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

Garrisonian abolitionism might lead to national disunion. Quakers on either side of the
Orthodox-Hicksite divide supported free produce; however, more radical Quakers
believed individual abstinence was inadequate and that Quakers should join with non-
Quakers in free-produce and anti-slavery societies such as the PFASS and the AASS.
Quaker abolitionists were instrumental in the organization of the Requited Labor
Convention and the subsequent formation of the American Free Produce Association
(AFPA) in 1838. When British reformers established the British India Society (BIS) a
year later, abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic celebrated. British and American
abolitionists viewed these two national associations as the foundation of an international
movement against the products of slavery. Despite the struggle to form associations and
maintain a strict boycott of slave-labor products, abstainers envisioned the eventual
success of a transatlantic free-produce community.
The Society of Friends
Garrison and other abolitionists — Quaker and non-Quaker alike — looked to the
Society of Friends to provide leadership in the abolitionist movement. The Hicksite-
Orthodox schism of 1827-1828 shaped Quaker participation in the abolitionist movement
expanding participation among some Friends while limiting participation among others. 5
Orthodox-Hicksite division and argue that criticism of Hicks’s free-produce testimony was intertwined
with theological debates among American Quakers. See Drake, Quakers and Slavery, 114-132; Ingle,
Quakers in Conflict.
5 Historians of Quakerism have traditionally interpreted the schism as a tragedy. See Jones, The
Later Periods of Quakerism; Ingle, Quakers in Conflict, xiii. Nancy Hewitt and Judith Wellman, however,
suggest that the Hicksite schism of the 1820s as well as other divisions among American Friends
“nurtur[ed] and expand[ed] women’s power.” See Nancy A. Hewitt, “The Fragmentation of Friends: The
136