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

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. 69 Chandler’s abstention poetry as well as the story of Henry Haycroft highlighted
the dangers of intemperate consumption of sugar. Such tales urged parents, especially
mothers, to instill discipline and virtue in their children. Abstention from sugar would
aid the abolitionist cause and protect children from the worst effects of sugar
consumption. Thus, anti-sugar literature written for children was intended to train boys
and girls into a particular mode of behavior.
One 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 by 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. 70 In The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, alphabetization was
also shaped by the politics of abolitionism. 71 The letters of the alphabet were printed 1.5
69
Thomas Teetotal, “Henry Haycroft – A Story for Youth,” Temperance Advocate and Cold
Water Magazine, 1 (1843), 38-40.
70 Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer
to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 218, 4, 103-140.
71 See Martha Sledge, “‘A is an Abolitionist’: The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and the Politics of
Literacy,” in Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American
Children’s Literature, Monika Elbert (New York: Routledge, 2008), 69-82. Shirley Samuels connects The
Anti-Slavery Alphabet to the pedagogical concerns of The Slave’s Friend, an abolitionist journal printed for
children in the 1830s. Shirley Samuels, “The Identity of Slavery,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race,
Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York and Oxford:
122