Lucretia Mott did not wear cotton. Wool was her choice of fabric for the long Philadelphia winters; she wore linen or silk when the weather was hot. Her husband, James Mott, had for a time worked as a cotton merchant, but ultimately quit to trade in wool. He left for the same moral reasons that drove Lucretia’s abstinence: As adherents of the Free Produce Movement, an abolitionist effort led by Quakers in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the Motts did not buy or consume any goods made with slave labor—period. This meant that in addition to abstaining from buying or wearing cotton, the Motts went out of their way to buy staples like rice, coffee, and tea, and nonfood items like tobacco and indigo dye from sources besides the American South or the Caribbean. Lucretia was even particular about her sweets: maple sugar over cane.
The boycott endures as a familiar facet of American political life more than 150 years later, with the MAGA-hat crowd refusing to buy Nike products and LGBTQ allies avoiding Chick Fil-A. Not to mention the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, one of the most pointed efforts to bring an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank. In action, if not in spirit, all these efforts have roots in the actions of abolitionists like Lucretia Mott. “A lot of our modern-day consumer activism, they’re drawing on the tactics of the Free Produce Movement—even if they’re not aware that they are,” said Julie Holcomb, author of Moral Commerce: Quakers and The Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy and a professor of museum studies at Baylor University.
The idea that buying products like sugar supported the institution of slavery was already well established when the Free Produce Movement began in the United States in the 1840s. In 1790, Thomas Jefferson—a slave owner and the original booster of local American foods—wrote about the interest there was at that time in increasing maple sugar production, remarking, “What a blessing to substitute a sugar which requires only the labor of children for that which is said to render the slavery of blacks necessary.” In England, there were boycotts of sugar from the West Indies in the late 1700s and the 1820s, both of which were concerned with far more than the inconvenience of slave labor as Jefferson saw it. But even after the abolition of slavery in the United Kingdom in 1833, there continued to be imports of slave-produced goods, and it was British Quakers who founded Free Produce in an effort to cut the UK’s economic ties to slavery.