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

the context of the Anglo-American anti-slavery movement will reveal that British
abolitionist George Stephen was correct in saying that women “formed the cement of the
whole Antislavery building — without their aid we never should have kept standing.” 61
Free produce encouraged and sustained many women abolitionists throughout the period
of abolitionist activity and they in turned sustained the movement.
My dissertation consists of six chapters arranged thematically as well as
chronologically. I focus on the most intense period of free-produce activism, 1791
through 1848. The first two sections focus on the British and American movements
respectively. In section one, chapter one examines the eighteenth-century British
campaign while chapter two examines Elizabeth Heyrick and nineteenth-century British
abstention. In section two, chapters three and four focus on American attempts to
transfer British success in the free-produce movement to the United States. Chapter three
focuses on American Quaker writer Elizabeth Margaret Chandler who promoted free
produce in Great Britain and the United States in poems, essays, and morality tales
published in the Genius of Universal Emancipation and the Liberator. Chapter four
focuses on American and British organizational activity in the 1830s, in particular the
work of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, the American Free Produce
Association, the British India Society, and the Society of Friends. In the final section, I
shift attention to abstainers’ attempts to build an international movement against slave-
labor products. Chapter five examines the moments of community and conflict in the
61 George Stephen to Anne Knight, November 14, 1834, as quoted in Adam Hochschild, Bury the
Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2005), 327.
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