THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

The second abstention campaign engaged the rhetoric of the first abstention
movement; yet, the second campaign reflected important changes in British society in the
thirty year span between the two organized boycotts of slave-produced goods. In the
1790s, East Indian sugar was available but only in limited quantities. Thus, abstainers
often urged total abstention from slave-grown sugar rather than substitution. 103 In the
1820s, with the increased availability of free-grown sugar, activists such as James
Cropper urged removal of protective duties so that free and slave labor might compete
equally in the market. This position, which involved political appeals, was generally
adopted by male abolitionists. In contrast, women emphasized the need for individual
abstention, suggesting that individual renunciation of slave-labor products would effect a
necessary change of heart that would in turn lead to, or at least be aided by political
solutions such as revised duties and bounties.
This division in tactics and emphasis reflects competing strains of consumer
activism. Historian Lawrence Glickman suggests consumer activists who advocated
asceticism “understood consumption as generating unvirtuous, immoral people and
injustice.” 104 Heyrick is reflective of this strain of consumer activism. A parallel strain
of consumer activism stressed “individual pleasure and group solidarity” as consistent
with justice; thus, pleasure and virtue were not mutually exclusive. To treat the two
103 In her pamphlet, Pity the Negro; or, An Address to Children on the Subject of Slavery,
Charlotte Townsend, daughter of Lucy Townsend, wrote, “When my mother was a little girl, she went
without any sugar at all, rather than partake of the sin of slavery, and help to oppress the oppressed: but you
need not go without sugar, for East India sugar can now every where be procured.” Charlotte Townsend,
Pity the Negro; or, An Address to Children on the Subject of Slavery, 6 th ed. (London: Printed for Frederick
Westley and A.H. Davis, 1826), 6.
104 Glickman, Buying Power, 9.
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