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

American and British free-produce movements in the 1840s, beginning with the highly
anticipated World Anti-Slavery Convention and ending with the quiet demise of the
AFPA and the BIS.
Ideologies of race, gender, and commerce, as well as ideas about morality and
sectarianism, intersected in the abstention movement in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. To displace the tainted productions of slavery from the marketplace, free-
produce activists experimented with new ideas for organizing society and providing
consumer goods. Reformers disseminated abstention literature, organized boycotts of
slave-grown products, and formed free-labor associations and stores, published lists of
free-labor grocers, and established utopian communities. Significantly, free-produce
supporters asserted the importance of continual self-examination and moral suasion as the
means to abolish slavery and achieve racial equality. In the process, free-produce
supporters suggested a radical re-ordering of society that challenged the greed and racism
that had supported the Atlantic economy and instead promoted self-sacrifice for the good
of the global community.
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