But this year, as the 150th anniversary of the Civil War approaches, the maple sugar season has a different meaning. Some 70 years before the war began on April 12, 1861, people had looked to maple sugar  –both as a political and economic weapon against slavery. The idea was simple –replace cane sugar, produced by slave labor, with maple sugar and it would be a blow to the slave system.

One of the first to advocate the idea was Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration and an early voice of abolition in America.  With the Quakers of Philadelphia, Rush proposed using maple sugar as a means of hastening the end of slavery by replacing one of the key products manufactured by slave labor.  (Rush also opposed the death penalty, was a proponent of public education, and advocated for the humane treatment of the mentally ill.)

In 1788 Rush had published an essay on the “Advantages of the Culture of the Sugar Maple Tree” in a Philadelphia monthly. In 1789 he had founded, with a group of Philadelphia Quakers, the Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree. He had even staged a scientific tea party to prove the potency of maple sugar. The guests – Alexander Hamilton, Quaker merchant Henry Drinker, and “several Ladies” – sipped cups of hyson tea, sweetened with equal amounts of cane and maple sugar. All agreed the sugar from the maple was as sweet as cane sugar. (Source: The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia)

Their aim was simple, as Rush’s 1788 essay put it: “to lessen or destroy the consumption of West Indian sugar, and thus indirectly to destroy negro slavery.”

Dr. Rush found an enthusiastic disciple in Thomas Jefferson, who explored the concept of an American maple sugar industry during a journey to Vermont and even attempted–unsuccessfully it would turn out– to import sugar maple trees to Monticello.

Jefferson and other conscientious consumers could now … “put sugar in (their) coffee without being saddened by the thought of all the toil, sweat, tears, suffering and crimes that have hitherto been necessary to procure this product.” (Source: The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia)

Jefferson, Dr. Rush and other Abolitionists were ultimately disappointed as the maple sugar idea failed to gain a foothold and speculation in maple forests actually created a “maple bubble” which burst before this “sugar substitute” could prove itself an economic weapon against slavery.

But well into the 19th century, Abolitionists continued to  pursue the cause of maple sugar. The American artist Eastman Johnson attempted to make maple syrup a political statement through a collection of works showing the sugaring process was not only a part of New England’s social fabric, but a way to strike a blow for freedom.

This failed effort to make what we buy and eat a political act may have been a quixotic disappointment. But the thought of putting maple syrup and sugar to use in a noble cause only makes them taste a little sweeter. And the fundamental idea that taking care in what what we purchase and consume can make a difference is still a valuable principle.

But nobody understood the hard facts about the Puritans better than the Society of Friends, or Quakers. On October 14, 1656, the Puritans who ran Massachusetts enacted the first laws against Quakers. The penalty for being a Quaker was ultimately death.

And it wasn’t an empty threat. Late in October 1659, two Quakers were executed by hanging. A third, Mary Dyer, was executed in 1660. And a fourth was hung in 1661. A sister of dissident Anne Hutchinson also became a Quaker. She was spared hanging. The Puritans merely stripped her in public and lashed her.

There is an irony as this date also happen to be the birthday of the most famous Quaker in American history, William Penn, born in 1644. Precisely because the Friends were persecuted in England as well as Massachusetts, Penn received the charter to begin his colony as a haven for Quakers, and other religious dissenters. Under Penn’s liberal leadership which extended to politics as well as religion, Penn’s “Holy Experiment” flourished. (Unfortunately, his son and brother who eventually replaced him did not see things the same way and reversed many of William Penn’s enlightened policies.)
You can read Penn’s “Charter of Libertie” at the Yale Law School Collection of colonial charters and documents. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/pa03.asp

BTW, The man on that box of oats is not William Penn, according to the Quaker Oats company.
Could have fooled me.