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

to their constitution recommending that “the Members of this society should, at all times
and on all occasions, give the preference to free produce over that of slaves believing that
the refusal to purchase and use the products of slave labour is one of the most efficient
means of abolishing slavery.” 35 The women of the PFASS deliberately echoed the title of
Heyrick’s work in their resolution, which was much stronger than the AASS resolution.
Likewise, the black abolitionist founders of the American Moral Reform Society,
established in 1836, included free produce in their broad reform agenda. 36
While free produce attempted to build a broad base of support, the American
movement relied primarily on the support of the Society of Friends. The organized
American free-produce movement developed in the midst of the Hicksite schism of the
late 1820s. Quaker reformer Elias Hicks had advocated abstention from slave-labor
products since the 1790s. Hicks’s free-produce activism as well as his broader campaign
against the increasing worldliness of American Quakers led to schism in 1827-1828.
Followers of Hicks sought a return to traditional Quakerism, emphasizing individual
conscience and purity. In contrast, Orthodox Quakers, influenced by evangelical
Christianity, stressed the importance of scriptural authority and doctrinal conformity.
Both Hicksite and Orthodox Quakers supported anti-slavery. In the 1830s, however,
Quaker debates about abolitionism increasingly focused on defining the appropriate
35 Liberator, December 25, 1863; December 14, 1833 and January 15, 1834, Minutes of the
Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Reel 30, Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Historical Society of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter PFASS, HSP).
36 Faulkner, “The Root of the Evil,” 391. See also Jean R. Soderlund, “Priorities and Power: The
Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in
Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1994), 67-88; Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for
Autonomy, 1787-1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 105-106.
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