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

CHAPTER 5
I CAST MY WHOLE SPIRIT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC:
CONFLICT AND COMMUNITY IN THE
TRANSATLANTIC FREE PRODUCE MOVEMENT
I feel that I have a great weight of obligation to discharge for the two
interesting letters which I have recently been favoured with from thee.
Yet at present I fear I can do little more than thank thee with the assurance
that every line you write & every pamphlet or paper sent to us from your
Land is animating & strengthening to our hearts.
– Elizabeth Pease to Maria Weston Chapman, July 11, 1839
Let me assure thee that thou art greatly mistaken if thou supposes that the
contents of the letters are not as deeply interesting to us, as thou sayest
our’s are to thee.
– Angelina Grimké Weld to Elizabeth Pease, August 14, 1839
These two letters were among the hundreds exchanged by British and American
abolitionists in the 1830s. In addition to letters, British and American abolitionists
exchanged speakers and pamphlets and shared tactics. The transatlantic visits of George
Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison built on traditional Quaker networks and
established new lines of communication between abolitionists in both countries. In 1836,
the women of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society reprinted Elizabeth
Heyrick’s Immediate Not Gradual Abolition; a year later, Elizabeth Pease arranged for
the British publication of Angelina Grimké’s Appeal to the Christian Women of the
184