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Produce of Their Labour. Slavery, according to Hicks, was established and continued by
tradition, normalized as consistent with justice and social order. In a series of queries,
Hicks asserted the traditional Quaker argument that slaves were prize goods and, as a
result, the products of their labor should also be considered as prize goods and contrary to
Quaker discipline. The Meeting for Sufferings approved Hicks’s publication, which was
widely circulated among American and British Friends. Hicks revised his pamphlet in
1814 and again in 1823. 27 With the publication of Observations, Hicks reinvigorated the
American abstinence movement. Though Hicks’s abstinence testimony owed much to
Woolman, the tone of Observations resembled more closely the uncompromising
abolitionist Benjamin Lay. 28 Observations affirmed Hicks’s emphasis on individual
conscience and rejection of modern economic interests.
Not all Quakers agreed with Hicks’s views on the products of slave labor. In
1810, members of the New York Yearly Meeting approved a revision of the discipline,
which omitted the reference to prize goods. New York Friends believed it was
27 Elias Hicks, Observations on the Slavery of the Africans and Their Descendants, and on the Use
of the Produce of Their Labour (New York: Samuel Wood, 1814); Forbush, Elias Hicks, 144-149; Drake,
Quakers and Slavery in America, 116.
28 Drake, Quakers and Slavery, 115-117. Often described as eccentric, Benjamin Lay refused to
eat with slaveholders, or to be served by slaves; he also dressed in coarse clothes because he refused to
wear garments made by slave labor. In 1742, in a dramatic public forum, Lay smashed his deceased wife’s
china in protest against “the vanity of tea drinking,” an event which was reprinted periodically into the
nineteenth century. See, for example, Register of Pennsylvania, July 26, 1828. At the 1738 Burlington
Yearly Meeting, Lay denounced slaveholding among Quakers and described slavery as great a sin as
murder. In a dramatic climax, Lay thrust his sword into his Bible which hid a bladder of red pokeberry
juice. The juice splattered Lay and his listeners in fake blood. This story may well be apocryphal;
however, it highlights the distinctions made between the peaceful Woolman and the fiery Lay. See David
Waldstreicher, “Benjamin Franklin, Religion, and Early Antislavery,” in The Problem of Evil: Slavery,
Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform, Steven Mintz and John Stauffer, eds. (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 168. See also Andreas Milke, “‘What’s Here to Do?’: An
Inquiry Concerning Sarah and Benjamin Lay,” Quaker History 86 (1997), 22-44.
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