Conclusion

She little thinks that to enable her to sweeten her daily meal, the African village may have been fired—the horrors of the middle-passage inflicted—human beings brought to the auction-block and sold into interminable Slavery, the wife from the husband, and the child from the parent—the gang, male and female, driven to the cane-field with a cart-whip—herded together at night like cattle—systematically kept in heathen darkness and degradation!

—Anna Richardson, There Is Death in the Pot!, c. 1850

Henry and Anna Richardson produced three pamphlets in support of Garnet’s free-produce tour of England: A Revolution of the Spindles for the Overthrow of American Slavery, Conscience versus Cotton, and There Is Death in the Pot! The first two tracts reflect the boycott’s shift in focus to slave-grown cotton in the nineteenth century while the third, with its graphic title, captured both the past and the present of the boycott of slave labor. The phrase, “there is death in the pot,” is a reference to the prophet Elisha who commanded his servant to gather herbs to make a stew for the sons of the prophets. The servant mistakenly gathers poisonous gourds, prompting one man to cry out, “O, man of God, there is death in the pot.” Elisha added flour to the pot, miraculously transforming the contaminated stew into a wholesome, nourishing meal.¹ There Is Death in the Pot! invoked in its title the specter of James Gillray’s “Barbarities in the West Indias,” the eighteenth-century political caricature of a slave boiled to death in a pot of sugar cane juice, and the specter of blood-stained sugar (see Figure 3). It also referenced Frederick Accum’s scandalous work, A Treatise on the Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons, which was first published in 1820 and reprinted widely in England, the United States, and Germany. Using the phrase, “there is death in the pot,” Accum urged consumers to take action against contaminated foodstuffs. A “lurid production,” according to one historian, Treatise went through multiple editions, even after the author left England in disgrace and fear.²

There Is Death in the Pot! traced the contamination of consumer goods by slave labor and the role of consumers in transforming the marketplace. Linking slave-labor goods to domestic consumption, Richardson wrote, “The grocer takes your [money for sugar], and retaining a fraction as his profit, hands all the remainder to the wholesale dealer, the dealer hands it to the importer, the importer to the Cuban merchant; the merchant to the Slaveholder, to whom it becomes a premium for the maintenance of slavery.” Although total abstinence from slave-labor goods was impossible, that was not sufficient justification for “consuming some hundred-weights of Slave-grown sugar, or some scores of pounds of Slave-grown coffee, while the same articles, in Free produce, are within our reach.” The tract concluded with a table headlined, “The Free-Man or the Slave; Which Shall Supply Your Table?” Three columns labeled “Produce of Free Labour,” “Produce of Slave Labour,” and “Partly Free, Partly Slave, or Uncertain” mapped for consumers the progress of emancipation in the Atlantic world, emphasizing the availability of free-labor sugar, coffee, and tobacco from the British West Indies and the continued oppressive labor conditions in Cuba, Brazil, and the American South. There Is Death in the Pot! documented the accomplishments of the boycott as well as the work that remained. In mapping the availability of free-labor goods, the tract emphasized consumers’ ability to act as moral agents in the market. Like the flour used to transform the poisonous stew of the Old Testament, consumers could transform the market through their individual purchases of free-labor goods.³

There Is Death in the Pot! also makes clear the limits of the boycott as evidenced by the continued presence of slave-labor goods. The boycott was most effective in Britain in the 1790s and the 1820s when activists garnered widespread support for a boycott of slave-grown sugar by linking the boycott to other political and social issues such as women’s activism, parliamentary reform, and colonial expansion. Estimates for the 1791–1792 boycott vary widely ranging from three hundred thousand to as many as one-half million participants. The door-to-door canvas of the 1820s likely yielded an even higher figure.⁴ Compare those figures to estimates for the American movement. At the height of its popularity, an estimated five to six thousand individuals attempted to buy only free-labor goods; free-produce societies attracted about fifteen hundred members. In 1847, the Non-Slaveholder placed the number far higher, estimating that ten thousand Friends or 10 percent of all Quakers abstained from slave-labor goods.⁵ The stark difference between the British and American movements is instructive. British supporters, especially in the 1790s and the 1820s, targeted slave-grown sugar, thus effectively limiting the scope of the boycott. Although such a political strategy limited the general economic impact on slaveholders, it did focus considerable attention on the violent production of slave-grown sugar, giving rise to graphic images of Britons consuming the flesh and blood of African slaves. Such a focus may well have contributed to the popularity of the boycott because consumers, repulsed by the thought of eating contaminated sugar, rejected the commodity. In contrast, American supporters targeted a broad range of slave-labor goods, including sugar, cotton, indigo, rice, and coffee. For Quakers, such as George W. Taylor, the morality of free produce called on consumers to forgo all products of slave labor. While Taylor and others invoked the violence of slave labor, suggesting, for example, that cotton had been stained by the blood of slaves, such rhetoric lacked the intense lurid focus that distinguished antisugar rhetoric. Moreover, this comprehensive boycott of slave labor forced supporters, including Taylor, to spend considerable time and effort locating free-labor alternatives. American supporters of the boycott often framed abstention and free produce as an absolute choice—demanding complete abstinence as proof of ideological consistency. This moral absolutism led many abolitionists, including Garrison, to reject boycotting as an antislavery tactic.

Taylor’s free-produce activism reveals how much Quaker abstention had changed since the ministry of John Woolman. For Woolman, the rise of consumer society imperiled the individual’s soul. Consumer goods, whether made by slaves or free men, hindered an individual’s relationship with God. Thus Woolman’s abstention was both antislavery and anticommerce. Where Woolman saw danger, Taylor saw redemption. Taylor believed the market held the potential to act as an agent of moral reform, purifying the market of slave-labor goods and bringing the individual closer to God by aligning faith and action. That many Quakers, individually and collectively, continued to practice abstention and free produce despite the many schisms of the nineteenth century suggests the protean meanings of the boycott. While many Quakers believed activism in the free produce and antislavery movements would lead Friends away from their religious tenets, others believed such activism was an important means of putting faith into action. In 1884, reflecting back on the movement, Taylor noted that the predictions of Friends had not materialized: “Some [Friends] looked upon [free produce] with suspicion, as likely to lead Friends away from communion with our religious Society.… [This] prediction was not verified in a single instance to my knowledge.”⁶ The flexibility of free produce provided for the presence of both groups of Quakers—conservative Quakers who abstained as an individual statement of renunciation of the sin of slavery, and evangelical Quakers (such as Taylor) who abstained as part of a broader statement of reform. Additionally, the presence in the movement of radical Quaker abolitionists such as Lucretia Mott serve as further evidence of the multiplicity of meanings activists gave to abstention and free produce. For Mott and like-minded activists, free produce affirmed their unequivocal commitment to racial equality.

The women who supported abstention and free produce were as diverse as the Quakers. The boycott of slave-labor goods transformed women from the unreliable abolitionists of the eighteenth century to the movement’s moral core in the nineteenth century. The movement accommodated a multitude of female voices, including the economic analysis of Heyrick, the sentimental arguments of Chandler, and the racial radicalism of Mott. Even as moral suasion lost ground in the 1840s, many women continued to assert the imperative of free produce, citing ideological consistency as an important signifier of antislavery commitment and as an important statement of radical identification with the slave. Free produce assured both conservative and radical women of a place in the antislavery movement. Moreover, the multivocal networks of the free-produce movement connected radical women such as the pacifist Mott—“who proclaimed she was a belligerent in the face of slavery”—to the militant black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet who simultaneously advocated slave insurrection and free produce.⁷

Garnet and other black abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s embraced the economic principles of free produce, which they saw as a practical response to the failure of moral suasion. For Garnet, free produce had the potential to provide the economic foundation necessary for racial equality. In the 1840s and 1850s, many British abolitionists aided the efforts of black abolitionists to establish free labor. In 1848, Douglass’s North Star reprinted Henry Richardson’s Revolution of the Spindles, in which he connected British consumption of American cotton to slavery, claiming a revolution of the spindles would overthrow American slavery. Echoing the words of Garrison, Richardson demanded “No Commercial Union with Slaveholders!”⁸ Richardson urged consumers to “come out” of the marketplace and to create instead an alternate economy based on justice and equality. Seeking alternate sources for southern, slave-grown cotton, British abolitionists supported the efforts of Garnet and other black abolitionists who planned to establish free-labor colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. These projects would restore to black laborers the fruits of their labor. More significantly, these projects were a critical step in achieving racial equality. Black abolitionists asserted both the moral commitment and the economic principle of the boycott. “Tell the planters that you will no longer, by buying the produce of their slaves, suffer them to get rich by the sweat, and agony, and blood of your fellow creatures—that you will reduce them from affluence to poverty and bankruptcy, and immediately the system will come to an end,” Alexander Crummell told the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1849.⁹

Still, supporters of free produce never came close to displacing slave-labor goods from the Atlantic marketplace. In her history of the free-produce movement, Ruth Nuermberger claims the boycott of slave labor failed because it placed too heavy a demand on the individual consumer: “Voluntary self-denial can be expected only of the conscientious few, never of the mass.”¹⁰ While Nuermberger is correct, the failure of the boycott reveals more than a lack of economic and moral commitment by the mass of abolitionists. Instead, we need to understand the sheer audacity of the boycott. Garrison correctly recognized just how indispensable slave-labor goods had become in the nineteenth century.¹¹ While northerners abolished slavery, manufacturers and consumers in New England remained connected to slavery through their commercial transactions, perhaps most visibly in the links between the ever-expanding cotton frontier and the textile manufacturers in places such as Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Lowell, Massachusetts. More than cotton connected the industrial North and the plantation South, however, as northern manufacturers produced critical goods such as hoes, shoes, and clothing for slaves.¹² Among consumers, early crops from the South allowed northerners to enjoy an extended growing season. “Early in the spring from the South … many rare vegetables and other edibles are brought to market by the facilities afforded by rail cars and steamboats, thus inducing, as it were, in these latitudes, artificial seasons,” observed Thomas De Voe, a butcher and New York City’s future superintendent of markets.¹³ In the nineteenth century, as slave-labor goods expanded the breadth and depth of their economic reach, antislavery consumers found it increasingly difficult to remain free of slave-labor goods. According to historian Seth Rockman, as historians have turned more attention to the relationship between slavery and capitalism, their works “hold a great deal of promise for recognizing slavery’s centrality to the capital at the heart of capitalism.… Following the money has allowed scholars to see slavery less as a regional system and more as the wellspring of national economic development.”¹⁴ The men and women who supported the boycott of slave labor as well those who gave up on the boycott recognized that challenge. “I have myself, for many years, endeavored to carry out this principle [free produce] … as far as I could do so,” Samuel J. May wrote in 1848, before comparing the boycott to “bailing out the Atlantic with a spoon.”¹⁵ That May felt compelled to defend his habits of consumption, even as he criticized the boycott, suggests the success of the boycott of slave labor cannot be measured by purely economic means. Supporters of the boycott made the connection between slavery and capitalism an inescapable reality. In the process, they pioneered a new conception of consumer activism that has, as one scholar notes, “become the lingua franca of consumer activists ever since.”¹⁶

For more than one hundred years, support for abstention and free produce waxed and waned; yet, support for the movement never completely disappeared, which is a testament to activists’ resilience and persistence. The rhetoric of abstention and free produce emphasized consumers’ complicity in slavery and called on men and women to reject the immoral commerce in slaves and slave-labor goods. Invoking the ideals of humanity and justice, supporters of the boycott envisioned a deep-rooted transformation of the Atlantic economy. For supporters of moral commerce, each individual decision in the marketplace was freighted with moral significance. Therein rests the success of the movement. As supporters and opponents debated the meaning and the role of moral commerce in the fight for the abolition of slavery, they made it impossible to remain fully neutral in the slavery debate.