Conceived in Liberty (126 page)

In 1688, Francis D. Pastorius, head of a colony of German Quakers in Pennsylvania, persuaded his flock to issue a remonstrance against slavery. It was sent to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Quakers, which promptly buried the protest. In stressing slavery as a violation of the Golden Rule, Pastorius followed the teachings of the Reverend William Edmundston in Maryland a dozen years before.

Antislavery protests, even among people as individualistic as the Quakers, had proved abortive. Some Quakers were still troubled about the issue but little was done. The Keithian Quakers denounced slavery in 1693, as did Cadwallader Morgan a few years later. But the most the yearly meeting would do—first in 1696 and more stringently in 1715—was to criticize any further importation of slaves. The Pennsylvania Assembly, governed by Quakers, placed prohibitory import duties on the importation of slaves, but this was disallowed by the Crown under the influence of the slave-trading Royal African Company.

As more and more Quakers acquired slaves, protests within the order intensified. The minister William Southeby denounced the institution entirely and in 1712 vainly urged the Pennsylvania legislature to outlaw slavery. The Chester (Pennsylvania) Quarterly Meeting was the center of Quaker opposition to the practice, and in 1711 it began a series of resolutions for the expulsion of Quakers engaging in the importation of slaves. The Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting impatiently refused. Furthermore, for repeatedly urging Quaker condemnation of slavery, Southeby was expelled from the Quaker communion in 1716, and this suppression intimidated the more cautious Chester meeting to keep silent.

Meanwhile, similar protests were growing among New York and New England Quakers. Abolition of slavery centered in the Flushing meeting in New York, and the Dartmouth and Nantucket meetings in Massachusetts. Sparking the protest was an English Quaker minister, John Farmer, who raised a protest against both slavery and the slave trade at the Flushing Quarterly Meeting in 1717. The agitation was joined by Horsman Mullenix and William Burling. Burling presented an attack on slavery at the New York Yearly Meeting in 1718, though he himself balked at urging its abolition for fear of causing strife within the church.

In New England, the Nantucket Monthly Meeting in 1717 bravely condemned both the slave trade and slavery
per se,
while Dartmouth and Greenwich confined themselves to criticizing the slave trade. Newport, heavily involved in both slaveholding and slave trading, refused to condemn either one; hence the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting took no action. John Farmer now came to New England to preach against slavery, thereby intensifying the gulf between Newport and Nantucket. After urging the New England Yearly Meeting to denounce slavery in a paper,
Relating to Negroes,
Farmer succeeded only in bringing the meeting’s wrath down upon his own head. The meeting ordered Farmer to stop preaching against the slave trade, to turn over his papers to its care, and to cease publicizing his essay. Farmer would not allow his rights to be trampled on and continued to preach his opposition to slavery. Appealing to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Farmer, like Southeby, was ousted from the Quaker Society. The Philadelphia meeting’s only concesson to antislavery sentiment was to threaten, in 1719, the expulsion of any Quaker engaging in the importation of slaves. And even this mild step was not followed by other regional yearly meetings for several decades. The Virginia Yearly Meeting only began to advise against the slave trade in 1722, but not until 1768 did it move over to discipline. New England advised against slave imports in 1717 and only made the prohibition mandatory in 1760. Maryland issued a hesitant prohibition in 1759-60. New York advised in 1718 and only prohibited the slave trade in 1774. The North Carolina Yearly Meeting only advised in 1772.

The high-handed treatment of Southeby and Farmer suppressed further antislavery agitation for over a decade. Finally, in 1729, the question was reopened by one courageous man, Ralph Sandiford. An English Quaker and businessman, Sandiford settled in Philadelphia, only to be revolted at the sight of slave auctions. In this year, despite refusal of permission to publish by the overseer of the press in Philadelphia, Sandiford bravely published his
The Mystery of Iniquity,
in which he bitterly attacked Quaker slaveholding. The Quakers, he charged, had had it in their power to make their name glorious by spurning slavery; instead they had shown a defect of spirituality by engaging in this evil practice.

Sandiford’s booklet once again radicalized the Quakers of Chester, Pennsylvania.
The Chester Quarterly Meeting now called for the next step in restricting slavery: since slave importation was now prohibited to Quakers, purchase of newly imported slaves should likewise be banned. Two small quarterly meetings in New Jersey backed the Chester view; the Bucks Quarterly Meeting failed to take a stand; Philadelphia criticized any further changes in Quaker policy; and the Burlington meeting compromised on advising against purchase but without any disciplinary prohibition. This waffling suggestion was adopted by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1730.
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Ralph Sandiford, heartbroken at his defeat at the yearly meeting, soon died. But his suit was quickly taken up by his friend and fellow English businessman Benjamin Lay. Lay blasted Quaker slaveholders in his magnificently hard-hitting
All Slave-Keepers, That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates Pretending to Lay Claim to the Pure and Holy Christian Religion
(1737). Lay denounced Quaker slaveholders as “a parcel of hypocrites, and deceivers.” The Quaker ministers who held slaves especially raised his ire, for their hypocrisy set an example for all Quakers. Lay pointed out that slavery, just as in the case of murder, was a criminal assault on Christ’s gospel of love. Lay not only went unheeded but was forcibly ejected from Quaker meetings.

Into this atmosphere of repression and of general evasion of moral responsibility came the young man who would almost single-handedly free the Quaker slaves. John Woolman was a tailor, farmer, and shopkeeper in New Jersey, a colony containing many slaves. In 1742, as a young apprentice making out a bill of sale for a Negress, Woolman realized with a shock the true nature of the pervasive slave system. He thereupon decided to devote his life to crusading for the abolition of slavery.

Upon becoming a Quaker minister in 1743, Woolman went up and down the colonies exhorting Quakers to take a principled stand against the institution of slavery. In his influential and beautifully written
Journal
(1757), emanating a spirit of Christian love, Woolman wrote of the slaves: “These are a people by whose labor the other inhabitants are in a great measure supported.... These are a people who have made no agreement to serve us, and who have not forfeited their liberty.... These are the souls for whom Christ died, and for our conduct towards them we must answer before that Almighty Being who is no respecter of persons.”

The great impact of John Woolman is eternal testimony to the effect that ideas and moral conscience can have upon the actions of men. For while many Quakers had a vested economic interest in slaves, this interest and its ally, natural inertia, could not prevail against the spiritual moral principles proclaimed by the lone Quaker. By 1750, a young teacher in Philadelphia, the Quaker Huguenot Anthony Benezet, had joined wholeheartedly in the crusade. In 1754, Woolman published his influential
Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes,
denouncing slavery as a violation of man’s natural rights. Woolman punctured the usual rationalization of slavery as being for the benefit of the slaves. Instead, slavery is precisely to enable the masters and their families to live in luxury off the exploited labor of their human property. Furthermore, slavekeeping corrupted and demoralized the slave owners themselves.
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Under Woolman’s mighty influence, more and more Quakers took up the cause. Such prominent Quakers as Israel Pemberton, Samuel Fothergill, and John Churchman came out for abolition, and various monthly meetings in New Jersey and Pennsylvania condemned the purchase and keeping of slaves.

The great climax of the abolitionist movement in the Quaker society came at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of 1758. While conservatives and slave owners insisted on the old formulas of only barring slave imports and enjoining kind treatment of the existing slaves, Woolman and his fellow radicals launched a principled moral attack on slavery itself. At the yearly meeting it seemed as if the conservatives and the temporizers—with their pleas of “wait” until a “way would be opened”—were going to win. At this point the great Woolman rose to remind the assembled Quakers once again of principle: “Many slaves on this continent are oppressed and their cries have entered into the ears of the Most High... it is not a time for delay. Should we now... through a respect to the private interests of some persons... neglect to do our duty in firmness and constancy, still waiting for some extraordinary means to bring about their deliverance, God may by terrible things in righteousness answer us....”

Woolman swept the day. The historic yearly meeting of 1758 called upon Quakers to free their slaves and, besides, to grant them a terminal allowance. Thus the Quakers took upon themselves the financial loss not only of freeing the slaves, but even of compensating them to some extent for their prior servitude. The meeting resolved that “excluding temporal considerations or views of self-interest, we may... ‘do unto others as we would they
should do unto us,’ which would induce such Friends as have any slaves to set them at liberty—making a Christian provision according to their ages....” Discipline was to be imposed upon Quakers who persisted in buying, selling, or keeping slaves, but in ways short of actual expulsion. Particularly important was the meeting’s appointment of an energetic committee, headed by Woolman, to persuade and help Quaker slave owners to put this policy—including the Christian provision of reparations—into effect. By 1774, all the willing Quakers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania had freed their slaves. In that year, disciplinary threats of expulsion were imposed for slave purchasing, holding, or selling, and as a result, all the Quakers had freed their slaves by 1780. In consequence, there was by the end of the colonial period an appreciable decline of slavery in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. More important, the example of the voluntary abolition of slavery by the Quakers held up a beacon light of freedom to all Americans.

The action of 1758 of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting—by far the most important Quaker meeting in the colonies—provided an immediate inspiration to Quakers in the other colonies. Richard Smith, one of the few Quakers in Connecticut, had already announced the freeing of his own slave. Woolman’s trip to New England in 1760 inspired the monthly meeting in South Kingston, Rhode Island—in the Narragansett area, where slavery was widespread—to outlaw slavery two years later on pain of expulsion. Boston, Lynn, and Salem Quakers moved to prohibit slavery, but other areas proved far more resistant—especially Newport and New York City, which resisted pressure from upstate New York meetings. Maryland and Virginia Quakers split sharply on the issue.

Gradually, all the Quaker meetings were moved around to the full abolitionist position, but this could only be done by their adoption of the great libertarian and rationalist doctrine of natural rights, increasingly sweeping the colonies. With the aid of natural-right theory, the Quakers now realized that not only benevolent Christian morality but also basic justice required freedom for every man. Justice and the very nature of man required freedom for all. John Woolman had already proclaimed that “liberty was a natural right of all men equally”; and now the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of 1765, reaffirming its decree of seven years before, reasoned the necessity of abolition so that all Quakers might “acquit themselves with justice, and equity toward a people, who by an unwarrantable custom” had been “unjustly deprived of the common privileges of mankind.” And a New York Yearly Meeting of 1768, even while temporizing on abolition, conceded that “Negroes as rational creatures are by nature born free.”

This appeal to justice raised Quaker arguments from concern about
initial
enslavement through war to the
continuing
enslavement of the Negroes. For now the Quakers saw fully that aggression against the natural liberty of Negroes occurred not only at the time of their initial enslavement or importation,
but
all the time
that they were kept in bondage. Gradualist arguments about “preparing” the Negroes for freedom had now also to be swept aside. This insight widened Quaker horizons from religious concern for their fellow slave-owning members to concern for slavery in the society at large. As the historian Sydney James puts it:

If Negroes had been deprived of natural liberty not only when they had been forcibly transported from Africa, but every minute that they were held in bondage under whatever pretext, justice required that the God-given freedom be “restored.” In this light a master conferred no boon when he liberated a slave; he gave belatedly what he had hitherto “withheld” and simply ceased to “detain” a person who was, and who always had been, free. This idea soon pervaded official Quaker language and provided Friends with an unfailing encouragement to fight slaveholding in the “world” at large. Ending a wicked usurpation of control over a man’s life was as clearly a public duty as saving him from drowning, an obligation so positive as to relegate the spiritual or economic preparation of the slave for freedom to a position where it could not rightly control the decision to manumit or not.
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The Quakers were thus led to shift from their previous pessimistic view of unregenerate and sinful “natural man” to an optimistic view of man as possessing the natural and God-given liberty to choose the Christian and moral life for himself. Indeed, they saw more clearly that slavery and other such coercive restrictions on the natural liberty of the individual prevented him from using his liberty, and hence from fully adopting the moral “inner light” and from pursuing the proper path to his own happiness.