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

widely available. In the meantime, the Buckingham women struggled, as all abstainers
did, trying to identify and secure free-labor products. 61 The women of the Buckingham
society, like the women of the PFASS, linked free-produce activism to radical ideas of
gender and race.
In July 1837, the Buckingham association sent a letter of support to the Grimkés
after the General Association of Massachusetts Congregational Churches issued their
rebuke of the sisters. Though the “pastoral letter” does not specifically identify the
Grimkés, they were clearly the focus of the ministers’ concerns that women were
assuming “the place and tone of man as a public reformer.” 62 In a letter that echoed the
moral resolve of Elizabeth Heyrick, the Buckingham women reminded the Grimkés that
moral right mattered more than masculine custom. “[W]hatever is right must be
expedient . . . Let then, the right be done tho’ all the associations of men be dissolved,
and their glory laid low in the dust.” 63 Regardless of the consequences, women must act
on their beliefs.
In 1838, an anonymous member of the Buckingham society wrote and published
an essay on abstinence from the products of slave labor. As the women of the Anti-
Slavery Convention would do a year later, the Buckingham women linked free-produce
61 Minutes, August 10, 1837, PFASS HSP; Buckingham Female Anti-Slavery Society to Mary
Grew, August 4, 1837, Incoming Correspondence, PFASS HSP. See also Genius of Universal
Emancipation, October 1837. The original letter from the Buckingham FASS and the response from the
PFASS (written by Mary Grew) were reprinted in the Genius.
62 Boston Recorder, July 14, 1837. See also, Salerno, Sister Societies, 68-71; Anna M. Speicher,
The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 109-121.
63 Buckingham Anti-Slavery Society to Sarah and Angelina Grimké, July 27, 1837, Sarah M.
Grimké Papers, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
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