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

efforts throughout this early period. 32 Like their British counterparts, American women
promoted free-labor produce through associations, solicited friends and neighbors, and
operated stores offering alternatives to slave-produced goods. Lundy and Quaker
Elizabeth Margaret Chandler were key figures in interpreting British abstention rhetoric
for an American audience. Chandler, in particular, provided an important female voice,
influencing women to support free-labor produce. 33 American abstainers expanded the
British focus on slave-grown sugar to include a broader array of slave-labor products,
most notably cotton.
In the 1830s, abolitionists included abstention from slave-labor produce in the
constitutions of their anti-slavery societies. The American Anti-Slavery Society’s
(AASS) Declaration of Sentiments, for example, promised to “encourage the labor of
freemen rather than that of slaves, by giving a preference to their productions.” 34 In
attendance at the AASS’s founding meeting in December 1833 were Lucretia Mott,
Sidney Ann Lewis, and Lydia White. Free-produce supporters, these three women
helped form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) later that same
month. The following month the women of the PFASS added a free-produce resolution
32 For more on Lundy, see Merton Dillon, Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966). See also Kenneth Corfield, “Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical
Quaker,” in Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760-1930, ed. Gail Malmgreen, (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), 49.
33 Chandler remains an overlooked individual in American abolitionism. For discussions of
Chandler, see Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the
Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 21;
Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1978), 7-10; Beth Salerno, Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in
Antebellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 21-23.
34 Liberator, January 4, 1834.
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