"Buy for the sake of the slave": Abolitionism and the origins of American consumer activism

American Quarterly

Volumn 56, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 889-912

  Glickman, Lawrence B ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 17544378604     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2004.0056     Document Type: Review

References (83)

1. Eric Plaag and Jennifer Fitzgerald, e-mail communication to the author, April 23, 2003
2. For examples of overviews of consumer activism that skip from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, see Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton, "Material Politics: An Introduction," in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, ed. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (New York: Berg, 2001), 28
3. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 21. I have also been guilty of neglecting the antebellum period in my quest to locate the origins of consumer politics in the late nineteenth century
4. Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)
5. Charlotte Sussman backdates this train of thought even earlier, to the Irish anticolonial struggles of the 1720s in Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Shvery, 1713-1833 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)
6. Ruth Nuermberger, The Free Produce Movement: A Quaker Protest Against Slavery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1942), 119
7. For the reasons why George Washington Taylor kept his free produce store open until 1867, see W. P. Garrison, "Free Produce Among the Quakers," Atlantic Monthly 22 (October 1868), 485-94
8. The first notice for a free produce store is, Michael Lamb and Benjamin Lundy, "Produce of Free Labor. Circular," Genius of Universal Emancipation, August 5, 1826, 388
9. "David L. Child, Esq.," National Enquirer, April 29, 1838, 4
10. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists, (New York, 1969), 74-76
11. Carleton Mabee, Black Freedom: The Non-Violent Abolitionists from 1830 through the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 187
12. Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 241-42
13. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (London: Low, 1854), 2:62, 77-79, 99, 105
14. On Garrison's early support for free produce, see Nuermberger, Free Produce Movement, 101-2
15. Information in this paragraph is drawn from Nuermberger, Free Produce Movement, 60-82, 93, 95, 97, 119
16. Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolition: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 22
17. The quotation is from the "Report of the Board of Managers of the Free Produce Association of Friends, New York Yearly Meeting" (New York, 1853), 1
18. On the difficulties of running a free produce store, see George W. Taylor, Autobiography and Writings of George W. Taylor (Philadelphia: George W. Tayler, 1891), 42. Free produce advocates complained about a lack of support from their core constituencies
19. "What Does Sugar Cost?" Freedoms Journal, October 19, 1827, 127
20. For the term buycott, see Monroe Friedman, Consumer Boycotts: Effecting Change Through the Marketplace and the Media (New York and London: Routledge, 1999)
21. On the use of labels, see "Anti-Slavery Fairs," Non-Slaveholder, December 1847, 277
22. The quotation is from "Free Produce Convention," Liberator, November 15, 1839, 2
23. According to Richard Ohmann, "The very concept and word [consumer] appeared only" in the late nineteenth century. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 48
24. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "An Appeal to the Women of the Free States of America on the Present Crisis in our Country," Pennsylvania Freeman, March 2, 1854, 1
25. In The Marketphce of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), T. H. Breen has convincingly argued that consumer politics were central to the American Revolution. The consumer politics practiced during the Revolutionary Era, however, differed from that of the abolitionists in several significant ways. Breen is correct to note that, during the nonimportation movement, consumers were mobilized, but they were generally asked 1) to vigilantly watch over merchants to make sure that they did not violate nonimportation agreements, and 2) to not use or wear British goods. But these efforts did not stress, to the degree that free produce activists and later generations of consumer activists did, the extent to which consumption itself was the key political act. Nonimportation notices typically encouraged citizens to neither "purchase nor consume" British goods, suggesting that they viewed consumption as the use of a good already purchased. Breen notes that citizens caught using tea dumped by colonists during the Boston Party were punished as were those who wore clothes of British origin. Free produce campaigners, however, stressed the causal power of consumption itself. Indeed, in contrast to Revolutionary boycotters, free produce activists rejected the claim that they should throw away the "slave-produced goods in your possession; for if it was sinful to buy them, it is sinful to use them." As Lewis Gunn remarked: "To throw away the articles, would as much encourage slavery, as to use them. If their price has gone into the hands of the slave-holder, all the support which slavery can derive from them has already been secured." For the free produce activists, individual consumption - not the actions of merchants, nor the use of things already bought - was the key link in the causal chain
26. Garrison, "Free Produce Among the Quakers."
27. The slogan is found in an undated pamphlet by "E. Harris, printer" in the Taylor Family Papers, Special Collections, Haverford College. The "prime mover" quotation is from William Fox, "An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the utility of refraining from the use of West India Sugar and Rum" (London, 1791). Quoted in Sussman, Consuming Anxieties, 41
28. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. 2 (1776; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), book 4, ch. 8, 179
29. The chain quotation is from Lea. W. Gause, "Free Produce," Pennsylvania Freeman, February 2, 1854, 1
30. The chain, according to Elizabeth B. Clark, symbolized both the shackles of enslaved workers and the "essence of sympathy." "'The Sacred Rights of the Weak': Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America," Journal of American History 82 (September 1995), 463-93, quotation on 482
31. On the extermination of slave labor, see Adam Hodgson, "A Letter to M. Jean Baptiste Say, on the comparative expense of Free and Slave Labour, Continued," Freedoms Journal, August 31, 1827, 75
32. Benjamin Lundy, A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States (Baltimore: Benjamin Lundy, 1825)
33. Minutes of Proceedings of the Requited Labor Convention, 13
34. Henry Grew, "Free Labor Produce," The Non-Slaveholder, 162-65
35. Gunn, "Address to Abolitionists," 26
36. The Letters of John Green leaf Whittier, vol. 2, ed. John B. Pickard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 217
37. Free produce activists also invoked real Southern slaveholders and defenders of slavery, such as when Lucretia Mott "quoted the opinions of Hayne, Cooper, and Calhoun, severally of South Carolina, that the Southern planters are but the agents of the North in maintaining the slave system." "Sketches of the Sayings and Doings at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention," Liberator, June 4, 1847, 91
38. The commercial union quotation is from "Fragmentary Labor," Pennsylvania Freeman, October 29, 1846, 2
39. The "stimulated" quotation is from Sarah Pugh, "Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Free Produce Association," Pennsylvania Freeman, November 3, 1841, 4
40. Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 13
41. Thomas L. Haskell "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part I," in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 111
42. "Free-Produce Association-Philadelphia (U.S.)-Extracts from the Last Report," Non-Slaveholder, July 2, 1849, 109
43. Sussman, Consuming Anxieties, 188
44. On the "coercion" of merchants, see Benjamin H. Irvin, "Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768-1776," New England Quarterly 76 (June 2003), 197-238
45. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 262-63
46. The quotation about commerce and conscience is from "Disuse of Slave Produce," The Anti-Slavery Reporter, January 1, 1847, 1-2
47. Samuel Rhoads, "Free Produce," Liberator, March 1, 1850, 36
48. For an astute reading of the "commercial jeremiad" of early abolitionists, see Philip Gould, Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003)
49. Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection (Library of Congress) http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/lcrbmrp.t1502 (accessed September 20, 2004)
50. Wm. Henry Hobbey, "Letter to William Lloyd Garrison," Non-Slaveholder (September 1847), 202-5, quotation on 203
51. "How do you Know?" Non-Slaveholder (June 1853), 37
52. Snelling in The Abolitionist, March 1833, quoted in Garrison, "Free Produce Among the Quakers," 486
53. "True colors" is from "Free-Labor Produce - Report of the New York Association," Anti-Slavery Reporter, September 2, 1850
54. On "self-denial" see "Abstinence from the Fruits of Unrequited Toil," Pennsylvania Freeman, August 30, 1838, 1
55. On the self-denial of the movement's progenitors, including John Woolman, Benjamin Lundy, and Elias Hicks, see Elizabeth M. Chandler, "John Woolman," in The Remembrancer (Philadelphia, 1841), 27-30
56. "Biography of Benjamin Lundy," Pennsylvania Freeman, October 5, 1839, 3
57. Garrison, "Free Produce Among the Quakers," 491-92. "Artificial wants" is from an unsigned letter, Pennsylvania Freeman, May 28, 1840, 4
58. "Coarse calicos" is from D. W. J., "Free Labour Goods," Non-Slaveholder (April 1848), 74
59. "Privations" is from J. P. M., "Slave Labor Products," Pennsylvania Freeman, March 22, 1838, 1
60. Jeffrey, Great Silent Army of Abolition, 120, 122
61. Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Knopf, 1996), 187
62. Deborah Van Broekhoven, "'Better than a Clay Club': The Organization of Women's Antislavery Fairs, 1835-60," Slavery and Abolition 19 (April 1998), 24-51
63. Ladies' Sale of Fancy Articles," National Enquirer, December 17, 1836, 59
64. Gause, "Free Produce." "Thirteenth Anti-Slavery Fair," Pennsylvania Freeman, December 7, 1848, 2
65. On the role that free produce played in the conversion of the Grimke sisters, see Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition (New York: Schocken, 1967), 99-100
66. "Glaring inconsistency" is from "American Free Produce Association," Pennsylvania Freeman, October 28, 1847, 3
67. "Extraneous issue" is from William Jay, Liberator, June 18, 1836, 98
68. Elizur Wright Jr., "On Abstinence from the Products of Slave Labor," Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine 1 (July 1836), 393-400, quotation on 397, 399
69. The quotations from the elder Garrison are from "The Free Produce Question," Liberator, March 1, 1850, 1
70. Garrison, "Free Produce Among the Quakers," 492
71. On England see Schor, Henry Highland Garnet, 117
72. Fladeland, Men and Brothers, 369
73. William Goodell's 1852 history of abolition did not mention free produce. Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A History of the Great Struggle in Both Hemispheres; With a View of the Slavery Question in the United States (New York: Negro University Press, 1968)
74. Helen Sorenson, The Consumer Movement: What It Is and What It Means (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), 111
75. On the ebb and flow of this duty, see Michael Pertschuk, Revolt Against Regulation: The Rise and Pause of the Consumer Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)
76. Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 275
77. Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 206-35
78. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 22
79. Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink, Your Money's Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer's Dollar (New York: Macmillan, 1927)
80. Lynd quoted in "The Consumer Movement," Business Week, April 22, 1939, 40
81. For more on these issues, see Lawrence B. Glickman, "'Make the Lisle the Style': Fashion as Politics in the Japanese Silk Boycott, 1937-1940," Journal of Social History (Spring 2005). An organization that calls for a boycott of West African chocolate made by enslaved workers makes an explicit comparison between contemporary consumers and the situation "which confronted early abolitionists." "Do Cocoa Plantation Slaves in West Africa Produce Your Favorite Chocolate?" at (accessed September 20, 2004)
82. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 290
83. Beatrice Webb, The Discovery of the Consumer (New York: The Cooperative League, 1928), 6, 12-13