Free-produce movement

Similarly, "produce" does not mean just fruits and vegetables, but a wide variety of products made by slaves, including clothing, dry goods, shoes, soaps, ice cream, and candy.

Radical Quakers such as Anthony Benezet and John Woolman went further, voicing their opinion that purchasers of slave-derived goods were guilty of keeping the institution of slavery economically feasible.

Also in 1791, an English merchant named James Wright published a newspaper ad to explain why he would no longer sell sugar until he could procure it through channels "more unconnected with Slavery, and less polluted with Human Blood.

However, as the French Revolution turned violent in mid-1792, grassroots movements lost support[5] which they did not regain until it became known that Napoleon Bonaparte opposed emancipation.

It would doubtless have a particular effect on the slave holders, by circumscribing their avarice, and preventing their heaping up riches, and living in a state of luxury and excess on the gain of oppression…[13]Observations on the Slavery of Africans and Their Descendents gave the free-produce movement its central argument for an embargo of all goods produced by slave labor including cotton cloth and cane sugar, in favor of produce from the paid labor of free people.

[4] In 1827, the movement grew broader with the formation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of the "Free Produce Society" founded by Thomas M'Clintock and other radical Quakers.

[4] With the Society, they added a new tactic, one that sought to determine the unseen costs of goods such as cotton, tobacco, and sugar which came from the toil of slaves.

[16] Lydia Child, who would publish an important volume of abolitionist writings, The Oasis,[17] kept a "free" dry goods store in Philadelphia in 1831.

[4] Black abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins always mentioned the free-produce movement in her speeches, saying she would pay a little more for a "Free Labor" dress, even if it were coarser.

[19] Watkins called the movement "the harbinger of hope, the ensign of progress, and a means for proving the consistency of our principles and the earnestness of our zeal.

[5] UK counterparts to the American Free Produce Society formed in the 1840s–1850s, under the leadership of Anna Richardson, a Quaker slavery abolitionist and peace campaigner based in Newcastle.

Sometimes the non-slave goods were of poorer quality; one storeowner "not infrequently received sugar 'with a very disagreeable taste and odor' and rice that was 'very poor, dark and dirty.

[19] Though William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, initially proclaimed at a convention in 1840 that his wool suit was made without slave labor,[25] he later examined the results of the movement and criticized it as impossible to enforce,[26] ineffective, and a distraction from more important tasks.