopt the little plan of the [Free Produce Association of Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting], and expand it to a great system which should finally bring every mother’s son of the nonslaveholders of the South into antagonism to their feudal barons of the lash,” Burritt wrote Garrison, “thus arraying against slavery the powerful interest of free labor right on its bloodstained territory.” Burritt explained his ambitious plan to establish free-labor cotton factories in America, England, and France.³⁵ Three weeks later, Burritt wrote Taylor, outlining his plan and requesting information about free produce. “I am desirous of presenting this movement to the British public in a way that it has never been done,” Burritt wrote. “I believe the people here are ready for it.” He believed “the exclusive consumption of Free Labor products” should be an integral aspect of the league’s program. “I want you to keep me supplied with the facts necessary for a full exposition of the subject [of free produce].” For Burritt, reinvigorating the American free-produce movement would move British abolitionists to action. “The Abolitionists here have nothing large to do,” Burritt told Taylor in November 1846. “This measure would be the greatest one that ever was originated.” In England, women organized female auxiliaries known as Olive Leaf Circles to raise funds for the league by selling sewn articles, most of which were, at Burritt’s encouragement, made from free-labor goods. There were about 150 of these circles in England by 1850, creating a ready-made market for free-labor goods. Despite this optimistic start, Burritt’s peace crusade eclipsed his interest in free produce and antislavery until 1852 when the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin rekindled his interest.³⁶

In 1852, Burritt once again promoted the free-produce cause in Britain and the United States, suggesting a number of ideas to increase the supply of free-labor goods. Burritt proposed the creation of a company to support free produce. Supporters of free produce would purchase shares in the company, which would then pay dividends to farmers who raised free-labor cotton. Another plan proposed sending European immigrants to the American South to establish free-labor cotton farms. This plan would provide large amounts of free cotton for the market and would demonstrate to southern slaveholders the superiority of free labor. Burritt also established a free-produce depot in London in 1853. When Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe toured England in 1854, Burritt explained the project to them. The Stowes pledged their support. Harriet encouraged Burritt to tour the southern states and offered to cover the expenses of such a trip. In this same period, Burritt began to edit a new monthly, Citizen of the World, to be published by Taylor in Philadelphia. Citizen of the World promoted free produce. Burritt also took over editorial duties of The Slave, a weekly started by British Quaker and free-produce supporter Anna Richardson. Burritt also published The Bond of Brotherhood, which complemented and promoted his League of Universal Brotherhood. By the mid-1850s, however, Burritt’s efforts were severely limited by the failure of the league and the stagnation of Taylor’s cotton manufacturing. With the depression of 1857, the free-produce movement was in near collapse.³⁷

Burritt’s free-produce work was supported by British Quakers Henry and Anna Richardson who were leaders in the British free-produce movement. From 1851 through 1855, Anna edited the free-produce periodical The Slave. Henry and Anna had been involved in the abolitionist movement since the 1830s. In 1846, Anna founded the Ladies Free Produce Association. In addition to antislavery, the Richardsons were also involved in the peace movement. In 1850, Reverend Henry Highland Garnet accepted an invitation from the Richardsons to tour Britain to promote free produce. Historian R. J. M. Blackett describes American black abolitionists who visited England in this period as a “third force,” providing an alternative to political abolitionists and Garrisonians who vied for British attention. As a “third force”—independent, active contributors to the transatlantic abolitionist movement—black abolitionists provided British supporters an opportunity to remain involved in the movement without necessarily having to take sides. Garrisonians opposed free produce and Garnet’s tour because they worried it would erode support for other, more efficient abolitionist tactics. Frederick Douglass also opposed Garnet’s tour, claiming Garnet had never supported free produce in America. Despite the criticism, Garnet’s tour was a success, leading to the establishment of twenty-six free-produce societies by the end of January 1851.³⁸

Garnet spent three years abroad. He toured Scotland, England, and Ireland. Additionally, he and Henry Richardson attended a peace conference in Germany. Little is known of Garnet’s German tour, which is credited with the establishment of the German Anti-Slavery Society. Garnet also influenced an effort to establish free-labor stores in Germany. After leaving England, Garnet and J. W. C. Pennington traveled to Jamaica.³⁹ Garnet promoted free produce as a powerful weapon against slavery though it mattered little to him whether supporters were drawn to the movement by economic or moral motives. Garnet along with the Richardsons sustained the free-produce movement and drew other abolitionist consumers into their circle of influence. In the black abolitionist community, Samuel Ringgold Ward and Alexander Crummell promoted free produce as a practical tactic and a moral responsibility. Garnet, like Elihu Burritt, provided a vital link between American and British supporters of free produce.

Cheap Cotton

By the 1850s, through the work of the American Free Produce Association, the British India Society, and other free-produce and antislavery associations, the focus of the boycott of slave labor had expanded to include more explicitly the need to find free-labor alternatives for slave-grown cotton. Consumer demand for cotton textiles in Europe and the United States fueled an expansion of cotton production in Britain, making Britain the largest global producer of cotton in the 1840s. Centered in Manchester, which was dubbed “Cottonopolis” by The Times, and Lancashire, the British textile industry was the principal consumer of the global raw-cotton crop and, as a result, heavily dependent on American slave-grown cotton. “American slavery is principally supported by the demand of Great Britain for the cotton of the United States,” British abolitionists observed in 1846. British consumption of cotton helped revitalize the free-produce movement in Britain and stimulated interest among British and American abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s.⁴⁰ Africa and Texas were of particular focus in the 1850s as sites for free-labor cotton colonies.

In Cotton Cultivation in Africa, published in 1858, American Orthodox Quaker Benjamin Coates laid out his argument for an international reform movement connected to the cultivation of free-labor cotton in Africa. Coates argued that African cotton would be less expensive than American cotton and would, as a result, garner the support of both English and American consumers. African cotton would thrive and as a result so would African society while American slavery, once rendered unprofitable, would wither away. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Orthodox) endorsed the cotton-growing plan in a statement against slavery. Influenced by Coates’s pamphlet, Garnet devoted much of his time for the next three years to the African cotton project, establishing the African Civilization Society in 1859 to civilize and evangelize Africa and to promote cotton cultivation.⁴¹ Support in the African American community was divided. Reverend J. Sella Martin “believed the Civilization Society would tend to break the link which held England to this country, and makes her dependent on the Southern States for cotton.”⁴² Unfortunately, the involvement of colonizationists such as Coates limited the organization’s appeal among American supporters of free produce.⁴³

The desire for free-labor cotton led supporters of the boycott to once again consider Texas, now part of the United States, as a site for the production of free-labor sugar and cotton. Texas land merchant Jacob de Cordova gave a series of lectures in the United States and England, promoting the state and its suitability for cotton production. Born in 1808 in Jamaica, de Cordova was raised in England by an aunt. In the 1820s, he migrated to Philadelphia where he joined his father who had become president of the Congregation Mikveh Israel in 1820. De Cordova settled in Texas in 1839, living in Galveston and Houston where he served as one of the founders of Beth Israel. In the 1840s and 1850s, de Cordova traveled throughout the state of Texas. He laid out the central Texas town of Waco in 1848 and 1849 before settling in Guadalupe County near Seguin in 1852. By 1859 de Cordova had acquired nearly one million acres of Texas land and was widely recognized as an expert on Texas.⁴⁴ In 1858, de Cordova lectured in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York before traveling to England at the invitation of the Cotton Supply Association of Manchester. De Cordova’s lectures, which were drawn from his book The Texas Immigrant and Traveller’s Guide Book (1856), lauded the state as a new home for emigrants. De Cordova described a land abundant in natural resources and rich in opportunity.⁴⁵ As one reviewer noted of de Cordova’s book Texas: Her Resources and Her Public Men (1858), “Everything grows in Texas, or would grow if it were planted. There is room for slave-labour among the canes, and free-labour among the corn and the wine—and for slave or free labour, according to the taste or circumstances of the planter, among the cotton, which will remunerate either method of production.” Cotton cultivation, in particular, allowed an antislavery man “to sink his principles in his personal practice.” For the emigrant, who was able to purchase land and “work for his own hand,… Texas [would] become not only an ‘earthly paradise’ … but ‘a little heaven below’ to the contemplation of the Northern abolitionist, whose real prospect of ever trampling out the ‘guaranteed institution’ is through competition alone.”⁴⁶ In England, de Cordova glossed over his proslavery leanings, emphasizing instead the potential for free-labor cotton in Texas. “Whilst you are directing your attention to [the cultivation of cotton] in India, and receiving reports of cotton prospects from Africa, I come before you to tell you of a State … [which] if encouraged by emigration and nourished by capital, is capable of producing every year, by European labor—from three to five million bales of cotton,” de Cordova told his listeners. He cited the example of German immigrants who grew nearly one-fifth of the cotton produced in Texas and asserted his view that “white labor” was “the most economical.” Only in Texas could cotton be successfully produced by free labor, de Cordova remarked, and “those who visit the State of Texas must soon be convinced of its importance as a cotton-growing country.”⁴⁷ De Cordova’s speeches were published and read widely on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result of de Cordova’s efforts, his land company, which he co-owned with his brother Phineas, became one of the largest ever operated in the southwestern United States.⁴⁸

Jacob de Cordova was not alone in promoting Texas as a productive site for free-labor cotton. From 1852 through 1857, journalist and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted embarked on an extensive research journey through the South and Texas, writing a series of articles for the New York Daily Times, which were collected into three volumes, including A Journey through Texas (1857). Like de Cordova, Olmsted celebrated the cotton production of the antislavery German immigrants in Texas. Olmsted had for several years been involved in efforts to bring free-soil settlers to Texas. In 1857, Olmsted turned his attention to immigration, hoping to use the positive reception his book had received in the North to generate interest in free-labor immigration to Texas. Olmsted distributed copies of A Journey through Texas to abolitionists, including Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, and John Greenleaf Whittier. The Texas book was translated into German in an attempt to encourage further German immigration to Texas. Olmsted also sent copies of his book to the Cotton Supply Associations of Manchester and Liverpool. In his correspondence with British cotton interests, he pointed out that the supply of cotton was limited only by the labor supply, and a tenfold increase in the production of cotton was possible if there were a significant increase in the number of free immigrants into the Southwest. Moreover, the cotton crop of the United States, Olmsted wrote, “might be doubled on the land as yet unoccupied” in Texas. “There is nothing in the laws, nor, under discreet direction, need there be anything in the prejudices of the people, to prevent free settlers occupying this land,” Olmsted concluded. By 1858, however, personal difficulties forced Olmsted to drop his active promotion of Texas.⁴⁹

The efforts of de Cordova and Olmsted generated considerable interest in the Northeast in the idea of a free-labor cotton colony in Texas. In 1861, New England businessman Edward Atkinson published the pamphlet Cheap Cotton by Free Labor. Like Olmsted, Atkinson sought the transformation of cotton production by bringing free labor to Texas by convincing northern textile manufacturers that slavery was not the most effective way to grow cotton. Displacing slave-labor from cotton production would break the “slave oligarchy” that had deprived working men of “participation in a branch of agriculture capable of being made the most profitable and self-sustaining of any which can be followed in this country,” Atkinson argued. The system of slave-labor had proved inefficient. The high cost of slaves had kept planters from increasing production of cotton. If Texas lands were instead “occupied by an intelligent yeomanry” rather than “the whiskey-drinking, pork-eating race which now occupies them,” cotton production would increase. Echoing the arguments of de Cordova and Olmsted, Atkinson claimed Texas had enough cotton and sugar land “to supply three times the entire crop now raised in this country.” Using free labor to produce these staples more cheaply than they could be produced by slave labor would bring an end to slavery—“the law of competition is inexorable.” Atkinson declared the slave-labor system a failure. “Have not the cotton spinners of the world the right to say to the slaveholder:—You have proved by the experience of the last few years that with your slave labor you cannot give us cotton enough.” While Atkinson believed free blacks could grow cotton more efficiently than enslaved blacks, the bulk of his argument focused on free white labor.⁵⁰ Atkinson’s pamphlet was well received by northern and British businessmen. Olmsted told Atkinson he had read his pamphlet “with more satisfaction than anything hitherto published on the slavery question.”⁵¹

Atkinson promoted a plan to send the federal army to Texas to emancipate the slaves, compensating their owners so they might have capital enough to transition to free labor. Occupying Texas would isolate the “old slave states,” leaving slavery “to die a certain and a peaceful death.” In a letter to Gustavus Fox, assistant secretary of the navy, Massachusetts Governor John Andrew outlined the military and economic benefits of Atkinson’s Texas plan. In addition to flanking the southern rebellion, the plan would restore the cotton supply for northern manufacturers and encourage loyal men to remain in Texas. “These points are urged, not in the interest of Abolitionists,” Andrew emphasized, “but by leading commercial men and capitalists, as fairly coming under the necessities and rules of war.”⁵² Andrew sent copies of his letter to other government officials as well as friends in New York. The plan had the support of many in the federal government, including Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Despite such support, President Abraham Lincoln refused to support the plan, citing other military priorities. Lincoln later relented, as a result of pressure from his own cabinet and from Texas Unionists, and authorized Nathaniel P. Banks to lead an expedition to the Gulf Coast of Texas. By the time Banks launched a Texas expedition up the Red River in 1864, Atkinson had turned his attention elsewhere. In late 1863, Atkinson, with support from Boston businessmen, organized the Free Labor Cotton Company, which leased southern cotton plantations “on humane business principles.” The group hired A. H. Kelsey as their agent. Kelsey and his son traveled to the lower Mississippi Valley where they leased a large cotton plantation, hired workers, and proceeded to plant a cotton crop. Unstable economic conditions as well as Confederate raids limited the outcome of the project.⁵³

Free-produce stalwarts Taylor and Burritt had also explored the possibility of free-labor cotton from Texas. Nathan Thomas, an agent for the Free Produce Association of Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, traveled through Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas to determine the prospects for free-labor production in the region. In his letters to Taylor and Rhoads, Thomas provided an extensive description of the region. Thomas believed Texas might become a viable source of free-labor goods, but in the late 1840s the region was too sparsely settled and too far from reliable transportation to be considered.⁵⁴ Elihu Burritt suggested that the success of German immigrants in Texas in producing free-labor cotton might be reproduced in Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi.⁵⁵ In 1850, the Free Produce Association of Friends of New York Yearly Meeting considered a proposal to raise $100,000—half of which would be raised in England—to award prizes to planters in Texas who produced the largest amount of free-labor cotton. Benjamin Tatham, the New York Quaker who proposed the scheme, pledged $500 a year to help “crowd slavery out of Texas.” His co-religionist Richard Carpenter described Tatham’s pledge as “very liberal,” but noted also that “he is very safe in making it.” While Carpenter claimed “an increasing interest in the success” of free produce, he did not feel a similar “increase of hope that it will succeed.”⁵⁶ Philadelphia Friends, like many non-Quakers, lauded the success of the German immigrants in Texas in the 1850s. “The production of a thousand bales, untouched by servile hands, within a small district of that fertile region,” Samuel Rhoads and Enoch Lewis remarked, “certainly gives encouragement to the belief, that with proper exertions a supply might be obtained more than equal to existing demands.”⁵⁷ Nonetheless, the Quaker efforts did not lead to an increase in the production of free-labor cotton.

The efforts of free-produce activists to increase the production of free-labor cotton faced formidable challenges in the 1840s and 1850s. As slaveholders migrated west toward new cotton regions such as Texas, they also created, as historian Edward Baptist argues, “practices, attitudes, and material goods—whips, slates, pens, paper, and the cotton plant itself—that made” their “cotton-picking method as efficient as possible.” New practices were reinforced by the use of torture, extorting “new efficiencies” from the “most skillful hands and contriving minds ever harder.” As a result, cotton production by slave labor continued to expand, doubling in the 1850s from two million to four million bales. World consumption of cotton experienced similar increases, from one and one-half billion pounds at the beginning of the decade to two and one-half billion pounds by the end of the decade, with nearly two-thirds of that amount coming from American fields. By 1860, seven of the eight wealthiest states had been created by cotton’s march south and west.⁵⁸

By the end of the 1850s, despite nearly one hundred years of arguments against the products of slave labor, the so-called “gains of oppression” had deepened their hold on the transatlantic economy. Among Garrisonian abolitionists, support for free produce declined rapidly in this period. Even among Quakers, those first supporters of the boycott of slave labor, the boycott lost its relevance for many, particularly as they worried about the continued divisions among Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers. While some Quakers asserted the moral imperative of free produce, others—notably Gurneyite Quakers—focused their efforts on increasing the production of free-labor goods. Free-labor cotton from Texas or Africa would provide sufficient economic leverage to permanently dislodge slave-labor cotton from the Atlantic market. These efforts were unsuccessful, however, revealing how dependent consumers were on slave-labor goods. Yet, free produce as a statement of moral commitment and economic principle persisted and even, to an extent, flourished as the movement attracted new supporters, particularly black abolitionists like Henry Highland Garnet. The presence of new supporters such as Garnet and Atkinson reveals the resilience of the idea of moral commerce.