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

elationship between Friends and the radical abolitionist movement. Hicksite Quakers
joined the secular anti-slavery societies that formed in this period in much larger numbers
than their Orthodox brethren. Still, Quakers on either side of the schism supported free-
produce as a potentially apolitical protest against slavery. 37 The “fragmentation of
Friends” created unprecedented opportunities for American Quaker women, especially
Hicksites, to participate in the many reform movements of the antebellum period. 38
By the late 1830s, American abolitionists believed they had enough support to
establish a national free-produce association. Led by the PFASS and the Clarkson Anti-
Slavery Society, American abstainers gathered at Pennsylvania Hall in May 1838 for the
Requited Labor Convention. Despite attempts to recruit a broad cross-section of
delegates from anti-slavery and free-produce associations, the men and women who
resolved to form a “National Requited Labor Association” were primarily members of the
Society of Friends. Lewis C. Gunn, Henry Grew, William Bassett, William Jackson, and
Alice Eliza Hambleton were appointed a committee to draft a constitution for the new
association. 39 The meeting, however, was interrupted when anti-abolitionist mobs burned
the hall. In October of that year, abstainers met again to establish the American Free
37 H. Larry Ingle, Quakers in Conflict: The Hicksite Reformation (Wallingford, Penn.: Pendle Hill
Publications, 1998); Ryan Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist
Dilemma, 1820-1865 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007).
38 Nancy A. Hewitt, “The Fragmentation of Friends: The Consequences for Quaker Women in
Antebellum America,” in Witnesses for Change: Quaker Women over Three Centuries, eds., Elisabeth
Potts Brown and Susan Mosher Stuard (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 93-119.
39 th
Minutes of Proceedings of the Requited Labor Convention, Held in Philadelphia, on the 17
and 18 th of Fifth Month, and by Adjournment on the 5 th and 6 th of Ninth Month (Philadelphia: Merrihew and
Gunn, 1838), 3-6.
xxxi