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

in the marketplace. 11 Women’s marketplace behavior could model the virtue of the
family by boycotting sugar, or could instead reflect an uncontrolled pursuit of fashion.
Bayard, for example, noted that American women’s “mania for luxury [had] reach[ed]
such an extent that the wife of the laboring man wishes to vie in dress with the wife of the
merchant, and the latter does not wish to be inferior to the wealthy women of Europe.”
Yet, earlier in his narrative, Bayard had noted the patriotic behavior of American women
who used homespun rather than purchase British goods. 12 These seemingly
contradictory descriptions of female economic behavior suggest that the language of
commerce in this period was entangled with other social, political, and cultural
concerns. 13
Emphasizing women’s economic behavior challenges Thomas Clarkson’s
interpretation of the first slave-sugar boycott. In his 1808 history of the abolition of the
slave trade, Clarkson argued that public outcry over Parliament’s rejection of the slave
trade abolition bill led consumers to reject slave-grown produce. Spurred on by William
11 See Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,”
and “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,”107-135, 136-160; John
Ashworth, “The Relationship between Capitalism and Humanitarianism,” all in The Antislavery Debate:
Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed., Thomas Bender (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992),180-199; Clare Midgley, “Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism
and the Domestic Base of British Anti-Slavery Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 17 (1996), 150-152.
Midgley, building on the arguments of Haskell and Ashworth, suggests that the rise of consumer society
with its concomitant emphasis on individual choice was necessary for the development of the abstention
campaign.
12 Bayard, Travels of a Frenchman, 130, 73.
13 See Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary
America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 192. Hartigan-O’Connor argues that the
language of “commerce was shot through with other concerns, including affection, family obligation, and
ideas about appropriate ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ interests. . . . If a market ethos permeated social and
emotional lives, so, too, did social and emotional concerns influence commercial decisions.”
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