In the 18th and 19th century, did any American/European abolitionist embargo business related to slavery?

by t0rnap0rt

Today we can refuse to buy coffee and cocoa produced under harsh labor conditions. Was it possible for the abolitionists?

For example, did any abolitionist refuse to produce slave ships, not buy sugar/cotton produced in a slave plantation, deny donation from slave owner, or refuse service from a pro-slavery church?

And, did any abolitionist church went as far as denying all religious service to slave owners?

hotsouthernhistorian

Yes! It was big enough to have a name - the "free produce movement." There's a few sources about this, and the conclusions a lot of them draw are, unfortunately, not happy, and I'll explain why.

It was possible, at least in theory, to avoid goods made by an enslaved person in some places, and where/when you lived was absolutely a factor in ease here. The two big exceptions are in textiles (clothing) and in sugar. Because of the difficulty which existed virtually no matter where you were, this practice was pretty uncommon (though Faulkner points out that different groups of people, like women, Freedmen, and quakers were more likely to participate in it than others).

It was theoretically possible to find and purchase free goods, yes. However, there were a few reasons why this whole thing never really kicked off, and, unfortunately, much of it was associated with stigma from abolitionists (they believed it to be associated with Quaker religious practices which were seen as foreign and creepy). Abolitionists also frequently mocked free consumers because of the perceived or actual lower quality of goods. Because of this, the movement never took off despite it being a transatlantic movement: it was a fringe section of abolitionist action despite existing everywhere. So, frequently, someone would eat nasty sugar and vile rice while being mocked by even members of the abolitionist movement. Plus, a lot of the clothing produced in the world at this time was somehow impacted by cotton produced by enslaved people. Even if it was not MADE by such cotton, the revenue generated from using such cotton allowed for the expansion of the textile industry, which meant that money from enslavement touched almost all textile corporations in some way. For these reasons, it wasn't very appealing, even to people ostensibly committed to the demise of the peculiar institution.

The origins of this movement came about towards the end of the transatlantic slave trade, so I do not recall any instances in which abolitionists would refuse to make slave ships, but I think it stands to reason they would in fact commit to such a refusal.

Donations I also don't have any data on, but based on what I know, it's extremely unlikely that an enslaver would even think to donate to an abolitionist, except in, say, the American Colonization Society, and that sort of school of thought was what led directly to that organization's demise.

I don't exactly know about refusal for religious service. In the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening, it became more common for congregations outside the South to become antislavery (though not necessarily abolitionist). This is why there were so many church splits in the antebellum period. Congregation members in the South were surrounded by proslavery messaging and the Jackson admin even allowed for what amounted to a mail ban to occur in the South, in which folks receiving antislavery messages, communications, or other documents that may have disturbed the hierarchy were either unable to receive their mail bc the local postmaster tossed it out, or because he would inform the community about such communications and the community members would... "deal with it." This is why Southerners who were antislavery (not that I think there were many of these types of people - especially towards the later antebellum period - but the few who did exist) often didn't express their views: their community would come down hard on you. So, antislavery Southern congregates either didn't exist or were terrified to speak their mind. I have no doubts that a Southern proslavery church (aka almost all white Southern churches) would have banned abolitionist or even antislavery people from their congregation. The circumstances which occurred in the South, wherein the community acted as a sort of thought police, occurred in the North too, though most communities in the North were only passively antislavery and not abolitionist, so the degree of passion was dramatically different.

What this DOES mean is that churches in free states and churches in the South split. This is why today we have the "Southern Baptists" and other explicitly Southern denominations: Church leaders were so committed to their ideas of slavery they started schisms to pursue their relationship with God as part of a convention/denomination which did not have members who were actively opposed to it. To these folks, both in free states and in the South, slavery was a deeply religious issue, and texts were often cited to "prove" each side's subjective correctness. So, churches which were explicitly abolitionist would never attract a slaveowner in the first place, and their leadership and congregation would likely have been hostile to any such people in their house of ownership due to the perception of the incompatibility of such a person's lifestyle with the teachings of The Bible.

TL;DR: Yes, abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic did act to avoid purchase of goods produced by enslaved people. This was an extremely difficult feat to accomplish, and it never took off as a model for wide-scale resistance to slavery as an institution. Private businesses also sometimes followed a model of refusal to allow involve themselves in the trade, though this was often extremely self-limiting due to the lower quality - real or imagined - of such goods. Abolitionists who did get involved in free consumerism were often mocked by their fellow abolitionist. Meanwhile, antislavery and proslavery communal spaces - especially churches - were unwelcoming to folks of differing views, making it increasingly difficult for these people to even interact or view each other as human beings.

Sources:

Moral Commerce, written by Julie Holcomb.

The Root of Evil: Free produce in Antislavery Society by Carol Faulkner (article on JSTOR).

"Buy for the Sake of the Slave" (which is an article) and *Buying Power (*a book) by Lawrence Glickman both look into this issue.

"Broken Churches, Broken Nation" By C. C. Goen (this one is aging nowadays but provides a pretty good look into the regional church splits in the antebellum period).