Vermont Maple Country
(Courtesy Vermont Maple Sugar Makers)
Pancakes and Politics?
Spring in Vermont. As the temperatures and sap rise, you see the web of sap lines descending from the woods to galvanized vats beside the roads. Dense clouds of wood smoke billow from sugar houses, large and small. This weekend (March 23-24), Vermont celebrates the season with an Open House Weekend at sugar houses around the state.
But the maple sugar season has another historical 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)
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.
Abolitionists continued to pursue the cause of maple sugar in the 19th century. 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.
(Note: This is a revised version of a post originally written in March 2011.)
