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

colony in Africa. 46 Scorned even by their fellow abolitionists, abstainers continued to
assert the importance of purity and consistency in abolitionist work and the cultural and
economic value of a moral economy.
The British and American abstention movements have received scant attention
from historians. Ruth Ketring Nuermberger’s The Free Produce Movement: A Quaker
Protest against Slavery is the only full study of the American abstention movement.
Nuermberger traces the free-produce movement from its eighteenth-century Quaker
origins to its nineteenth-century Quaker demise concluding that the movement was more
significant for its impact on the Society of Friends than its influence on the abolition of
slavery. 47 Similarly, Kenneth Corfield characterizes the British abstention movement as
predominantly female occupying only a “minor place” in the history of abolitionism. 48
Charlotte Sussman and Lawrence Glickman place the British and American abstention
movements within the larger history of consumer protests. Sussman focuses on the
intersection of gender, nationalism, and commerce in Britain. British anxieties about
personal and national contamination developed around colonial goods suggesting protests
against slave-grown sugar were not solely expressions of abolitionist sentiment. 49
Glickman argues that the American free-produce movement was most successful in
46 Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner and Margaret Hope Bacon, eds. Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates
and the Colonization Movement in American, 1848-1880 (University Park, Penn.: The University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
47 Nuermberger, The Free Produce Movement, 115.
48
Kenneth Corfield, “English Abolitionists and the Refusal of Slave-Grown Goods, 1780-1860,”
MA diss., University of London, 1983, 53.
49 Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery,
1713-1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
xxxiv