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

and the weak resolutions against slave-labor products passed by convention delegates.
Free-labor products, like Garrison’s “free suit,” went unnoticed in the divisive
atmosphere of the convention as British and American abolitionists focused on the
woman question.
Despite Garrison’s waning interest and the disappointment of the World Anti-
Slavery Convention, abstainers demonstrated incredible resilience. After the BIS and the
AFPA dissolved in the mid- to late-1840s, many British and American abolitionists
continued to support the free-produce movement. In the mid-1840s, American Quakers
established a Quaker-only free-produce association hoping to revive the movement
among Friends by avoiding any connection with radical abolitionism. 42 Among the
radical abolitionists, Mott led the fight for abstention, influencing the passage of a free-
produce resolution by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in 1850. 43 In this period,
the women of the PFASS including Mott continued to assert the importance of free
produce as a radical statement of abolitionist purity and racial identification. 44 In the
early 1850s, black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet toured England on behalf of the
free-produce movement. British abolitionists Henry and Anna Richardson established
dozens of free-produce societies in the months following Garnet’s tour. 45 Garnet also
worked with American Quaker Benjamin Coates on a plan to establish a free-labor
42 Nuermberger, The Free Produce Movement, 35-39.
43 Pennsylvania Freeman, October 24, 1850; Faulkner, “The Root of the Evil,” 398.
44 Faulkner, “The Root of the Evil,” 397-398; Soderlund, “Priorities and Power,” 67-88.
45 R.J.M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist
Movement, 1830-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 119-123; Faulkner, “The Root of the Evil,”
396-397, 400-403.
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