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

strands of Quaker reform continued into the nineteenth century and were reflected in
debates about the relationship between the Society of Friends and the radical abolitionist
movement.
Despite Quaker efforts to stop consumption of slave-labor products within their
communities, abstention remained an isolated, individual anti-slavery tactic until 1791,
after Parliament failed to pass the slave trade abolition bill. In the wake of that failure,
many British abolitionists urged a boycott of West Indian sugar. While the movement
was influenced in part by the Quaker testimony against slavery, the British abstention
movement in this period had a broad base of support, attracting as many as 400,000
supporters in 1791 and 1792. Dozens of abolitionist tracts were published by Quaker and
non-Quaker abolitionists urging consumers to abstain from slave-grown sugar. 24 The
premise of abstention rhetoric was straightforward: removing the market for the products
of slave labor would strike at the very root of slavery forcing planters to use free labor,
which in turn would lead to wider availability of free-labor goods. Abstainers also
suggested that slave-grown sugar, for example, was tainted with the blood, bodily fluids,
cooperative than first appears. “The London leadership evinced no more than a hesitant embrace of
colonial abolitionism, despite their supportive words.” The British Society of Friends, dominated by
wealthy, patrician Quakers, found “John Woolman an embarrassment rather than a source for inspiration.”
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2006), 404, 406.
24 For an extensive bibliography of these works, see Peter C. Hogg, The African Slave Trade: A
Classified and Annotated Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Articles (London: Frank Cass,
1973), 169-175.
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