Free produce movement

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A "free products" store in Mount Pleasant, Ohio . The business operated between 1848 and 1857 and was located in a former estate owned by Benjamin Lundy , who opened the first of its kind.

The free produce movement was a movement in the abolitionist movement of the USA in the early 19th century, which aimed to weaken the slave economy of the southern states economically by selling goods from “free labor” .

The current emerged from the Quaker environment , but was not limited to a religious context. The Quakers had successively excluded slave owners from among their members until around 1780. The idea of ​​an effective boycott movement aimed at abolishing slavery went well with their core pacifist beliefs during the Civil War . People like Anthony Benezet and John Woolman coined the narrative in these circles that consumers of slavery products also have a share of responsibility for the continued existence of the institution because they have a share in its economic basis. The consumption of slave goods was also compared with the participation in the spoils of war, which the “Society of Friends” forbade for religious and moral reasons. In Wilmington, Delaware , a founding document was developed in 1829 for the formal establishment of an organization for the creation of "free products". At the same time, Benjamin Lundy opened a shop in Baltimore that exclusively sold products from free workers. The most frequently sold “free products” typically included the goods and raw materials that are otherwise predominantly made by slaves: dry goods - that is, sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, grain, cotton - as well as clothing, shoes, soaps, ice cream, juices and sweets.

In 1830 supporters of the movement founded the American Free Produce Association and individual businesses. In the following year, the Colored Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania and the Colored Female Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania were founded . A nationwide organization existed from 1838. In addition to business activities, the structures and individuals involved also carried out extensive public relations work. In addition to countless lectures, pamphlets and pamphlets, the magazine The Non-Slaveholder was published between 1846 and 1854, which most closely reflects the position of free producers in the abolitionist media landscape of the time. The media and individual speakers at the time also carried the idea to Great Britain, where a boycott subculture with its own dynamics also developed.

In the early years of the movement, the idea of ​​its own economic system was welcomed by contemporary abolitionists, and sometimes euphorically. Frederick Douglass , Gerrit Smith , Sarah and Angelina Grimké , and Harriet Beecher Stowe were among the supporters of the Free produce movement from the abolitionist environment . In relation to the early days of the movement, William Lloyd Garrison can also be classified here as the editor of Liberator , who later criticized the movement as ineffective. In general, women as a group probably played a decisive role in movement dynamics. Some people invested considerable sums of their private wealth in such ventures. Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell , for example, were convinced that mechanized sugar production could economically displace slave labor. They traveled to Europe to familiarize themselves with the production of beet sugar, but were unable to develop a marketable product.

The movement has been largely ignored by slaveholders and their apologists. There was probably no real economic effect on slavery as an economic form; at least no one can be reconstructed in retrospect. The last shop that exclusively sold "free products" closed in 1867, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation .

Lawrence Glickman (2004) proposed to write the history of contemporary political consumption, at least for the US context, on the basis of the free-produce movement. Even animal rights activists that a vegan provide consumerism in the center of their political work were seen by Corey Wrenn (2013) in this tradition.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Lawrence B. Glickman: 'Buy for the Sake of the Slave' Abolitionism and the Origins of American Consumer Activism . In: American Quarterly . 56, No. 4, 2004, ISSN  1080-6490 , pp. 889-912. doi : 10.1353 / aq.2004.0056 .
  2. ↑ The term "free labor" here refers to workers who are not slaves.
  3. ↑ a b Glenn Grothers: free produce movement . In: Peter P. Hinks, John McKivigan (Eds.): Encyclopedia of antislavery and abolition . Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. 2007, ISBN 978031333143, pp. 266-268.
  4. ↑ Clare Midgley: Slave sugar boycotts, female activism and the domestic base of British anti-slavery culture . In: Slavery & Abolition . 17, No. 3, 1996, ISSN  0144-039X , pp. 137-162. doi : 10.1080 / 01440399608575190 .
  5. ↑ Andrea Moore Kerr: Lucy Stone: speaking out for equality . Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ 1992, ISBN 0813518598 , p. 114.
  6. ↑ Corey Lee Wrenn: Abolition Then and Now: Tactical Comparisons Between the Human Rights Movement and the Modern Nonhuman Animal Rights Movement in the United States . In: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics . 2013, ISSN  1187-7863 , pp. 1-24. doi : 10.1007 / s10806-013-9458-7 .