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

as a moral alternative to slave-grown West Indian sugar. Philadelphia Quaker Henry
Drinker was among those who hoped to destroy American dependence on tainted British
sugar. Drinker’s co-religionist and friend, Elias Hicks, took up the campaign against the
products of slavery in the 1790s. Ultimately, Hicks’s unstinting critique of slave-labor
products contributed to theological divisions that separated Quakers in the late 1820s.
In 1789, Henry Drinker partnered with Benjamin Rush and several other
Philadelphians as well as New Yorker William Cooper to promote the production of
sugar from the maple tree. Troubled by his economic ties to the West Indies, Drinker
looked forward to a future when his sugar kettles might support the domestic sugar
industry rather than the “polluted and wicked” sugar industry of the British Indies. 13
Rush, Drinker, Tench Coxe, James Pemberton, John Parrish, and Jeremiah Parker agreed
to organize an association to purchase annually a quantity of maple sugar to encourage
the manufacture of maple sugar and reduce American dependence on slave-grown West
Indian sugar. Ultimately, the group attracted seventy-two subscribers, primarily
Philadelphians. 14 Cooper and Drinker touted the moral benefits of maple sugar; yet, both
men also hoped to capitalize from the virtuous enterprise. In the 1780s, Cooper, an
ambitious frontier businessman, acquired a patent on a large tract of heavily forested land
on New York’s Lake Ostego. Cooper then sold parcels of land to farmers for commercial
13 As quoted in David W. Maxey, “The Union Farm: Henry Drinker’s Experiment in Deriving
Profit from Virtue,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107 (1983), 612.
14 Benjamin Rush, The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, His “Travels Through Life” Together
with His Commonplace Book for 1789-1813, George W. Corner, ed. (Princeton: Published for the
American Philosophical Society by Princeton University Press, 1948), 177; Roy L. Butterfield, “The Great
Days of Maple Sugar,” New York History 39 (1958), 156. See also Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town:
Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1995).
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