One important tool used by abolitionists in their moral fight against slavery was the Free Produce movement. The Free Produce movement began in the eighteenth century. It was primarily a Quaker movement, led by John Woolman and Elias Hicks. Abolitionists who participated in Free Produce refused to use any goods made by slave labor. This was much harder to do than we might realize today.
To truly remain faithful to Free Produce ideals, a person would have had to avoid all products that had any component produced by slave labor. Obviously this meant refusing to use cloth made of slave-grown cotton or sugar grown by slaves. One solution was to find cotton and sugar grown by non slave holders. Another was to wear wool clothing instead of cotton clothing. To be completely true to principle, however, an adherent to Free Produce would have had to make sure that the ink in the tag on the clothing was not produced by slave labor since indigo, an important component of ink, was often grown by slaves.
Benjamin Lundy traveled extensively for the cause of Free Produce.
Benjamin Lundy was an abolitionist who devoted a great deal of time to finding alternative sources of cotton, traveling to Haiti and Texas in search of possible locations for Free Produce colonies. James Mott, once a cotton merchant, decided to deal only in wool in order to avoid the moral taint of slave produce. Perhaps most famously of all, Quaker abolitionist Elias Hicks is said to have refused to be covered by a cotton blanket, even as he was on his deathbed, because he did not want his soul to be tainted by the immorality of slavery.
This story, true or not, illustrates quite well the point of Free Produce. The difference between Free Produce and a modern boycott is that a boycott uses economic pressure to change the behavior of the producer of the goods, whereas Free Produce adherents’ goal was to keep their own conscience free of taint by not benefitting from the forced labor of others. They would have loved it if their refusal to use slave-grown products could put enough economic pressure on the system to force its end, but most realized that that could never happen. W.P. Garrison, son of famed immediate abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, once argued that though people have called Garrisonians impractical or radical, it was actually the Free Produce group that fit this description. Addressing the notion that Garrisonians were fanatics for refusing to participate in politics, he maintained that free produce Quakers were actually the radical, impractical dreamers. Of course, those who adhered to Free Produce would have argued that practicality was not the issue, morality was.
Some people today still use moral boycotts to maintain their distance from products and companies that violate their principles of social justice.
For more information on Free Produce, read the story of Blood Stained Goods.
Universal Emancipation 