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

impossible to distinguish between free- and slave-labor goods. John Comly, who in the
schism of 1827 would take the Hicksite position, saw no value in abstinence. Jonathan
Evans, a powerful elder from Philadelphia, became the most outspoken opponent of
Hicks’s ministry and his abstinence testimony. 29 Quakers were as divided in their
response to free-produce as non-Quaker abolitionists.
The conflict between Evans and Hicks came to symbolize the Hicksite schism of
1827-1828. Writing in 1801, Evans told his wife Sarah that he felt freed from the
obligation of abstaining from the products of slavery, particularly as the line separating
free- and slave-labor products was increasingly difficult to discern. The complete
“breech of unity,” Evans’s biographer notes, came eighteen years later at the Pine Street
Meetinghouse. 30 In late October 1819, Hicks arrived in Philadelphia where he attended
several meetings. On October 27, Hicks visited Pine Street meeting where he preached
against the products of slave labor and noted that some Friends who had previously
abstained from these products had taken a “retrograde course,” as his testimony was later
described, making a rather pointed reference to the lapsed abstinence practice of Evans. 31
After Hicks finished his testimony, he asked permission of the meeting to attend the
women’s business meeting at the other end of the building. All of the members except
29 Forbush, Elias Hicks, 89-90, 149; Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America, 115-116. See also
Ingle, Quakers in Conflict, 49. Ingle describes Comly as the epitome of the cautious reformers among the
Hicksites.
30 William Bacon Evans, Jonathan Evans and His Time, 1759-1839: Bi-Centennial Biography
(Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1959), 42.
31 Jeremiah H. Foster, An Authentic Report of the Testimony in a Cause at Issue in the Court of
Chancery of the State of New Jersey, between Thomas L. Shotwell, Complaintant, and Joseph Hendrickson
and Stacy Decow, Defendants (Philadelphia: J. Harding, 1831), II:39.
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