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The 'Philadelphia Free Produce ^Attack Upon Slavery

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The 'Philadelphia Free Produce ^Attack Upon Slavery The 'Philadelphia Free Produce ^Attack Upon Slavery HE issue of slavery in the United States has produced an extensive literature of such vast proportions that every aspect T of it appears to have received exhaustive study. Yet "best sellers" continue to be spun out of this rich source and learned pro- fessors retain it as a favored topic of research in the more objective deliberations of history seminars. The field has been ploughed and reploughed innumerable times with sterility too often the reward of research 5 but occasionally there is unearthed some fragment that pushes back a little further the curtain of our ignorance of that event- ful period from 1830 to i860. What we shall discuss here has none of the dramatic qualities characteristic of that swift succession of crises that drove ever deeper the wedge of secession. Our story has no episode comparable to Adams' stubborn fight against "gag rule" 3 it will not arouse the reader as do the fervid cries of a Garrison and the dangerous fanaticism of a John Brown. Utterly devoid of the pathos and romantics of Uncle Tom's Qabin> it is also happily free from the sanguinity of "Bleeding Kansas." These and the other familiar incidents have completely overshadowed, almost to the point of obscurity, a less-publicized contemporary development, which, even if finally judged to be relatively insignificant, must be considered better to view the antislavery crusade in its entirety. This is the story of a few people who cherished an illusion—the belief that it would be possible to abolish slavery by making it an economic liability. The attempt to do away with slavery by making it financially un- profitable during the years when "cotton was king" was as empty a gesture as Canute's ambition to turn back the waves of the sea by command. Many who were exhorted to wage economic war on the 294 1942 THE FREE PRODUCE ATTACK UPON SLAVERY 295 plantation system must have regarded such a struggle as ludicrous. But the beginnings of protest go back to a day when cotton was not paramount, when the evil of slavery was seen at its worst in the production of sugar cane. Convinced of the sin of keeping a fellow man in bondage, the venerable John Woolman abstained from using sugar in order to bear a consistent testimony against the method by which it was produced. For like reason, when a guest in another's home, he refused to accept the services of a household slave. His co-religionists, the Friends, whose moral tenacity has often evoked universal admiration, were not yet ready to emulate his self- sacrifice. Early in the 1790's there were signs, however, that a boycott was being attempted on slave-grown cane sugar. In the second session of the third Congress notice was drawn to the perceptibly diminishing consumption of sugar due to "the qualmishness of some of the Quakers." In the sugar maples of the northern forests Dr. Benjamin Rush saw the means to end slavery in the sugar islands. To Thomas Jefferson he confided: I cannot help contemplating a sugar maple tree with a species of affection and even veneration, for I have persuaded myself to behold in it the happy means of rendering the commerce and slavery of our african brethren in the sugar islands as unnecessary, as it has always been inhuman and unjust.1 Others shared Rush's hope that the sugar maple might prove the key to emancipation. A society was organized to encourage planting 5 estimates of the yield of the maples in New York and Pennsylvania were made, and it was believed that 263,000 acres of trees would fill the sugar needs of the entire nation. Anticipating the effects of maple sugar culture upon the deliberations of Congress in regard to the Negroes Abbe Bonnet envisioned a not distant day when nature would compel the freeing of the enslaved. Congress will be confronted by the slaves . and what can it reply to them, when each bearing in his hand a branch of the sugar maple, they shall come to say to it: Look, and read upon this leaf the decree of nature; we were enslaved in order to cultivate the sugar cane! What can it reply, I say, but you are free.2 Less philanthropic-minded persons had seen the possibility of *Mary S. Locke, Anti-Slavery in America, 1619-1808 (Boston, 1901), 189. 2 Ibid., 190. 296 NORMAN B. WILKINSON July "turning a penny" to their own account. One instance is that of the enterprising Dutch bankers of the Holland Land Company. Taking up the scheme of producing maple sugar on a large scale, they sent Gerrit Boon of Rotterdam to America in 1792. After touring the northern states in search of tracts heavily wooded with sugar maples Boon purchased thirty thousand acres north of Fort Stanwix in New York state. Yankee woodcutters were engaged to cut out all trees but the maples on the hillside chosen for the , first experiment. Within eighteen months numerous difficulties arising from the lack of proper equipment, and also from Boon's refusal to accept advice from more experienced heads, contrived to prevent the enterprise from succeeding. In November, 1794, the venture was closed at an estimated loss of $15,000. Boon had been able to produce only about $320 worth of maple sugar.3 Other projects to produce maple sugar in quantities sufficient to supplant the use of cane sugar met with similar failure. Thus the leaf of the sugar maple vanished as a symbol of Negro freedom. Congress never entertained the leaf-bearing blacks and in a few years the sugar cane yielded its place to the cotton plant. Dismayed as they must have been by the failure of the maple sugar scheme the zealous abolitionists of the later 1790's labored the more diligently to spread the conviction that slavery could not be opposed on humanitarian and religious grounds and at the same time supported economically. The flow of profits that kept the abhorred institution alive had to be shut off, the consumption of goods made by slaves had to cease. At the convention of abolitionist societies that met in Philadelphia in 1796 this ideal found sufficient acceptance to occasion a general appeal. Members and sympathizers were called upon to give . decided preference to such commodities as are of the culture or manufac- ture of freemen, to those which are cultivated or manufactured by slaves, as a means by which every individual may discountenance oppression, and bear a testimony against a practice which is still suffered to remain the disgrace of our land.4 The annoying inconveniences and expense inhibiting a scrupulous 3 Paul D. Evans, The Holland Land Company (Buffalo, 1924), 14-18, 63-66. 4 Edward Needles, An Historical Memoir of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery; The Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race (Philadelphia, 1848), 43, 44. 1942 THE FREE PRODUCE ATTACK UPON SLAVERY 297 obedience to this supplication are obvious. Numerous essential goods and many habitual luxuries were produced only by slave labor; re- luctance to forego these was considerable. Few women were willing to sacrifice comfort and style in dress, while not many men would abjure the old habits of smoking, snuff-pinching, and the use of sugar at the behest of impractical visionaries. Northern traders and processors of southern raw materials naturally opposed such a pro- gram of abstinence. It must be remembered too that a widespread sentiment against slavery did not yet prevail in the northern states. Pennsylvania's gradual emancipation law had not long been on the statute books (1780); slave trading flourished until 1808 and aroused little public indignation when carried on surreptitiously thereafter. Philadelphia was still to witness demonstrations against its anti-slavery champions, riots and the burning of meeting places. This early injunction of the abolitionists was but a gesture, a feeble cry of opposition amidst the virile forces that were planting deeper the institution of slavery in the expanding nation. In a short time the wording of the first free produce appeal was modified to permit a more flexible adherence. Preference for the products of free labor should be exercised ". in cases where it is practicable," an escape clause allowing the compromise of principle and practice without too serious soul-searching. One might note the analogy be- tween the support accorded the free produce ideal and adherence to the cause of prohibition in a later day. In the literature of abolitionism there are few references to free produce during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. A pamphlet by Elias Hicks, Observations on the Slavery of the zAfri- cans and their descendants appeared in 1811 attacking the use of slave-made goods and reiterating the appeal to abstain. But in these years the energies of abolitionists were given mainly to improving the lot of free Negroes and preventing their re-enslavement. Others saw solution of the slave problem in the colonization movement. Hitched to a bale of cotton the South's star had been rocketing ever higher. Less tenacious spirits than the Philadelphia abolitionists might have succumbed to its ascending power and free produce would have suffered oblivion. The ideal was somnolent but not dead. In 1825 there is a token of its rejuvenation in a letter received by Roberts Vaux from England's indefatigable warrior against slavery, 298 NORMAN B. WILKINSON July Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson mentions plans afoot in England to organize a company to produce by free labor, manufacture and un- dersell commodities now produced entirely by slave labor.
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