Wealthy American citizen (let’s go with the typical white male of English descent) who inherits a large estate that includes some agricultural holdings.
I have a progressive 21st century stance on slavery: I find it abhorrent and refuse to buy any items made with slave labor or do business with anyone who owns slaves. I absolutely refuse to own any human beings myself.
Running my own estate, I think, should be easy enough as long as I take a dent in my profits in order to actually pay agricultural workers. (Not sure who these would be- poor whites, “free blacks”, or recent immigrants). I imagine the rest would be harder.
Can I get tea and coffee that doesn’t use the labor of enslaved people? Are these common items in an 1840s household? What about sugar, cotton fabric, and indigo dye? What other industries used slave labor? Were ethical alternatives available?
Was the labor of enslaved people intertwined with every part of the economy, or was it sequestered to very specific industries?
Comments
A couple of responses to this question by u/postal-history and myself may be interesting to you. Our comments focus mostly on sugar, though, so plenty more remains to be said about other products.
Edit: Fixed link
This would depend greatly on how far you are willing to go. Do you want to send your kid to Yale, knowing that he’ll be there with Southern students who might have literally sold a slave to pay their way?
Will you resolve never to visit the White House or many buildings in DC (built with slave labor)? Never travel to or even through a slave state (where most infrastructure was built at least partially with slave labor)?
How about imports? How do you know that something imported didn’t come on a ship that had enslaved labor? You’d never have any way of knowing where your rice, sugar, cotton, indigo dye, tobacco, etc came from, especially since there was no infrastructure to prevent someone from just lying to you.
The next question comes about what you consider “slavery”. While the Indian Slavery Act of 1843 was meant to bring an end to slavery in East India Company controlled territory, there was still indentured servitude (often coerced), and of course products could still came from areas of India that still practiced various forms of slavery (though rarely chattel slavery). Do you consider child labor to be slavery, given young children don’t really have a say? Well, there goes many textiles, many factory goods, and many things coming out of a mine.
Obviously, in the North and West, you’d have a lot easier time living your life with out the fruits of enslaved labor. The more you make at home (and you can make a lot at home given time), the less of a problem you’ll have. A western frontiersman could easily never use any products of enslaved labor. A businessman in New York City would probably have a harder time.
If you have inherited in the South, by the 1840’s, you’re gonna have a hard time, something I explain in more detail here and here. Farmers and planters rarely were debt-free, and that debt may well have been tied up in the slaves themselves. Southern states heavily restricted manumission of enslaved people, meaning that at best, you would have to pay to resettle them out of the state. Free Black farm labor would hard to come by, and poor whites might balk at doing <slur> work for someone they’re not related to (working one’s own farm or helping family is a far cry from working for an unrelated landowner).
My advice, if you’re trying to do the most good, is to never let perfect be the enemy of the good. Will going to Yale help you make the connections you need to make a profit that you can pour into anti-slavery pursuits? Then go to Yale! Did you inherit land but you cannot afford to manumit the enslaved people that came with it? You could always point them to the Underground Railroad, move North, and change your name. Worst case, you hurt a local bank that is also tied deeply into slavery as they end up taking a bath when the foreclosure doesn’t make them whole.
You’ll almost certainly have to make compromises, unless your plan is to go the route of John Brown (may his soul go marching on).
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/u/Georgy_K_Zhukov has previously answered Was there any effort made to source material in a way that didn’t use slavery amongst abolitionists in the USA?
/u/mimicofmodes has previously answered Pre-Civil War, Did Abolitionists Boycott Southern Goods Made With Slave Labor?
See also In the 18th and 19th century, did any American/European abolitionist embargo business related to slavery?
More remains to be written.
There were actually some opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century who did boycott products of enslaved labor on ethical grounds. It was a difficult thing to do, since the cotton, sugarcane, and tobacco industries were so heavily dependent on slave labor that one virtually had to boycott all products of those industries entirely and, even if one did boycott those industries, enslaved labor played a lesser integral role in many other industries. Goods produced by enslaved labor generally didn’t advertise that fact, which made it impossible for anyone to be really certain that nothing they purchased had been produced by enslaved people.
In 1791, the British Quaker radical abolitionist William Fox published a pamphlet titled An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Utility of Refraining From West India Sugar and Rum, in which he urged the British public to abstain from sugar and rum (both products of the sugarcane plant), since the vast majority of sugarcane was grown on slave plantations in the Americas. Fox’s address became the most widely distributed pamphlet of the eighteenth century; over 200,000 copies were distributed across the United Kingdom and North America and it went through over twenty-six editions in just one year.
Fox’s pamphlet helped set off a movement that endured through the early nineteenth century. The movement’s supporters were known as “anti-saccharites” and it had its strongest support among Quakers and other radical opponents of slavery. Famous figures who supported the movement by abstaining from sugar included Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley. For several decades of the nineteenth century, there were some companies in the U.K. that sold sugar that they marketed as having been grown free of slavery, but this supposedly slavery-free sugar generally costed around three times as much as the regular sugar grown by enslaved workers in the Americas, which made it an impractical alternative to anyone who wasn’t wealthy. Maple sugar was another alternative to sugarcane sugar, since maple sugar was mostly harvested by free workers.
There were also movements in the nineteenth century to boycott cotton (which, after Eli Whitney’s invention of the mechanical cotton gin in 1793, became the primary cash crop of the slave South). Those who boycotted cotton could generally buy wool (which was mainly sheared and processed by free workers) instead.
In other words, if you were a wealthy die-hard opponent of slavery in the U.K. or the northern United States who was strongly determined not to buy any products of slavery, you could reasonably hope to abstain from at least the most obvious kinds of slave-labor-produced products and find alternatives to them. The alternatives were generally harder to come by and often significantly more expensive, but they did exist. You could never be certain that nothing you owned was made by slaves, but you could do your best to minimize the likelihood.