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

League of Universal Brotherhood. In the mid-1850s, when Anna Richardson withdrew
from active participation in the organized free-produce movement because of her
husband’s illness, Burritt assumed editorial responsibilities for the Richardsons’
publication, The Slave. In the late 1850s, Garnet, inspired by Orthodox Quaker Benjamin
Coates’s Cotton Cultivation in Africa, re-organized the African Civilization Society as
part of an effort to increase the cultivation of free-labor cotton in Africa and displace
from the British market slave-grown cotton from the American South. Despite the
efforts of Garnet, Coates, the Richardsons, and Burritt, support for the free-produce
movement continued to decline in the late 1850s. The presence of colonizationists like
Coates left many radical free-produce supporters wary of the organization. 5
Despite its lengthy history, the free-produce movement failed to maintain a broad
following. At its most popular, in the late eighteenth-century, abstention from slave-
labor products drew nearly a half million supporters in England. In the nineteenth-
century, however, British and American abstainers failed to replicate the heady days of
the 1791-1792 boycott. The failure of the free-produce movement to develop a
sustainable following or to end slavery has led historians to dismiss abstention as a
footnote in the history of abolitionism. The problem with earlier historical assessments
5 Ibid., 119-124, 143-144, 162-194; Lapsansky-Warner, Back to Africa, 33-34; Faulkner, “The
Root of the Evil,” 400-403. See also Henry Highland Garnet to Samuel Rhodes, December 5, 1850, in The
Black Abolitionist Papers: The British Isles, 1830-1865, C. Peter Ripley, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1983), I: 232. Celebrating the increasing interest of British capitalists, Garnet told
Rhodes, “Allowing their motives to be purely commercial, yet the effect of their movement will be the
same upon slavery, and will do the same thing that those benevolent people desire who base their efforts
upon humane and moral principles.” See also Benjamin Coates, Cotton Cultivation in Africa. Suggestions
on the Importance of the Cultivation of Cotton in Africa, in Reference to the Abolition of Slavery in the
United States, Through the Organization of an African Civilization Society (Philadelphia: C. Sherman and
Son, 1858). Coates hoped the organization would appeal to Friends who were reluctant to join the more
political anti-slavery or colonization movements.
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