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

Association was integrated by gender and race. 11 Women participated in the
association’s activities, held office, and established policy. The AFPA highlighted the
differences between American and British women’s political culture. In Britain, though
associated by Heyrick with radical ideas about slave rebellion and working-class rights,
abstention ultimately confirmed the existing political culture, using public pressure to
bring about parliamentary abolition of slavery. In the United States, however, women’s
abstention work challenged the greed and racism that underwrote the economics of
slavery and slave-labor products. For women such as Mott and Sarah Pugh, their daily
contact with African Americans through their associations and communities led them to
advocate not just abolition and abstention but racial equality. Through the AFPA,
women working alongside men worked to address issues of the production and supply of
free-labor goods, which reinforced their conviction that the economic ties between North
and South were intertwined.
Woven throughout the history of free produce is the history of the Society of
Friends. In the eighteenth century, Quakers worked to purify the sect from the taint of
slavery and the products of slave labor. In the nineteenth century, most Quakers
advocated peaceful, gradual solutions to the problem of slavery and avoided the radical
abolitionist movement. Schism in the late 1820s influenced Quaker anti-slavery,
transforming radical Quakers into Quaker abolitionists who were often frustrated by their
more conservative co-religionists. After 1828, many Quakers on either side of the divide
11 In 1839, Grace Douglass was a delegate for the PFASS to the annual meeting. Continued
participation of African American abolitionists in the AFPA after 1839 is difficult to ascertain since the
AFPA did not record the names of delegates. However, given the level of support given by the PFASS to
the AFPA, it is reasonable to assume that African American abstainers were included in the organization.
221