American Free Produce Association

In September 1838, Requited Labor Convention delegates appointed Lewis C. Gunn to prepare an address on the duty of abstinence. A New York Quaker, Gunn was active in the American Anti-Slavery Society. In the winter of 1837–1838, he and Connecticut abolitionist Charles C. Burleigh spent six months in Haiti on a fact-finding trip, establishing connections with abolitionists in Port-au-Prince.² In An Address to Abolitionists, Gunn laid out the moral foundation of the American Free Produce Association. By purchasing slave produce, consumers sanctioned “the plunder of slaves.” Moreover, through his purchase of slave-labor goods, the consumer “tempt[ed] the commission” of the crime of slaveholding; thus, the consumer became “virtually the plunderer of the slaves.” By using slave produce, abolitionists were withholding a “very important testimony against slavery as a sin” and “diminish[ing] the influence of [their] antislavery efforts.”³ Gunn’s Address invoked the free-produce rhetoric of Elias Hicks and Elizabeth Heyrick, as well as early Quaker reformers such as John Woolman, consciously placing the AFPA within the broader, transatlantic history of the abstention movement. Recounting the ideological origins of the abstention movement, Gunn and the members of the AFPA reminded supporters and opponents alike of the importance of moral consistency.

The members of the AFPA also recognized the importance of increasing the supply of free-labor goods. At the Requited Labor Convention, Lydia White, a member of the PFASS and a Hicksite Quaker, was appointed to a committee to identify sources for free-labor goods.⁴ As the owner of a free-labor store in Philadelphia, White was a logical choice for the committee. She understood, probably better than any other member of the committee, the difficulty of obtaining regular supplies of free-labor goods. When White opened her dry goods store in Philadelphia in 1830, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler promoted the store and its owner in the “Ladies’ Repository” of the Genius of Universal Emancipation: “We are proud to know that the projector of so laudable a design is one of our own sex.”⁵ By 1831, White was receiving orders from Vermont, Michigan, Rhode Island, New York, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, and Delaware as well as Pennsylvania. White also purchased small quantities of cotton for manufacture and sale in her shop.⁶ White advertised her store in the Liberator and the Genius of Universal Emancipation as well as the National Reformer, an African American weekly.⁷ White and other owners of free-labor stores had difficulty obtaining a steady supply of free-labor goods. Writing in 1831 to Garrison, White apologized that she did not “have a full supply and a better assortment of domestic cotton goods.” In a letter later that year, White again lamented the lack of free-labor goods, “It is truly mortifying to have [to] say that we have not enough of either of the articles [you requested] on hand at present worth sending.” White suggested a free-labor cotton factory might address supply problems and convince southern cotton growers to switch to free labor.⁸ Samuel Philbrick, who was one of the first and most active abolitionists in Brookline, Massachusetts, complained free-labor cotton “cannot be had in Boston.” He suggested that abstention might gain favor among Boston consumers if a steady supply of free-labor goods were made available at a price competitive with slave-labor goods.⁹

The AFPA committee appointed to identify supplies of free-labor goods proposed two plans to address the problem. The first plan was based on voluntary contributions from individuals; the other plan proposed forming a joint stock association. After the September meeting, the AFPA distributed a circular presenting both plans and requesting supporters indicate their preference and pledge their support.¹⁰ Massachusetts abolitionist William Bassett was among the first to respond sending a ten dollar contribution. Bassett also suggested Miller send circulars to other abolitionists, including Abby Kelley, Maria Weston Chapman, Samuel Philbrick, and Aaron L. Benedict.¹¹ In their responses, Philbrick and Benedict raised doubts about the efficacy of the venture. Both worried that the joint stock association would render stockholders liable for the financial obligations of the society. Philbrick also worried about “subscribing for any certain am[oun]t of goods, without knowing whether the quality & kind of goods wanted, can be obtained.”¹² When the AFPA met in October 1839 for their first annual meeting, the Executive Committee lamented the lack of progress, noting the response to the circular was “not sufficiently encouraging to justify us in taking the proposed step.” While the AFPA had failed to collect funds to establish free-labor stores, the committee believed the proposal “a measure of the highest importance.” Attributing the failure of the store venture to a lack of steady supply, the committee suggested instead “the creation of a fund for the encouragement of the production of cotton by free labour.” Funds raised could be used to purchase free-labor cotton and to hire agents who could ensure that free-labor cotton was not “intermixed with that produced by slaves.”¹³ The delegates adopted the measure and appointed a committee to raise the necessary funds.

FIGURE 6.    Label used by the American Free Produce Association. Courtesy of Middletown Historical Society, Middletown, Connecticut.

Raising nearly four hundred dollars, the AFPA recruited Esther and Phineas Nixon from Randolph County, North Carolina, to procure free-labor cotton from local farmers. In early 1840, the AFPA purchased more than thirteen hundred pounds of cotton, which was subsequently manufactured and sold.¹⁴ Procuring free-labor cotton from the slave-labor South was problematic, as the Nixons reported to the AFPA. The couple had trouble convincing local farmers to adopt free-labor practices and often had to price their cotton above market value. Producing free-labor cotton was also dangerous. “All it needs is a match to create an explosion,” Esther Nixon noted.¹⁵

With more than one hundred people in attendance at its first annual meeting, the AFPA seemed a vibrant but struggling community of dedicated reformers. Although they worried about their lack of progress, members looked forward to the World Anti-Slavery Convention scheduled to meet in London in June 1840. The AFPA selected nine delegates—seven men and two women, including James and Lucretia Mott, Sarah Pugh, William Bassett, and Abraham Pennock—to represent the association’s interests at the international meeting. Delegates also passed a resolution calling on recalcitrant abolitionists “to reflect upon the glaring inconsistency of protesting against slavery as an immorality, and yet paying for its support.” More than anything, members of the AFPA hoped to end abolitionists’ “lamentable apathy” toward free-produce. AFPA members also celebrated the end of apprenticeship and full emancipation in the West Indies and the subsequent formation of the BIS. These events, members claimed, were “calculated to have an important bearing on the cause of freedom generally and on our enterprise in particular.” The delegates resolved to begin correspondence with the BIS.¹⁶ American supporters of the boycott believed reform in India would open new sources for the production of free-labor goods, which in turn would aid the abolitionist cause in the United States.

British India Society

The organization of the British India Society was a watershed moment. As we have seen, in the 1820s, abolitionist consumers distanced free produce from East Indian slavery. In the 1790s and the 1820s, East Indian sugar held symbolic importance for supporters of the boycott of slave-grown sugar. Abolitionists insisted that East Indian labor, however cheap, was fundamentally free; they distinguished between East Indian and West Indian slavery, claiming the former was indigenous and less severe than African slavery in the West Indies. In 1833, Parliament excluded British India from the Emancipation Act, leaving it to the East India Company to eradicate slavery in India. By the late 1830s, however, EIC inaction led abolitionists to focus more closely on labor conditions in India. Conditions in British India became increasingly significant to abolitionists and other reformers who “sought to reposition the subcontinent within newly emerging relationships of trade and labor in a post-emancipation empire,” as one scholar notes. Supporters of the boycott of slave-labor goods were anxious to exploit India’s economic potential as a supplier of free-labor goods while others saw in India an important market for British goods. Moreover, reform in India took on added urgency as free labor increasingly became the only legitimate mode of capitalist production.¹⁷ British abolitionists’ emphasis on India reflected and reinforced their new, expansive vision of antislavery activism.

Organizing for the BIS began in 1838, following the formation of the Aborigines’ Protection Society a year earlier in London. Though events in India, in particular, were important in leading to the founding of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, the association focused on the conditions of indigenous populations throughout the British Empire.¹⁸ In the summer of 1838, George Thompson and Joseph Pease helped with the publication of a circular to outline conditions in India. The circular was then distributed to members of Parliament and the Aborigines’ Protection Society. At the August meeting of the society, a resolution was passed to engage Thompson’s aid in presenting a series of lectures to inform the public of the need for reform in India.¹⁹ In a letter to William Lloyd Garrison in January 1839, Thompson noted his affiliation with the Aborigines’ Protection Society. He also emphasized his particular interest in Indian reform, noting that most of his addresses in late 1838 and early 1839 had focused on conditions in British India.²⁰ In another letter, Thompson wrote of his growing interest in a British India association: “I incline more and more to the plan of a separate, independent, thorough-going society for prosecuting, as its exclusive work, the cause of the Hindoo.” Still, Thompson waited for the “way to open” in order to establish such an organization.²¹

In late January, Thompson found the opening he sought in a fortuitous meeting with the Orientalist William Adam.²² Born in Scotland in 1796, Adam studied classical and vernacular Indian languages before traveling to India, in 1818, as a Baptist missionary. While in India, Adam worked with Indian reformer Rammohun Roy, who converted Adam to Unitarianism in 1821.²³ Cut off from Baptist financial support, Adam worked as a clerk and newspaper editor in India throughout the 1820s. In 1829, Adam became editor of the radical India Gazette, which he used as a platform to challenge traditional British depictions of Indians as illiterate and uncivilized. From 1834 through 1838, Adam surveyed the state of education in India. He supported education in the vernacular languages, a plan the British government in India rejected as “impracticable,” “complicated,” and “expensive.” In 1838, Adam left India to join his wife and children in Boston, Massachusetts.²⁴ Adam convinced Thompson and Pease and his daughter Elizabeth Pease to establish an association to specifically seek reform on behalf of the people of India. Adam declined to take a leadership role in the organization, however, since he had already accepted a teaching appointment at Harvard University.²⁵

After the meeting with Adam, Thompson and the Peases worked to generate support for a British India reform association. Elizabeth Pease accompanied Thompson to the towns where he was scheduled to lecture, helping him organize local societies in a fashion similar to the antislavery societies organized in Britain in the 1820s. In March 1839, a provisional committee was appointed to organize the British India Society. Excluded from formal membership in the BIS because of her gender, Elizabeth Pease used other means to generate interest and support for the organization. In April, Pease’s friend Mary Wigham wrote Boston abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman that Thompson’s lectures and British affairs in India had “claimed [the] serious attention … of the Emancipation Society.” The Peases, along with Thompson, also attended London Yearly Meeting where Thompson outlined the goals of the BIS. A reprint of Quaker William Howitt’s prospectus for the organization was distributed at the meeting. The prospectus assured supporters of the Quaker foundations of the BIS, noting that the organization would be “found[ed] upon the strictest principles of justice and humanity—upon a basis which will permanently exclude the adoption of party, of sectarian, or mercenary views. They contemplate the use of those means only which are moral, peaceful, and constitutional.”²⁶

British and American abolitionists celebrated the first formal meeting of the BIS in June 1839. In a series of speeches, British reformers urged the reformation of conditions in India for the benefit of the indigenous population, the prosperity of British business, and the emancipation of the slave. Improving labor conditions would provide opportunities for expanded agricultural development in India, which would increase Indian supplies of cotton for British mills and in turn would increase Indian demand for British manufactures. As one lecturer noted, “If every man in India could afford to purchase a dress a year, Britain would send $50 million worth of goods to India.”²⁷ Reform in India would also affirm Britain’s moral standing, particularly in relationship to the United States. Lecturers noted the hypocrisy of slavery in the midst of American democracy. Cotton for British mills, one lecturer noted, came almost “wholly from the United States of America, which still allowed their land of freed, (O, mockery of the name of freedom!) to pander to the cause of Slavery: dimming the luster of their flag of stars, and making it too often the harbinger of darkness instead of light.”²⁸ The BIS is “doing your work for you & aim at the very object you are seeking to accomplish,” Elizabeth Pease told Maria Weston Chapman.²⁹ In response, Chapman congratulated Pease, praising the establishment of the BIS: “I see at a glance what its effect must be on American slavery, & cast my whole spirit across the Atlantic, towards you in England.”³⁰ Angelina Grimké wrote Pease that the BIS had “claimed a large share of our sympathy” and wrote of her pleasure to see free produce being agitated in Britain once again.³¹ Boston abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman praised the British India Society for “bringing the free labor of British India in direct competition with slave labor.” The BIS also promised prosperity to England by removing British dependence on American cotton. American statesmen, Chapman noted, will “see both the patriotism and the cupidity of Britain ready to aid her philanthropists … to secure to British India the undivided demand of the British cotton-market.”³² Though not all supporters of the BIS were interested in its humanitarian efforts, British and American reformers looked to the organization as yet another important development in the international abolitionist movement.

Unlike the American Free Produce Association, the British India Society functioned solely as a pressure group. The AFPA had two goals: to convince other abolitionists to adopt free produce and to increase the availability of free-labor goods by direct participation in the manufacture of those goods. In contrast, the BIS identified as its primary duty the widest possible dissemination of information about India, believing that political reform would then create the conditions for businessmen to produce free-labor goods.³³ In his extensive lecture series, Thompson linked the success of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies to the planned objective for British India: “The spirit that never tired, that never quailed, while pursuing the great object of negro emancipation, has been invoked, has been awakened, is now stirring; and what we did for the slave of the West shall, with the help of God, be done for the Hindoo of the East.”³⁴ Political and economic reform in India would address the shortcomings of the Emancipation Act of 1833 and, at last, emancipate all of the empire’s slaves. In the United States, Garrison edited a volume of Thompson’s India speeches while William Adam lectured on his experiences in British India.³⁵ Through her extensive correspondence with American abolitionists, Elizabeth Pease also aided the flow of information about the BIS and its efforts. Pamphlets, reports, and letters sent by Pease to American abolitionists were, as Lucretia Mott’s son-in-law Edward M. Davis noted, kept in “constant motion.”³⁶ American supporters of the boycott believed reform in India would increase the supply of free-labor goods and further the cause of abolition in the United States.

Not all abolitionists were convinced that cotton cultivation in India would have the desired effect on slavery in the southern United States. William Adam claimed he did not share George Thompson’s “sanguine expectations.” While Adam was convinced increased cotton cultivation, “in combination with other causes” might improve the situation of “the starving & degraded population of India,” its effect on American slavery might only be “collateral.” Still, Adam resolved “to stand before the American public as its advocate to the full extent of the object.”³⁷

Abolitionists’ desire to increase cotton cultivation in British India received unexpected reinforcement in this period from the East India Company and the cotton manufacturers in Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow. American cotton prices rose and supplies declined in the late 1830s, prompting British businessmen to explore the potential for cotton cultivation in East India. India had been a major supplier of cotton until it was superseded by American cotton in the nineteenth century. In 1839, the EIC recruited Captain Thomas Bayles, an officer of the Indian army on furlough in England, to introduce American-style cotton production to India using indigenous labor. In an allegedly covert operation, the EIC sent Bayles to America “to engage parties qualified for the purpose of instructing and superintending the natives in the cultivation of cotton, and the proper method of cleaning it by machinery.”³⁸ Given the amount of publicity Bayles’s mission received in the British and American press, Bayles’s objectives were far from secret. The editors of the New Orleans Daily Picayune, for example, claimed the Mississippi press had exposed Bayles’s purpose after he recruited individuals to go to India.³⁹ Bayles spent time in South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana as well as Mississippi. In 1840, Bayles returned to England with ten recruits. The Washington, D.C., Daily National Intelligencer mocked the American planters who traveled with Bayles as “pure philanthropists” and claimed the misguided American “anti-Slavery and Abolition societies” wished to deprive American cotton “of a foreign market, as the produce of slave labor” because they believed “the Hindoos” enjoyed “an admirable freedom.”⁴⁰ The EIC operation worried some supporters of American cotton, who feared increased cotton production in British India, Texas, South America, and elsewhere would damage the market for American-grown cotton.⁴¹ In the end, the EIC operation failed despite a total investment of £100,000.⁴² While rumor attributed its failure to sabotage by American planters, Isaac Watts, secretary of the Cotton Supply Association in Manchester, blamed the poor infrastructure of British India, which hindered efforts to bring cotton to the British market. Nonetheless, businessmen and abolitionists persisted in their efforts to produce cotton in East India for British textile mills.⁴³ Supporters of free-labor goods from India looked forward to the World Anti-Slavery Convention, believing international cooperation would aid the boycott and the abolitionist cause.

World Anti-Slavery Convention

Responsibility for organizing the World Anti-Slavery Convention fell to British Quaker Joseph Sturge and members of the London Committee, the executive committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Considered among the more radical of the British abolitionists, Sturge embraced immediatism earlier than many of his male abolitionist counterparts. Sturge had also opposed compensating slaveholders. Like Cropper and Heyrick, Sturge recognized the connection between the abolition of slavery and relief for the poor, believing the abolition of slavery would improve conditions for the working class. He, like Cropper, also worried that a widespread boycott of slave-grown cotton, for example, would close mills and displace British workers. In planning for the convention, Sturge recruited support from British antislavery societies and supervised efforts to gather information about slavery for presentation at the convention. The London Committee also issued an invitation to “the friends of the slave of every nation and every clime.”⁴⁴ When the London Committee learned that some American antislavery societies had appointed female delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention, they issued a second call, specifically asking for male delegates. Female delegates, Sturge claimed, would hinder rather than aid the cause. If female delegates did attend the convention, he warned, “they will have to encounter the strong feeling against it, which exists here, standing alone.”⁴⁵ Still, American associations, such as the American Free Produce Association persisted, sending as delegates Lucretia Mott and Sarah Pugh. As the female delegates arrived in London, in the days before the convention began, the London Committee made repeated efforts to convince them to accept their exclusion from the convention. At one meeting, a black delegate from Jamaica told Mott, “It would lower the dignity of the Convention and bring ridicule on the whole thing if ladies were admitted.” Mott replied, noting that “similar reasons were urged in Pennsylvania for the exclusion of colored people from our meetings—but had we yielded on such flimsy arguments, we might as well have abandoned our enterprise.” Mott’s response is an important reminder of the different social and political contexts in which British and American abolitionists worked. In the United States, female and African American support and leadership were vital to the cause.⁴⁶

American abolitionist Wendell Phillips brought the woman question before all of the delegates on the first day of the convention. William Lloyd Garrison, delayed by the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, was not present. Although the London Committee had already decided to exclude female delegates, Phillips insisted that the convention as a whole should decide whether the women should be recognized, an argument first made by Sarah Pugh in a written protest the previous day. British abolitionist George Thompson, who had been instrumental in bringing American women into the movement, urged Phillips to withdraw the motion. Phillips, however, persisted. William Adam also spoke in favor of the women delegates. In the end, an overwhelming majority of convention delegates voted against admission of the women, and they were forced to sit in the gallery, witnesses to but not participants in the proceedings.⁴⁷

Delegates debated two topics—British India and free produce—that were of particular importance to supporters of the boycott. On the second day of the convention, William Adam delivered a lecture to the delegates, highlighting the continued existence of slavery in the territories of the East India Company. Abridged from a series of open letters Adam had written to parliamentary abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton and published in Boston and in London earlier that year, Adam’s lecture challenged traditional arguments about the character and the source of slavery in British India. The EIC had failed to abolish slavery and had given tacit sanction to its continued presence. “Slavery in India does not rest on law but custom,” Adam remarked, “and this illegal custom has been invested by the British government in India, with the desecrated forms and sanctions of law and justice.” Moreover, slavery in India was not as benign as previously claimed. Using a rhetorical strategy from the abolitionist movement, Adam emphasized specific instances of physical cruelty, alluding to “the unnatural and atrocious barbarity” practiced on slave eunuchs, for example. Female slaves, he added, were kept “for licentious purposes” and often subject to “mutilation and murder.” While Adam admitted that slavery was not the worst social evil from which India suffered, he maintained that Indian bondage was far from harmless. Highlighting the horrors of slavery, Adam contradicted earlier assumptions that Indian slavery was “divested of all the cruel features which characterized the African trade.” He called for renewed abolitionist effort to end slavery in British India, thus completing the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. “Nothing has been done to mitigate the condition of the slaves, or to lead to the extinction of slavery,” Adam told the delegates. “You have, therefore, strong, clear, defined ground upon which to proceed; and I earnestly hope that you will proceed.”⁴⁸

The delegates received Adam’s speech with approbation, noting that the political compromises of the Emancipation Act of 1833 had limited action against slavery in India. “We have long talked of the evil [of slavery in British India], but what have we done to remove it,” Joseph Pease asked. The delegates appointed a committee, including Adam, Pease, Charles Stuart, and George Thompson to consider Adam’s paper and to deliver to the convention a resolution or resolutions based on it. Joseph Sams, a Quaker bookseller from Darlington, urged the committee to do more than consider Adam’s report. Instead, he urged the committee to also consider the subject of free labor. If “we as a nation were to use only free labour produce,” Sams said, “it would be one of the severest blows which could possibly be given to slavery.” R. R. R. Moore, a political economist from Dublin, objected. “We shall gain nothing by mixing up the subjects,” Moore claimed. George Thompson agreed. The delegates unanimously approved the resolution, limiting the committee’s review to the information contained in Adam’s report.⁴⁹

On the eighth day of the convention, Charles Stuart introduced a free-produce resolution, recommending “the disuse of slave-labour produce, and instead of it the use of free-labour produce, as far as practicable.” Stuart, a native of Jamaica and a retired army officer, had been active in antislavery in the United States and the West Indies. In the 1830s, as we have seen, Stuart was unsuccessful in his attempts to introduce a free-produce resolution at the annual meetings of the American Anti-Slavery Society. At the World Anti-Slavery Convention, Stuart’s resolution triggered an intense debate. Those critical of the resolution noted the challenge of abstaining from slave-labor goods, particularly in the United States. “Slave-labour, in some form or other, enters into nearly all the substantial articles of commerce, that are in ordinary use, and ranked as necessaries,” American abolitionist James G. Birney remarked. Other delegates debated the meaning of the phrase, “as far as practicable,” asking whether the resolution should be reworded or the phrase omitted altogether. American abolitionist and Unitarian minister George Bradburn claimed the phrase “as far as practicable” amounted to “nothing.” “Great diversity of opinion will be entertained as to what is practicable,” he said. Several delegates were concerned that the consequences of the boycott had not been fully considered. Noting the importance of cotton to British industry, one delegate believed any free-produce resolution would impede the abolitionist cause. “I think we ought to pause, and to deeply consider the consequences of this motion,” he warned. Delegates who supported a free-produce resolution noted the thousands of Americans who abstained from slave-labor goods. “Americans … eschew every article of slave produce, and would pay fifty cents instead of five, if it were required, to put down American slavery,” bragged one American delegate while another claimed hundreds more abstained in the United States than in Britain. George Thompson believed passage of the resolution, or a modified version of it, “would strengthen the hands of abolitionists very materially.” In the end, the delegates refused to endorse Stuart’s resolution. Instead, delegates agreed to form a committee to examine possible sources for free-labor goods.⁵⁰ Immediately after the free-produce debate, William Adam introduced the resolutions drafted by the committee charged with examination of his report on East India slavery. The committee presented a series of eight resolutions, highlighting the nature and extent of slavery in India. The resolutions, which restated the key points of Adam’s lecture, passed unanimously. The resolutions did not reference free labor or identify India as a potential source of free-labor goods.⁵¹

In her diary, Lucretia Mott wrote approvingly of William Adam’s lecture earlier in the week though she lamented that “the convention [was] not disposed to entertain the question, altho’ many had something to say on it.” It was Nathaniel Colver, the stout Baptist minister from Tremont Temple in Boston, who received the harshest criticism from Mott. Colver, she wrote, “told how tender he was once on the subject [of free produce], how he gathered his little ones about him, and explained to them the cruelty & wickedness of such participancy,” but he discovered that “self-denial was not easy & gave it up & [gave] his children full latitude in robbery & spoil & the gain of oppression.” After giving his speech against free produce, Colver “sallied forth to our bar,” challenging Mott to speak out, “if the spirit moves you … say on—you’ll be allowed to say what you wish.” Instead, Mott sat in silent protest. Later she noted, “Our Free Produce society will have to double their diligence & do their own work—and so will American Abolitionists generally—& especially women.”⁵² Colver’s taunt marginalized both the free-produce movement and the women who supported the movement. Subsequent reports of the free-produce debate focused on the silencing of Mott. According to Sarah Pugh, Mott’s report to the AFPA, in October 1840, revealed “how her heart burned within her to speak for the wronged & the outraged,” and how she had not been granted the opportunity to counter the “false reasoning” of the delegates. Had Mott been able to do so, Pugh claimed, “they would have mourned for the wrong they had done to the slave in this gagging one of his best and most able advocates.” The National Anti-Slavery Standard noted that “the rules of the Convention had placed a padlock upon [Mott’s] lips, and [she was] obliged to listen to flimsy sophistry in defence of wrong, in silence.”⁵³

The free-produce debate at the World Anti-Slavery Convention reveals the limits of moral commerce. During the convention, delegates spent considerable time debating the “general axiom, that free-labour is more profitable to the employer, and consequently cheaper, than slave-labour.” On the seventh day of the convention, delegates considered a series of resolutions emphasizing the profitability of free labor and encouraging abolitionists to seek alternate sources for slave-labor goods. Such measures relied on economic coercion to force slave-labor goods from the market. “The unrestricted competition of free-labour in the cultivation of sugar, would necessarily introduce a new system, by which the cost of production would be further diminished, and the fall of prices that must ensue, would leave no profits upon slave-grown sugar.”⁵⁴ Many of the delegates agreed with Stuart, who believed the market for slave-labor goods must be destroyed before abolitionists could begin to convert the hearts of slaveholders.⁵⁵ For Lucretia Mott, such appeals to “avarice” displayed a “want of confidence in moral power.” As historian Carol Faulkner argues, “abstinence was an aspect of the practical Christianity that [Mott] advocated in her sermons: an everyday action that shook the religious, political, and economic foundations of slavery.” Consuming free produce, “the individual freed herself from custom and the market even as she contributed to the liberation of slaves.”⁵⁶ While Mott and other members of the American Free Produce Association worked to replace slave-labor goods with free-labor alternatives, their efforts emphasized the moral purity of free-labor goods rather than their economic superiority. The free-produce debate reflected abolitionist consumers’ struggle to reconcile the fundamental elements of free produce: economics and morals. Mott’s son-in-law Edward M. Davis looked forward to a future when cotton from British India would drive slave-grown cotton from the market. “American slavery will have recd. its death blow,” he remarked.⁵⁷ Yet, Davis also questioned the objectives of the British India Society. “You force Slavery from its present location by appealing to the avaricious feelings of the slaveholder,” he wrote British abolitionist Elizabeth Pease in March 1840. “We exterminate it by appealing to his conscience and understanding.” Even if British reformers were successful in supplying their country with free-labor cotton from India, Davis suggested that would still not reform American slaveholders. “Would this prove to our planters that slavery is sinful?” Davis asked. “No! only that his business is unprofitable. The result might & I doubt not would be, to do away with our slave holding Laws but not our slave holding spirit.”⁵⁸ Davis, Mott, and others made a sharp distinction between the morals and the economics of free produce. The morality of free produce reformed the heart while economics reformed the market. Delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention were unable to come to an agreement about the relationship between economic principles and moral commitments. While delegates chose to focus on questions of supply rather than matters of conversion, the conflict between economic principles and moral commitments continued to stress the free-produce movement even as free produce attracted new supporters and lost old ones on either side of the Atlantic.

Doing Their Own Work: American Free Produce in the 1840s

In October 1840, the American Free Produce Association held its second annual meeting at Clarkson Hall in Philadelphia. As it had with other antislavery and free-produce meetings that fall, the events of the World Anti-Slavery Convention dominated the meeting’s discussions. Henry Grew provided the only dissenting vote when AFPA delegates passed a resolution stating the association was “deeply aggrieved” by events in London. At the convention, Grew had voted against recognition of the female delegates, including his daughter Mary. Lucretia Mott and Sarah Pugh presented their report to the membership, noting that while many delegates to the convention expressed support of the theory of free produce, delegates did little “to aid us in our plans.” James Mott and Henry Grew also presented a report to the association, noting with regret “that the consistent practice we advocate, of abstaining from the use of the fruits of cruel and unrequited toil, has obtained to a very limited extent among the professed friends of the injured slave.” Delegates to the convention, though expressing support of abstention, claimed that “impracticability” and “inexpediency” made it impossible for them to remain consistent. The slaveholder, Mott and Grew remarked, used the same excuses “to fortify his trembling conscience.” The establishment of the British India Society, however, gave the two men reason to hope that free produce was gaining in appreciation by the larger abolitionist community.⁵⁹

Despite the hopes of Mott and Grew, the AFPA had limited support in the 1840s. After peaking in 1839, participation steadily declined. The meeting minutes for 1839 contain a complete list of delegates whereas most minutes for subsequent years contain no such listing. In 1845, the annual meeting had to be rescheduled because delegates were lacking; in 1846 and 1847, delegates appointed the same set of officers who had served the association the previous year. In the 1840s, as the organization lost members, the membership narrowed to a small core group of supporters, mostly Quakers, including Sarah Pugh, James and Lucretia Mott, Abraham Pennock, Caleb Clothier, and Daniel Miller Jr. Still, members of the AFPA continued to seek support from abolitionist societies. In 1841, the Executive Committee of the AFPA sent a letter to each state antislavery society urging their members to embrace “the principle of abstinence.” The group also issued an “Address to Abolitionists.”⁶⁰ The following year, members issued the American Free Produce Journal, a two-page circular, issued in October 1842, to present the free-produce idea “to the serious attention of their antislavery brethren.”⁶¹

The AFPA also struggled to supply boycotters with free-labor goods. In 1840, the group purchased nearly 1,400 pounds of North Carolina cotton to be manufactured into free-labor yard goods. The following year, the AFPA received a large quantity of “free Texas cotton,” which the group had made into ginghams, canton flannel, bed-ticking, calicoes, knitting cotton, and other articles. Cotton prices declined sharply in 1842, forcing the group to take a loss on some of its goods. At the annual meeting that year, members passed a resolution to create a fund “for the purchase & manufacture of Free Cotton.” Each member, by annual subscription, would pay one dollar into a manufacturing fund. In 1843, the AFPA’s Committee on Finance outlined a four-step plan to raise funds to continue manufacturing free-labor goods. The annual report for 1843 noted that the market and the quality of goods had improved, which is evidenced by the AFPA’s purchase of more than 30,000 pounds of free-labor cotton that was subsequently manufactured into 40,000 yards of cloth. In 1844 and 1845, the group manufactured 41,000 and 62,000 yards of cloth, respectively. Increasingly, in the 1840s, manufacturing seemed to be the only business of the association although manufacturing reports are unavailable after 1845. In 1846, James Mott noted that since “the business of the association is conducted chiefly by our manufacturing committee, the details of its operation will be found in their report.” Success was short-lived, however; sales declined in 1847 as the AFPA faced competition from the newly formed Free Produce Association of Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. “Storekeepers and others” had divided their purchases between the two groups. Moreover, the Free Produce Association of Friends “had a larger stock and better variety of articles” and received “the best attention” of the two groups. The Free Produce Association of Friends was not the AFPA’s most significant problem, however. “The chief reason” for declining sales, the committee reported, could be attributed to inability of the association’s agents “to give the business the time and attention requisite to its proper management.” As a result, the Executive Committee recommended liquidating the business.⁶²

Even as the Executive Committee of the AFPA struggled with problems, such as membership and supplies, the group continued to frame those discussions in moral terms and to assert the moral imperative of free produce. At the third annual meeting of the AFPA, in October 1841, the Executive Committee lamented the apathy many abolitionists demonstrated toward free produce. “The great mass of abolitionists … need an abstinence baptism,” president pro tem Sarah Pugh asserted in the annual report. In a pointed reference to Garrison’s dismissal of free produce, she noted that many abolitionists had “sacrificed political party and religious sect for the cause of freedom, yet the taint of slavery still clings to them, and they need to be pointed to the stain that dims their otherwise consistent testimony.” Pugh described the AFPA as an association under siege. Editors of antislavery papers did not reprint an address published by the association in the Pennsylvania Freeman; thus, the report reached only “a comparatively small portion of abolitionists” rather than “the great mass of … antislavery brethren.” Likewise, England continued to purchase American slave-grown cotton rather than improve labor conditions and increase production of free-labor cotton in India. The AFPA’s efforts were further hampered by high duties on free-labor cotton. At the annual meeting, members reviewed and approved a memorial to Congress requesting that duties on foreign and raw cotton be removed, claiming that current duties paid by the association constituted “a tax upon conscientious scruples.”⁶³

In 1842, at the fourth annual meeting, Sarah Pugh presented a motion to dissolve the association. After an “animated discussion,” the motion was voted down “by an apparently unanimous vote.”⁶⁴ During the “animated discussion” of Pugh’s motion, the membership read a letter from Aaron L. Benedict of Delaware County, Ohio, reporting the successful organization of the Western Free Produce Association (WFPA). Benedict’s letter was reprinted in full in the AFPA’s annual report, suggesting its importance to the membership. “No house in the vicinity being half large enough to convene the people, the [free-produce] meeting was held in a grove,” Benedict wrote. According to Benedict, a plan had been established to form free-produce societies in every county in Ohio where “friends of abstinence reside.” Benedict described an energetic free-produce movement under development in the West, one which the newly formed society hoped the AFPA would support through the supply of free-labor goods.⁶⁵ Developments in Ohio and Indiana were promising enough to postpone any plans of dissolving the AFPA.

Even as free produce declined in the East, western free produce gained momentum, which in turn helped revitalize the movement in Philadelphia. Of an estimated sixteen free-produce societies that formed in the 1840s, seven were located in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan, including the Marion County Free Produce Association, Whetstone, Ohio; the Wayne County Free Produce Association, Wayne County, Indiana; the Iowa Free Produce Association (formerly the Salem Anti-Slavery Society, established in 1841), Salem, Iowa; and the Young’s Prairie Free Labor Association, Young’s Prairie, Michigan.⁶⁶ Many of the antislavery societies that organized in the West in the 1840s also adopted free produce. In the spring of 1841, nearly one hundred women gathered in Spiceland, Indiana, to organize the Henry County Female Anti-Slavery Society. Initially, the women focused on influencing their “fathers, husbands and brothers” to vote for Liberty Party candidates. By fall, however, the women had adopted their first free-produce resolution. Four other women’s associations quickly adopted similar free-produce resolutions.⁶⁷ When the Western Free Produce Association organized in 1842, as an auxiliary to the American Free Produce Association, supporters asked antislavery societies throughout Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa to hold meetings to discuss free produce and to select delegates to the WFPA’s inaugural meeting, which was held on August 8, 1842, in Green Plain, Ohio.⁶⁸ All of this activity supported the establishment of free-produce stores. Of the estimated twenty-one free produce stores established in the 1840s, nine were located in Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana.⁶⁹

When the Western Free Produce Association organized in 1842, the group laid out ambitious plans for promoting the free-produce cause. By leaving the manufacturing to the American Free Produce Association, the WFPA could focus solely on supplying goods through wholesale and retail free-labor stores. In his letter to the AFPA, Benedict suggested the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society hire an agent “to go through the country and form free-labor societies, and rouse the minds of abolitionists to a sense of the importance of abstinence from the productions of slave-labor; and of establishing a monthly periodical, devoted to this subject.”⁷⁰ In 1843, when the WFPA met in Greensboro, Indiana, members reported little progress. The group had struggled to acquire free-labor goods, to raise funds, and to recruit experienced leaders to promote the cause. In 1844 the officers of the WFPA did not attend the meeting, and in 1845 the organization did not hold a meeting. The following year, the group reorganized and resolved to raise funds to establish a wholesale free-produce store in Cincinnati that would be operated by Levi Coffin, a Quaker merchant from Newport, Indiana. Initially, Coffin declined for personal and professional reasons; however, when the group failed to find someone else to run the operation, Coffin relented. Chronically underfunded, Coffin managed to keep the business afloat until 1857 when he sold out and returned to Newport.⁷¹

Levi Coffin’s influence on free produce in the West was not limited to his work with the WFPA, however. In the early 1840s, Coffin was instrumental in organizing the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-Slavery Friends, which formed after Quakers in Indiana split over the issue of abolitionism. In the 1830s, Quakers in Indiana led opposition to slavery in the state, including vigorous protests against the state’s infamous Black Laws, which limited black immigration to Indiana and denied citizenship to blacks already living in the state. Levi Coffin and his distant cousin, Elijah Coffin, were among those Quakers who petitioned the state legislature for repeal of the laws. Radical Quakers such as Levi Coffin advocated for immediate emancipation and full racial equality. In contrast, Elijah Coffin and other conservative Quakers favored gradual emancipation through colonization. As clerk of the Meeting for Sufferings, Elijah Coffin was also among the powerful elite of Indiana Quakers. Until 1839, these two groups, conservative and radical, maintained an uneasy truce. In 1839, Arnold Buffum arrived in Indiana. An agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Buffum had been disowned by the Society of Friends in the East. His arrival in Indiana was followed by letters and traveling ministers who denounced Buffum as an infidel and a deceiver. Buffum established antislavery societies, edited the abolitionist journal, the Protectionist, and organized antislavery lectures throughout the state. Not surprisingly, radical Quakers such as Levi Coffin, as well as Walter Edgerton and Charles Osborn, welcomed Buffum’s efforts. In 1840, Edgerton unsuccessfully attempted to modify the Quaker discipline, making the purchase of slave-labor goods an offense subject to disownment. Two years later, tensions among Quakers reached a boiling point when presidential candidate Henry Clay appeared in Richmond, Indiana, during the yearly meeting. His warm reception by conservative Friends stood in sharp contrast to the “stinging rebuke” of abolitionist Quakers, who publicly demanded Clay free his slaves. As a result, the Meeting for Sufferings removed eight of its members for their abolitionist sympathies, including Levi Coffin and Charles Osborn. Indiana Yearly Meeting also warned its subordinate meetings not to appoint abolitionists to positions of power, and continued to caution against the “excitement and zeal” of the antislavery movement. In the end, nearly two thousand Friends, or about one-tenth of the Yearly Meeting’s membership, left to form the Anti-Slavery Friends.⁷² Having “come out” of the Indiana Yearly Meeting, Anti-Slavery Friends were freed of the hostile Quaker authority that had limited their abolitionist agitation.

The Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-Slavery Friends sought to transform abolitionist practice into enforceable doctrine, the only corporate body of Quakers to do so. Anti-Slavery Friends required their members, primarily Orthodox Quakers, to support the Liberty Party and to adopt free produce. In 1849, the Anti-Slavery Friends revised their discipline, making the boycott of slave-labor goods a requirement. Deficiencies reported by subordinate meetings prompted the group to issue epistles in 1853 and 1855, reminding the quarterly and monthly meetings, as well as individual Quakers, of the importance of “a faithful testimony against Slavery.” Anti-Slavery Friends never received widespread support from American Quakers. In 1857, the group dissolved for lack of members.⁷³

The American Free Produce Association, the Western Free Produce Association, and the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-Slavery Friends framed their support of free produce in moral terms. The members of the AFPA and the WFPA, in particular, gave priority to the morality of free produce above all else. Free produce, they argued, was a sacrifice, a duty, and an act of consistency required of all true abolitionists. Urging abolitionists’ identification with the slave, Quaker Benjamin S. Jones claimed, “if we have faith in the principles we advocate, we should be willing to sacrifice luxury, comfort, and convenience in the cause of universal liberty; preferring rather to suffer with the captive, than share the spoils with the oppressor.” In the mid-1840s, members of the AFPA celebrated their ability to “maintain [their] principles amidst opposing influences within, as well as without, the antislavery ranks.” Their critics, however, were quick to point out their inconsistency, citing the unavoidable infiltration of slave-labor products into northern society. Other critics of free produce were frustrated by what they saw as a proliferation of tests for abolitionist membership. “We should have not only the political and ecclesiastical tests, but ‘free produce tests,’ the ‘kitchen table or cast’ test, the test of paying taxes to the government that supports slavery, the test of neglecting to do all in our power … and so on, indefinitely,” Samuel Lightbody complained. Instead, Lightbody called on reformers to simply “abolitionize the people and then leave them to act individually.”⁷⁴ In their quest to bring abolitionists into the free-produce movement, abolitionist consumers instead seemed to push them away with their narrow focus on individual purity and moral consumption.

William Lloyd Garrison was a particularly visible target for supporters of free produce. An early supporter of free produce, by the late 1830s, Garrison had rejected the tactic as impractical. While in London for the World Anti-Slavery Convention, Lucretia Mott tried unsuccessfully to change Garrison’s mind. “Rather inconsistent,” she noted in her diary.⁷⁵ Lea Gause was not so charitable, publicly accusing Garrison of adopting the motto, “No Union with Slaveholders” in theory but not in practice.⁷⁶ Time and again, abolitionist consumers pointed out the hypocrisy of abolitionists who purchased slave-labor products, strengthening the very shackles abolitionists were attempting to break.⁷⁷ Garrison later defended his stance, arguing that free produce would not convince slaveholders who were motivated “not [by] the love of gain, but the possession of absolute power, unlimited sovereignty.”⁷⁸ When Garrison claimed abolitionists were particularly entitled to use slave-labor goods because they were fighting for the slave, the AFPA responded, “It is even said, by men of well-known zeal for the cause of freedom, that the friends of the slave have a peculiar, and, indeed, the only right to use the blood-stained fruit of his extorted toil, as if we, whose eyes have been opened to the enormous injustice of the system which extorts that toil, and whose souls burn with indignation at its very name, may appropriate its fruits to our use more guiltlessly than they who are comparatively blind to its inherent sinfulness!”⁷⁹ In the 1840s, Garrison continued to assert the impossibility of avoiding all slave-labor products. Garrison criticized those who would use free produce as “a test of moral character.” While he expressed respect for those who abstained and who could be described as “the most intellectual, the most courageous, the most self denying, and the most sincerely conscientious antislavery men and women in the land,” Garrison chastised Quakers, such as those in Indiana, who abstained from slave-labor goods all the while “upholding the pro-slavery position of the Society with which they are connected.” Such free-produce supporters, Garrison remarked using a biblical figure, “strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.”⁸⁰

In the 1840s, American supporters of the free-produce movement were unable to reconcile the economic principles and the moral commitments of abstention. The Quakers who dominated the free-produce movement continued to assert the moral imperative of abstention, driving away potential supporters of the boycott. Although the boycott suffered from chronic problems of supply, the boycott suffered more from the inflexibility of the movement’s supporters.

As American supporters of free produce attempted to maintain associations to coordinate the work of the movement, British reformers struggled to continue the British India Society. In August 1840, Manchester replaced London as the center of the Indian reform movement. Five months later, the association established the newspaper, the British Indian Advocate, edited by William Adam, who had relocated to Britain from Massachusetts after the World Anti-Slavery Convention. The Advocate was short-lived, however. In 1841, the British India Society entered into a formal alliance with the Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL). In an effort to increase free trade, the ACLL sought repeal of British laws restricting the importation of foreign grain. While many British and American abolitionists supported free trade and the Anti-Corn Law League, many others worried that the movement would distract attention from abolitionism, particularly after George Thompson agreed to set aside agitation for the BIS temporarily in order to work for the league. As Elizabeth Pease noted, “they [the League] will not let us have GT to ourselves, peaceably.” Thompson, Joseph Pease, and the leadership of the BIS agreed to the alliance. In return, the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League promised to throw the weight of their influence behind Indian reform once the Corn Laws had been repealed. The leaders of the BIS thought they had negotiated a good bargain; however, the alliance proved disastrous for the BIS. The British India Society lost all public momentum for the cause and gained the enemies of the Anti-Corn Law League. By the time the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, Indian reform and the British India Society were nearly forgotten.⁸¹

The demise of the American Free Produce Association and the British India Society did not mean the end of free produce in the United States or Britain, however. Supporters of both the AFPA and the BIS regrouped to form new associations. In 1845 and 1846, American Quakers established the Free Produce Association of Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the Free Produce Association of Friends of New York Yearly Meeting, respectively.⁸² British Quaker Anna Richardson organized the Newcastle Ladies’ Free Produce Association in 1846, one of a growing network of British free-produce societies in this period. Three years later, Joseph Sturge chaired a meeting to establish the British Free Produce Association.⁸³ These associations sustained the free-produce movement in the 1840s and initiated a new wave of free-produce activity in the 1850s.