Domesticity and Free Produce

Elizabeth Margaret Chandler was one of the most prolific antislavery authors in the United States in the antebellum period. Born in 1807 in Centreville, Delaware, Chandler’s father moved her and her two brothers to Philadelphia in 1809, after the death of their mother. After her father died in 1815, she and her brothers were raised by their maternal grandmother and various aunts in the area. Chandler attended Quaker schools until she was twelve or thirteen and grew to adulthood in the divided Quaker community of Philadelphia. In 1827, at the time of the Quaker schism, Elizabeth and her brother Thomas were members of Philadelphia Northern District Monthly Meeting. That fall, after the split, they transferred to Green Street Monthly Meeting, the center of Hicksite influence in Philadelphia. They were subsequently disowned by Northern District Meeting.¹¹ Chandler played an important role in the development of American antislavery literary culture.¹² She became editor of the “Ladies’ Repository,” a new feature in Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation. The “Ladies’ Repository” set conscience as the term on which women would engage in free-produce and antislavery activism. Chandler distinguished between male and female motivations for joining the abolitionist cause: men joined the cause for moral, political, or philanthropic motives whereas women were called to the cause “by all the holy charities of life.” Describing her work in religious terms, Chandler professed her desire to be “useful” in “the advancement of … [the] holy cause” of abolition and pledged to “place the tribute of her services on the altar of Emancipation.” She also urged women to abstain from slave-labor goods, to form antislavery societies, and to influence family and friends to do the same.¹³

Abstention, according to Chandler, was primarily a moral action that affected the individual consumer rather than an economic action that impacted the profitability of slavery. Although the economic consequences of abstention mattered, the moral foundation of abstention mattered more. Abstention was a particularly feminine means of affirming antislavery sentiment. “Letters to Isabel,” a series of eight free-produce essays written by Chandler in 1829 and 1830, urged women to become active supporters of abolitionism by abstaining from slave-labor goods. “Slavery, my friend, must be either positively right, or positively wrong. There is no middle point on which it may rest. It is not a thing to be merely disapproved of—coldly warred with as a venial offence. It violates all the most essential principles of Christian religion,” Chandler wrote. Anyone “who bears the name of a woman and a Christian” should “fling from them the luxuries” produced by slave labor “as if they were a deadly poison.” Women were naturally suited to antislavery work: “Woman was not formed to look upon scenes of suffering with a careless eye” and should not “for an instant tolerate” the “wickedness” of slavery or the “luxuries that are purchased by such means.” Chandler made an empathic appeal for women’s abstention, describing a pound cake as “the sepulcher of the broken heart” and a jam as filled with “briny tears.” Indifference to the blood-stained goods of slavery was a failure of female sensibility: “If those who unscrupulously partake of these delicacies, had beheld the horrors by which they are too often purchased … I believe there are few females who would retain any desire to taste of the blood-polluted banquet … why should the sight of blood be needed, when they know it has been shed, to awaken their sleeping sensibilities?” She tolerated no excuses for the consumption of slave-labor goods. Citing the parable of the widow’s mite, she dismissed the objection that free-labor goods were too costly and too inconvenient.¹⁴ While Chandler encouraged women to join in associations, forming their individual decision to abstain into a powerful, collective antislavery group, she reframed women’s economic power in moral terms, emphasizing instead the individual purification produced by moral female consumption.¹⁵

As an editor and a writer for the Genius of Universal Emancipation, Chandler was part of a broader pattern of change among American publications in the 1820s that provided more opportunities for female authors and editors. Women benefited from the significant increase in publications for women and by women; still, women often disagreed about the ways in which women should use those opportunities, particularly when it came to political matters such as slavery. Sarah J. Hale, who was the most prominent female editor in this period, used her position as editor of the Ladies Magazine to advocate for a separate feminine public sphere. While Hale accepted many of the cultural ideals of womanhood, she did not accept the gendered distinction between the public and the private sphere. Instead, she urged women to use the public sphere to engage and simultaneously challenge notions of true womanhood. According to Hale, women should speak out publicly on domestic and moral matters. That view did not extend to political matters, however. For Hale, women could address the morality of slavery but not the politics; Chandler’s pleas that women speak out and take action against slavery were too political.¹⁶

“An Appeal to the Ladies of the United States,” written by Chandler in 1829, is a powerful call to action against slavery. Women had been educated by custom to believe slavery a “natural” and “necessary evil.” The ideal of republican motherhood described women as the first educators of children who had the ability to influence national matters through the power of their influence. Women could “break the fetters of the oppressed.” Chandler wrote: “Will you not stand boldly and nobly forth, in the face of the world, and declare that American women will never be tamely made the instruments of oppression?” Moreover, by giving “on every occasion the preference to the products of slave labor,” those goods would become cheaper and more readily available. In a passage that echoed Heyrick, Chandler claimed: “As soon as sufficient inducement is held out, free labor will be liberally employed; the experiment of its comparative advantages with that of the slave, may then be fairly tried.… The demand for free labor products will become greater than for those of the other class; they may then be afforded cheaper, and Emancipation must necessarily follow.”¹⁷ “Appeal” appeared in Genius of Universal Emancipation in September 1829. It was reprinted two months later in Hale’s Ladies Magazine. Hale explained that the article had appeared in the Genius and that it was being reprinted “by request.” She attributed the essay to a “southern lady.” Significantly, she abridged the essay, omitting the final paragraphs that explicitly outlined women’s organizational activity and support for free produce. While Hale and Chandler shared similar views on female education and republican motherhood, their motivations for doing so were quite different. Hale believed female education would allow women to better fulfill their traditional feminine role; Chandler, in contrast, advocated female education as an important corrective to slavery. “In addressing her own sex, particularly on so momentous and really appalling subject as that of slavery,” Hale said of Chandler’s essay, “we presume the writer had no idea of advocating female interference or usurpation of authority, in directing the affairs of state.” Hale cautioned her readers, “Let us beware of exerting our power politically.” Woman’s influence should “depend mainly on the respect inspired by her moral excellence, not on the political address or energy she may display.”¹⁸

The following month, Chandler published her response to Hale’s criticism, producing the short piece, “Opinions,” as a review of a letter written by Hale to Chandler objecting “to the propriety of females becoming public advocates of Emancipation.”¹⁹ “Opinions” emphasized women’s domestic role, urging women to use that role to aid the cause of the oppressed slave. Free produce was particularly suited to women’s activism because it relied on women’s domestic responsibilities. While Chandler admitted that emancipation was a political question, she claimed it rested on “the broader basis of humanity and justice.” As a result, slavery was a moral question. And, Chandler asserted, “it is on this ground only, that we advocated the interference of women.” She further denied any desire to transform women into a “race of politicians.” Rather than emulating male political behavior, Chandler instead encouraged women to take female values into the world.²⁰

The Hale-Chandler debate about the appropriate use of the feminine public sphere reflects the pliable nature of domesticity. Although both women used domestic ideology and both believed women should address moral issues, they differed when it came to political matters such as slavery. Hale believed women should not engage in political debate or create discord; therefore, she urged women to avoid the controversy of slavery and emancipation.²¹ Chandler, in contrast, was troubled by women’s indifferent acceptance of slavery. Continued feminine consumption of slave-labor goods reflected a callous disregard for the oppressed slave that rendered meaningless the ideals of feminine morality. Slave-labor goods transformed the home into a blood-soaked scene. Rather than food to nourish the family, the family banquet contained sweets that were “mix’d” with the “red-life drops” and the “scalding tears” of the slaves who had produced the goods.²² Even families were rendered into shocking parodies by the commerce in slave-labor goods:

The weary slave had left his toil;—it was an eve like this,

But to his heart its loveliness would bring no throb of bliss …

A cry of anguish caught his ear—in shrieks she breathed his name,

And forward to his cot he sprung with heart and pulse of flame;

Amid her weeping babes she knelt, and o’er her crouching head

The white man’s lash in mockery swung, all newly stain’d with red.²³

Such scenes happened, Chandler claimed, because women were unwilling to forgo “the luxuries which have been wrung with heart-sickening inhumanity from the hands of the helpless and oppressed.” American colonial women had “refused the use of tea during the revolutionary contest”; yet her contemporaries allowed themselves “to be ministered to by the hand of slavery.” Chandler lamented, “It really is surprising how the gentle and the good can be so little offended by [slavery’s] vileness.”²⁴ It was woman’s duty “to relax not [her] endeavours until it is no longer impossible” to purchase free-labor goods. “Besides promoting the consumption of free produce, the influence of woman may be widely felt in awaking a more general interest in the cause of Emancipation.”²⁵ She called on women to “transform themselves mentally” into the slave, to “enter into the desolateness of that moment; stand alone and forsaken in the world; without religion, without a friend in earth or heaven, to whom they may turn for consolation in their hour of trial.”²⁶ The immoral consumption of slave-labor goods made a mockery of domesticity. Thus, true womanhood must include moral commerce.

Early Organizations

Chandler encouraged women to take collective action by organizing free-produce and antislavery associations. Women’s associational activity, she remarked, was part of the “conscientious discharge of an imperative duty.” British women had demonstrated the effectiveness of publishing and distributing antislavery literature. “The same measure would, no doubt, here be productive of equally beneficial results,” Chandler reasoned. Such associations would rouse the public from “their torpid insensibility.” Moreover, associations were “evidence that the opinions expressed are not merely the effervescence of excited feeling in scattered individuals.”²⁷ In the late 1820s, as Chandler began to speak out more frequently for free produce, her contemporaries in Philadelphia and elsewhere began to organize associations to promote antislavery and free produce.

The men and women of Philadelphia established gender-segregated free-produce societies in 1827 and 1829, respectively. Philadelphia men organized the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania in January 1827 to locate and to promote free-labor goods. Of the sixty-four men of the Free Produce Society, most were Quakers including James Mott, Thomas McClintock, Abraham L. Pennock, and Isaac T. Hopper. The Female Association for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton organized two years later, in January 1829, the city’s first female free-produce society and one of the earliest female antislavery associations in the United States. The group’s initial meeting attracted thirteen women; the group’s membership increased to more than one hundred in subsequent months. Although there are no membership lists for the association, it is likely that Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Margaret Chandler were among the members. It is unclear why the women waited two years to establish a female association in Philadelphia; it is possible, however, that their organization was delayed by the Hicksite schism. Moreover, the Hicksite schism may have contributed to a decline in male free-produce activity in Philadelphia in this same period. A letter, published in the African Repository and Colonial Journal in October 1829, suggested the men’s association had languished in the months after its establishment. The Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania, the letter writer remarked, had been recently “resuscitated from a state of torpidity … and now manifests strong symptoms of health and activity.” The author also noted the presence of the female society, estimating the membership at seventy women, “most of them being house-keepers.”²⁸

In the 1820s and early 1830s, free-produce and antislavery associations were also organized outside the immediate Philadelphia area. Quakers Enoch Lewis, William Gibbons, and Benjamin Webb organized the Wilmington (Delaware) Society for the Encouragement of Free Labor in 1826. Like the Philadelphia groups, the Wilmington organization resolved to encourage the cultivation of free-labor goods and to disseminate information about the cause. Free-produce groups were organized in Ohio, including the Salem Abolition and Colonization Society (1827), the Free Produce Association of Green Plain (1832), the Free Produce and Anti-Slavery Society of Monroe County (1833), the New Garden Anti-Slavery Society (1834), and the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society (1835). In 1826 the Aiding Abolition Society of Monroe County, Ohio, sent a memorial to the merchants of Ohio and elsewhere urging them to give “the preference to the product of free labour, so as to discourage African Slavery, and to promote the amelioration of this degraded race of fellow beings.” The memorial recited the lineage of the eighteenth-century abolitionist movement including Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and many other “individuals [who] conscientiously refused to use the produce of slavery.” The members of the association “assure[d] the merchants, who will avoid procuring the produce of slavery, piracy, smuggling, &c. and will purchase such articles as are the produce of free labour, that they shall have their united and liberal support.” Members cheered recent successful attempts by local merchants to secure free-labor goods.²⁹

Quaker free-produce associations supported the development of similar groups in the African American community in Philadelphia. In October 1830, members of the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania met with members of Richard Allen’s Bethel Church to discuss the establishment of an African American free-produce association. Two months later, at a gathering that drew several hundred men, the Colored Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania was organized, electing James Cornish as the secretary. Within months the officers of the association reported that demand for free-labor goods had exceeded expectations. It was reported that some members were buying up to fifty pounds of free-labor sugar at one time. In this same period, the women of Bethel Church formed the Colored Female Free Produce Society with Judith James as president and Laetitia Rowley as secretary. Like the Quaker-dominated associations, members linked consumers who purchased slave-labor goods to the support of slavery. The black free-produce societies also recognized the African American community’s personal stake in slavery and the community’s particular responsibility to break the chains of oppression. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, black abolitionists organized local free-produce and antislavery societies in Philadelphia and elsewhere. For example, in 1838, a group of African American women in New York promoted a display of free-labor products at the Broadway Tabernacle with the proceeds going to the antislavery cause. In March 1834, black abolitionist William Whipper established a free-labor store next door to Richard Allen’s Bethel Church in Philadelphia.³⁰

While each of these organizations urged abstention from the products of slave labor, they also encouraged free produce, or the substitution of free-labor goods. In a tactic that was clearly borrowed from the British example, the men and women who formed these groups disseminated information about the availability of free-labor goods. They used the collective power of their associations and their stores to locate and to procure for interested consumers free-labor cotton, sugar, and other goods. These organizations marked a significant break from eighteenth-century Quaker abstention, which was both antislavery and anticommerce. In the nineteenth century, the men and women who opposed the consumption of slave-labor goods formed free-produce societies, disseminated information about free produce, and patronized free-produce stores. This emphasis on free produce reflected the expansion of ideas about the superiority of free labor and the rise of consumerism. The impact of consumerism on abstention is particularly evident in the children’s poetry composed by Chandler.

Juvenile Abolitionists

The domestic ideology of the late eighteenth-century that aided distinctions between the domestic and the public spheres also supported new ideas about childhood that sharpened the distinction between adults and children. As it did with women, consumer culture had a profound influence on cultural ideas about childhood. Among the middle class, in particular, the idea of a separate children’s physical and cultural space became entwined with consumer culture, leading to an expanded market for children’s toys and books. These toys and books changed significantly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as parents adopted a more active model of child rearing that developed both mind and body. Increasingly, children’s toys and books were used “to draw out children’s talents and to teach the skills the middle classes believed to be most important for a respectable, happy and prosperous life.”³¹ These toys and books taught children cultural values, thus it is not unusual that Chandler and other abolitionists would use the consumer culture of childhood to teach children the importance of abstention and abolitionism.

As one of the earliest and most widely distributed American authors of children’s abolitionist literature, Chandler was influential in encouraging children to abstain from the products of slave labor. Some of her most popular free-produce poems—“The Sugar Plums,” “Oh Press Me Not to Taste Again,” “Slave Produce,” and “Christmas”—targeted a younger audience. Her antislavery texts written especially for children highlighted the importance of children to the abolitionist community. Abolitionists recognized that children were an important and receptive audience for antislavery literature.³² Noting that “every body writes now for children,” an editorial in the Liberator linked the growth in children’s literature in general to the specific need to provide children with “correct information” about slavery.³³ Consuming abolitionist literature socialized young boys and girls into the abolitionist community and initiated them into the broader antebellum consumer culture. Abolitionist Henry C. Wright compared abolitionist instruction to religious instruction, calling for children to be “thoroughly imbued with the spirit and principles of Christian abolition.”³⁴ Writing abolitionist literature for children provided women writers such as Chandler another literary venue to enter into the public debate about slavery.³⁵

Children’s stories about abstention dated to the late eighteenth century. Writers such as English Quakers Priscilla Wakefield and Amelia Opie used the expanding market for juvenile literature to craft antislavery tales.³⁶ Wakefield authored children’s books on natural history as well as travelogues and moral tales often blending popular science writing with juvenile and didactic literature. Many of her works were published by the Quaker publishing firm Harvey and Darton, a leading publisher of children’s books. Wakefield’s Mental Improvement appeared in three volumes between 1794 and 1797. In a series of conversations among Mr. and Mrs. Harcourt and their four children, the father selected the subjects while the mother provided moral and spiritual commentary on a variety of subjects. The tenth conversation focused on sugar, transforming a lesson in the cultivation of sugar into a discussion of slavery. The conversation concluded with a pledge by the Harcourt children to abstain from the products of slave labor. Mental Improvement was reprinted by American publishers. Abraham Shearman, of New Bedford, Massachusetts, published the first American edition in 1799.³⁷ Opie, like Wakefield, published many of her works with Harvey and Darton in England. Her work was also widely reprinted in the United States. Her poem, “The Negro Boy’s Tale: A Poem Addressed to Children,” originally published during the slave-trade abolition campaign, was reprinted in 1824 by Harvey and Darton during the emancipation campaign.³⁸ Reprints of the poem appeared in a number of American antislavery publications including Enoch Lewis’s The African Observer.³⁹ The Black Man’s Lament; or, How to Make Sugar, published by Harvey and Darton in 1826, is an alternative history of sugar making. Like Wakefield’s Mental Improvement, the cultivation and production of sugar cane is intimately linked to the abuses of slavery. Opie connected “the Black man’s woes” to the “White man’s crime.” The “tall gold stems” of the sugar cane contained:

A sweet rich juice, which White men prize;

And that they may this sugar gain,

The Negro toils, and bleeds, and dies.⁴⁰

In giving voice to the victimized slave, Opie rejected earlier children’s abolitionist literature, which suggested slavery was acceptable if enforced by a benevolent master or mistress.⁴¹ Instead Opie privileged the slave’s right to equality and claimed European anxieties about emancipation were outweighed by the moral wrong of slavery.⁴² In her poem, Opie made clear the link between sugar consumption and slavery; yet, she did not specifically call on children to abstain from sugar, relying instead on the moral weight of her tale to convince children to forgo the sweet substance.

Chandler, in contrast, appealed directly to children to reject slavery and the products of slave labor. In her study of abolitionist children’s literature, literary scholar Deborah De Rosa argues that Chandler created a new fictional protagonist, the “abolitionist mother-historian.” Female authors such as Chandler used the ambiguity of ideologies of motherhood to create “revisionist histories [that] employ everything from sentimental rhetoric to an increasingly radical, legalistic, and quasi-seditious rhetoric.” Rather than the “sentimental, patriotic, or morally correct information” women traditionally used to educate their children, women may have instead opted for “seditious political works.” Central to this revision of motherhood was the abolitionist mother-historian who reinterpreted American history for her children.⁴³ Two of Chandler’s most widely reprinted children’s poems—“What Is a Slave, Mother?” and “Looking at the Soldiers”—use the abolitionist mother-historian to create alternative historical narratives and encourage juvenile abolitionism. Both poems use a mother-child dialogue to heighten the child’s political awareness of slavery.

The child protagonist of “What Is a Slave, Mother?” looks to the abolitionist mother-historian to refute the existence of slavery, particularly the slavery of children. In the first stanza the child asks the mother about slavery:

Methinks I have heard a story told,

Of some poor men, who are bought and sold,

And driven abroad with stripes to toil,

The live-long day on a stranger’s soil;

                       Is this true mother?

In the second stanza, the child shifts focus from the “poor men” to “children as young as I” asking the mother to disprove that under slavery children were forcefully separated from their parents. However, the mother answers simply, “Alas, yes, my child.” Clinging to hope, the child asks the mother whether “the master loves the slave child.” When the mother responds in the negative, the child concludes, “The tales I have heard [must] be true.” Stanza by stanza, Chandler uses the guise of the abolitionist mother-historian to emphasize the violent life of the slave child, a life so violent that the mother in the poem can only make the briefest replies to her child’s disbelief. In the final stanza, the mother confirms her child’s conclusions and completes the child’s socialization into American political culture.⁴⁴

The second poem, “Looking at the Soldiers,” is a counterhistory of the founding of the United States. In the opening stanzas, the child describes the pageantry of the Fourth of July parade. The drums, the trumpets, the soldiers, and the horses are, for the child, a lesson in the history of events that “saw our country set free.” But the mother reminds the child that liberty and revolution were “made in man’s blood.” More than bloodshed, however, the mother is distressed at the hypocrisy of the American Revolution. Through the persona of the abolitionist mother-historian, Chandler exposed the contradiction of celebrating American independence while holding millions of slaves in chains. Moreover, the abolitionist mother-historian urged her child to consider the different interpretations of revolution. The American colonists revolted against Great Britain, and their success was celebrated by subsequent generations. If American slaves revolted, however, it would be considered rebellion and lead to a much bloodier conclusion:

We joy that our country’s light bonds have been broke,

But her sons wear, by thousands, a life-crushing yoke;

And yon bayonets, dear, would be sheathed in their breast,

Should they fling off the shackles that round them are prest.

In the final stanza, the mother asks the child to join her in protest by turning her back on the patriotic scene, thus transforming a moment of patriotism into a moment of abolitionist protest. Turning away in support of the slave, the mother introduced her child to a new form of civic virtue that challenged the child’s traditional perceptions of American history.⁴⁵

Still, Chandler sought more than abolitionist gestures; as in her adult works, Chandler encouraged readers to take pragmatic action against slavery, demonstrating individual commitment to the cause of the slave. Chandler used children’s abstention from slave-grown sugar to model ideal abolitionist behavior. In the poems, “Christmas” and “The Sugar-Plums,” the child protagonist rejects the gifts of sweets from the mother (or grandmother) and reminds the older women that the while such foods are pleasant to the taste, they were produced by the violence of slavery. “Oh Press Me Not to Taste Again” alludes to the trope of blood-stained sugar noting that “blood is ’neath the fair disguise” of “those luxurious banquet sweets.” All three poems were published in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, the Liberator, and Lundy’s collected works. “Oh Press Me Not to Taste Again” and “The Sugar-Plums” were also published in Garrison’s collection, Juvenile Poems for the Use of Free American Children of Every Complexion.⁴⁶

Chandler’s antisugar poetry for children coincided with nonabolitionist debates about the increasing availability of confectionery. The Moral Reformer, the Christian Watchman, the Friend, and the Boston Recorder all published jeremiads against the consumption of sugar. The Colored American warned parents of the danger of confectionery shops and, through its advertisements, promoted the purchase of free-labor sugar, which suggests the two issues were mutually reinforcing. In an article published in 1837, the anonymous author despaired of parents withholding money from their children to spend in confectionery shops. “Most parents excuse themselves by saying that they don’t spend a ‘great amount’ in confectionery, and don’t go to a confectionery shop very often,” the author noted. Still, “some men do not go to brothels very often; but then they go; and they go for the same purposes that those do, who go to them every night.” Consumption of confectionery, the author concluded, supported “the whole iniquity” regardless of the number of purchases.⁴⁷ Some warnings linked the consumption of sugar to drinking. The Temperance Advocate and Cold Water Magazine, for example, published the story of Henry Haycroft, who began drinking as a youth. In one scene, Henry is offered a glass of peppermint cordial, which he finds so sweet that he takes “a large quantity.” To further emphasize the connection between the peppermint of the alcohol and the peppermint of candy, the author follows Henry and his friend as they stumble to a candy stand to purchase sweets.⁴⁸

Antisugar literature emphasized the dangers of intemperate consumption of sugar. Such tales urged parents, especially mothers, to instill discipline and virtue in their children. Regardless of the motivation—free produce and abolitionism or temperance—abstention from sugar heightened parents and children’s awareness of the source of sugar and the consequences of excessive sugar consumption. Antisugar literature written for children trained boys and girls to an ascetic ideal that supported both abolitionism and temperance.

Another means of training children into virtuous behavior combined the discipline of alphabetization and the literacy of abolitionism. Inspired perhaps by Chandler, Hannah Townsend wrote The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, which was sold at the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Fair in 1846 and 1847. The Anti-Slavery Alphabet drew on the tradition of alphabet books as a primary method of literacy training. Because women were the primary instructors of the alphabet, nineteenth-century alphabetization was influenced by accepted ideas about domesticity.⁴⁹ In The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, alphabetization was also shaped by the politics of abolitionism.⁵⁰ The letters of the alphabet were printed 1.5 inches high in standard alphabetic order, from the abolitionist to the zealous man, with each letter followed by its quatrain. The text alphabetizes the cultural terrain of slavery including the products of slave labor. For example, “M” represents the northern merchant “Who buys what slaves produce,” emphasizing northern complicity in slavery, while “R” and “S” represent the rice and sugar, which the slave “is toiling hard to make.” Reinforcing the role of children in abolitionism, the final two quatrains call for children to take an active role:

Y is for Youth—the time for all

Bravely to war with sin;

And think not it can ever be

Too early to begin.

Z is a zealous man, sincere,

Faithful, and just, and true,

An earnest pleader for the slave—

Will you not be so too?⁵¹

Townsend leaves her readers with this heroic image of the child abolitionist, the final question urging the reader’s participation.⁵²

Abolitionist literature was vital to socializing young abolitionists into the cause. In the 1830s, as youth organized antislavery societies and other associations to support abolitionism, many read or sang Chandler’s poems at the meetings. For example, a group of Boston girls sang a musical rendition of Chandler’s poem, “Peace of Berry,” at their society’s meeting. Likewise, Susan Paul’s Boston Juvenile Choir sang a musical version of Chandler’s “The Sugar-Plums.”⁵³ Reading abolitionist literature to their children fit within the ideals of republican motherhood; yet, when poems such as Chandler’s “Looking at the Soldiers” rejected traditional forms of patriotism and urged the consumption of only free produce, abolitionist juvenile literature suggested a radical overthrow of American political culture, one which made some women uncomfortable.

While her works appealed to women and children, Chandler’s antislavery literature had a broad audience. As a result, she was the most widely read abolitionist author in the antebellum period, placing her in the vanguard of abolitionist and free-produce authors in the United States.⁵⁴ In addition to the Genius of Universal Emancipation, her poems and essays were published in the Liberator, the Atlantic Souvenir, the Saturday Evening Post, William Lloyd Garrison’s Juvenile Poems for the Use of Free American Children of Every Complexion, and, in the 1840s, set to music by George W. Clark in his widely published abolitionist songbooks, The Liberty Minstrel and The Harp of Freedom.⁵⁵ Long after her death, abolitionists and boycotters used Chandler’s literary works to promote the cause. These publications kept Chandler’s works before antislavery supporters throughout the antebellum period regardless of their opinions about moral suasion or political abolitionism. Because her works were also widely anthologized outside the field of abolitionist works, her work reached far beyond the confines of the free-produce and abolitionist movements.⁵⁶

Chandler asserted the morality of free produce and influenced men, women, and children to make the commitment to the cause of the slave by abstaining from the products of slave labor. The economic principles of Heyrick appeared occasionally in Chandler’s works; still, Chandler focused on the simple morality of free produce rather than its economic principles. In particular, her emphasis on the morality of domestic consumption, rather than the coercion of market manipulation, deepened the connection between women and children and free produce. Quakers and non-Quakers alike formed free-produce societies in the 1820s and early 1830s in response to the appeals of Chandler and other supporters of abstention. In the 1830s, with the emergence of William Lloyd Garrison and the rise of radical abolitionism, supporters of free produce were confronted with a new challenge: how best to reconcile free produce and abolitionism.