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

cotton and sugar were essential commodities. Abolitionist Elizur Wright claimed
complete abstinence from slave-labor products would force “merchants and
manufacturers [to] throw perhaps half their stock and their capital into the fire.” 9 From
international trade to local commerce, slave-labor goods were impossible to avoid. For
example, ships used slave-produced cotton and hemp for their sails and ropes. Sailors on
those ships were clothed in cotton while slave-produced sugar and rum provided essential
calories and offered diversion from the long voyage. Once in port, those ships and sailors
delivered cotton, sugar, and other goods produced by slave- and free-labor, for sale and
consumption in the local market. And the profits produced by all of those commercial
exchanges assured a continual flow of goods and people throughout the Atlantic
economic world. As Garrison argued, slave-labor products were “so mixed up with the
commerce, manufactures and agriculture of the world — so modified or augmented in
value by the industry of other nations, — so indissolubly connected with the credit and
currency of the country” that abstaining from them was “preposterous and unjust.” 10
Still, abstainers like Lucretia Mott continued to assert the importance of free produce as
9 Elizur Wright, Jr., “On Abstinence from the Products of Slave Labor,” Quarterly Anti-Slavery
Magazine 1 (July 1836), 395. Wright argued that abstention taken to its logical extreme would bring the
abolitionist movement to a halt. “No anti-slavery agent, or other abolitionist, must now travel in stage or
steam-boat, for the sheets and table cloths of the latter are of cotton, and the former has its top lined with
calico. No abolitionist can any longer buy a book, or take a newspaper printed on common paper. The
[American Anti-Slavery Society] must suspend all its publications till it can import or manufacture, at a
greatly enhanced expense, paper of linen. Indeed, if the principle that the use of slave labor products is
sinful, had been adopted at first, the anti-slavery reformation could not have started an inch.”
10 Liberator, March 5, 1847.
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