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

of the transatlantic abolitionist and free-produce communities, particularly in the 1830s
and 1840s. Community was important for abstainers. Free-produce and abolitionist
associations sustained women in their individual efforts to forgo slave-labor products.
These associations and the informal communities they generated also sustained radical
women as they faced criticism for their increasingly public activism. Abstainers
attempted to project their moral stance against slave-labor products into the larger
abolitionist community. Initially, those efforts were generally welcomed by individuals
and associations such as William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society.
However, as the American and British abolitionist movements shifted in response to
internal and external challenges, the abstention movement was transformed.
In the 1830s, as abolitionists formed associations such as the American Anti-
Slavery Society (AASS) and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS),
their constitutions and their published statements reflected their free-produce origins and
their Quaker membership. Free-produce rhetoric also figured prominently in Quaker
debates about the proper relationship between Friends and the radical abolitionist
movement. Friends’ responses to radical abolitionism were deeply influenced by the
1827-1828 schism between Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers. Abstinence from slave-
labor products affirmed traditional Quaker tenets. Yet, Quakers were mindful that Elias
Hicks had been an ardent proponent of abstinence and that his free-produce testimony
had contributed to the divisions among American Quakers. 4 Many Friends worried that
4 Lydia Maria Child, Isaac T. Hopper: A True Life (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1854), 276-282. Child
claimed the Hicksite schism resulted from Quaker differences over the use of slave-labor products. Child
was not alone among her contemporaries in pointing to free produce as the cause of division among
Quakers. Twentieth-century histories of the Quaker schism, however, illuminate the complex origins of the
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