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Overview
Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691630878 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #411 |
| Pages: | 236 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Quakers & Slavery
A Divided Spirit
By Jean R. Soderlund
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1985 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10243-6
CHAPTER 1
ABOLITIONISTS CONFRONT THE MEETING
In September 1738, the town of Burlington bustled with Friends from every part of the Delaware Valley. Representatives to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, who met in alternate years in this West Jersey town and in Philadelphia, came from as far away as Duck Creek (Delaware), Lancaster (Pennsylvania), and Cape May (New Jersey). Devout Quakers from all walks of life — men, women, and children — gathered to worship with friends they had not seen since the previous year. And in the business meeting, "weighty" or well-respected Quakers who were sent as representatives from their local meetings, deliberated problems of discipline and questions of policy that their monthly and quarterly meetings sent to the central body for consideration.
Despite all of the activity outside the meeting house, Yearly Meetings for business in the 1730s were rather stolid affairs. The Philadelphia and Burlington Quakers who guided the meeting were leaders in provincial government and commerce as well. Most were wealthy, and many owned slaves. Their philosophy and practice in both government and religion were preeminently conservative; their interest lay in keeping policies as they were and in maintaining control in their own hands.
Thus, when the small hunchbacked abolitionist, Benjamin Lay, walked into the 1738 Yearly Meeting, he was hardly a welcome visitor. The Friends knew him well. In fact, he claimed to be a member of their Society although his monthly meeting in England had disowned him years before. Originally of Colchester, Lay had immigrated first to Barbados and then to Philadelphia around 1731. He hated the system of slavery he had first experienced in the West Indies and set out to eradicate the less extensive, though still well-entrenched, institution he found in the Delaware Valley. His efforts earned him much enmity among the Quaker slaveholders who held sway in the Society in the 1730s and 1740s but probably helped to encourage the budding opponents to slavery who would gain support and take control of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting early in the 1750s.
Lay's tactics were as varied as they were provocative. He harangued local Friends' meetings, and was ejected from them forthwith. He kidnapped a Quaker child to illustrate the grief suffered by African families when their children were stolen by enslavers. He stood with one bare foot in deep snow to publicize the ill-treatment suffered by blacks, especially in the winter. Lay's most famous exploit, however, was his "bladder of blood" demonstration at the 1738 Yearly Meeting. He arrived dressed in a military costume, complete with sword, hidden under a plain coat, and carrying a hollowed-out book that resembled a Bible but actually contained a bladder of red juice. According to one account, Lay rose to speak to the meeting at a propitious moment and said, "Oh all you Negro masters who are contentedly holding your fellow creatures in a state of slavery, ... you might as well throw off the plain coat as I do ..." — at which time Lay took off the overcoat and disclosed his military garb to the surprised gathering. He continued, "It would be as justifiable in the sight of the Almighty ... if you should thrust a sword through their hearts as I do through this book!" Lay then dramatically drew his sword, stabbed the book and bladder, and sprinkled "blood" all over the Friends sitting nearby. The Yearly Meeting was outraged; the members decided that all connection between this radical and their meeting must be cut. Therefore, they directed John Kinsey, the clerk (or presiding officer), to advertise publicly that Friends took no responsibility for Lay's conduct (which also included speaking without invitation in other churches), and they repudiated his book, All Slave-Keepers, That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates (1737). Benjamin Lay subsequently dropped from public view, but some Friends visited him from time to time at the cave in which he lived near Abington, and he lived to see Philadelphia Yearly Meeting take substantial steps against slavery in the 1750s.
Benjamin Lay did not convince the Yearly Meeting to ban slavery among its members in 1738. He was the wrong man at that time, just as John Woolman would be the right man in the 1750s. Lay's method was direct confrontation and he could not wait for the Friends to achieve a sense of the meeting (or general agreement that their judgment reflected God's will) to oppose slavery. He believed that God had manifested the Truth in him and expected others to see the Light immediately. The give-and-take of the meeting, in which the words and examples of abolitionist Friends over many years gradually convinced hesitant slave owners to give up their blacks, was not Benjamin Lay's milieu. Even Friends who opposed slavery as deeply as he — such as members of Shrewsbury Monthly Meeting in East Jersey — could never condone his extreme measures.
Early Abolitionists
For fifty years before Benjamin Lay stabbed the bladder of "blood" in the Yearly Meeting, abolitionists had tried various strategies to put forth their case. Most began their crusades by presenting papers to their local meetings, who usually decided that the subject was beyond their jurisdiction and referred the proposals to the Yearly Meeting. When the reformers were rebuffed — as were all who wanted the Yearly Meeting to ban slave trading or slaveholding before 1750 — they had to make a difficult choice. Those who wanted to remain Quakers in good standing were forced to accept the sense of the meeting and simply work quietly within the Society to convince others of their views. To move outside the meeting and publish antislavery tracts was a breach of unity, a disownable offense. Before 1753, the Quaker overseers of the press prohibited publication of all papers against slavery; thus anyone who issued such a pamphlet was in effect denouncing Friends as well as slavery. John Woolman is the foremost example of an abolitionist who labored within the meeting until the time was ripe for reform. Benjamin Lay took the other route — and Friends cut him off from the Society as a result.
Quakerism offered three basic tenets that proponents of abolitionism could employ to support their case. The first was that all people were equal in the sight of God. Friends who were not sympathetic to abolitionism argued that this simply meant that everyone was capable of receiving God's Light, not that all humans should be equal socially, politically, and economically. Probably no Quaker abolitionist believed that blacks were the social equals of whites, and most reformers accepted without comment the hierarchical social and political structure of the eighteenth century. They believed that slavery was wrong because under the system of involuntary bondage one person could force another to do his or her will; thus masters could prevent their slaves from reaching God. Slave owners, for example, often separated husbands from wives, and thereby practically forced them to commit adultery. The second tenet that Quaker abolitionists used to back their case was nonviolence. Proslavery apologists argued that they treated their slaves well and of course never beat them, but activists pointed out that Africans were captured by force and that the system of slavery could not exist without the use or threat of violence. The third relevant Quaker doctrine was that Friends should avoid ostentation and sloth in their daily lives. Abolitionists accused slaveholders of using their blacks as symbols of conspicuous consumption; they also thought that slavery made both masters and their children lazy.
The earliest known antislavery appeal of Pennsylvania Quakers was signed in 1688 by Gerrit Hendricks, Derick op den Graeff, Francis Daniel Pastorius, and Abraham op den Graeff of the Germantown meeting. These men opposed the slave trade on the grounds that it encouraged theft and adultery, raised the possibility of rebellion, gave Pennsylvania and the Society of Friends bad reputations, and was contrary to the Golden Rule, that is, to do unto others as you wish others to do unto you (Luke 6:31). The Yearly Meeting refused to consider this epistle because it believed that Pennsylvania and New Jersey Friends could not outlaw slave trading as long as Quakers living elsewhere were involved in the trade. As far as we know, the Germantown petitioners raised no further objections to the institution.
Nevertheless, the Yearly Meeting elite could not avoid the issue for long, for only five years later an anonymous group of George Keith's Christian Quakers published An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes (1693). As might be expected, the Yearly Meeting did not respond favorably to this appeal, since the Keithians were schismatics who had demanded changes in key tenets of Quaker theology and had disrupted the Yearly Meeting. But in 1696 the writing of two weighty Friends did convince the Yearly Meeting to take a small step in cautioning members against importing slaves. In this case, William Southeby, who was active in Philadelphia Monthly Meeting and had lived in Maryland and Delaware before moving to Pennsylvania, and Cadwalader Morgan of Merion, demanded a ban on slave ownership and importation. In response, the meeting advised Friends to "be Careful not to Encourage the bringing in of any more Negroes, & that such that have Negroes be Careful of them, bring them to Meetings, or have Meetings with them in their Families, & Restrain them from Loose, & Lewd Living as much as in them lies, & from Rambling abroad on First Days or other Times." Southeby and Morgan were without doubt unsatisfied by this first advice of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on slavery because it had no teeth for disciplining slave owners and traders. Nevertheless, the ruling was important because it established several precedents for later decisions. The meeting clearly stated that blacks should be taught the principles of Christian religion and morality — a concern that remained strong even after Friends freed most of their slaves in the late 1770s. The meeting also for the first time in 1696 rooted itself firmly in an antislavery stance, even though it would only denounce slave importation at this time. Morgan apparently kept silent on this issue after he wrote the one paper, probably limiting his activities to speaking in private to weighty Friends. Southeby issued no more tracts until 1712 when, as we shall see below, he petitioned the Pennsylvania Assembly for general emancipation.
The Yearly Meeting's advice of 1696 carried very little weight: Quakers continued to import and own slaves. Therefore in 1698 Robert Pyle, a prominent member of Concord Monthly Meeting in Chester County, echoed previous arguments against slaveholding and suggested that quarterly meetings oversee manumissions. His paper, which recounted a dream in which blacks were represented by a "black pot" that must be set aside in order to reach heaven, had racist overtones that were absent in the writings of other Quaker abolitionists. There is no record that Pyle's paper was discussed or even read at the Yearly Meeting, but in the same year Philadelphia Monthly Meeting followed the Yearly Meeting's 1696 advice by asking Friends in Barbados to send no more blacks to Pennsylvania.
The next protest, this one aimed specifically against buying slaves imported into Pennsylvania, emerged in 1711 from Chester Monthly Meeting. That petition was significant because it came from an entire meeting, not just one or two individuals. Chester was the first monthly meeting, as far as we know, to demand new measures designed to stop the expansion of slavery in the Delaware Valley. For the first time in America, an organized body decided with unanimity or near unanimity that the slave trade was wrong and that it should be eliminated by disciplinary action. The Chester Friends believed that the policy of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting then in force, simply that Quaker merchants should discourage their correspondents from sending additional blacks to Pennsylvania and New Jersey, was too weak. They could see that many Friends and their neighbors of other religions were importing slaves. Slavery would grow, the Chester Quakers believed, as long as members continued to purchase slaves brought into the Delaware Valley. Again the central meeting tried to avoid further restrictions, contending that they did not have the power to forbid slave trading outright. Thus in 1712 the Delaware Valley Friends asked London Yearly Meeting to consult with other American meetings and decide whether or not Quakers should import and own black slaves, "detaining them and their Posterity as such without any Limitation or Time of Redemption from that Condition." The next year, the English meeting refused to ban members' participation in the African slave trade though they admitted that it violated the Golden Rule. The Delaware Valley Friends had also asked the London Quakers to protest the queen's veto of the 1712 Pennsylvania law that placed a prohibitive tax on slave imports, but the English meeting again refused. However, two years later, in 1715, the London meeting did go so far as to warn Friends to stop participating in the trade.
London's lukewarm response neither satisfied nor quieted the abolitionists of Chester Quarterly Meeting. Spurred on this time by both Chester and Newark monthly meetings, they complained in 1715 that "some Friends be yet in the practice of importing, buying and selling of negro slaves." The Yearly Meeting merely reiterated its 1696 decision and even rebuked the Chester Friends, suggesting in its epistle to local meetings "that all do forbear judging or reflecting on one another either in publick or private concerning the detaining or keeping them [blacks] Servants." Chester Monthly Meeting was disappointed with this decision because it believed that the former minute was not sufficient to stop importation. So in the next year it suggested a rule that would in the future bar Friends from buying any imported blacks. The Yearly Meeting answered sternly that this petition was little different from the one Chester had sent in 1715, and that the central meeting was content with its limited decision of the year before. Nevertheless, the representatives in the Yearly Meeting decided "in Condescention to such Friends as are streightnd in their minds against the holding them, it is desir'd that friends generally do as much as may be avoid buying such Negroes as shall hereafter be brought in, rather than offend any friends who are against it. Yet this is only caution and not Censure." Thus, at the insistence of Chester meeting, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting now took another step by cautioning Friends to avoid buying imported slaves. Again, this minute was only a mild warning, not a rule of discipline.
During the fourteen years following 1716, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's stance on slavery remained unchanged. In the 1719 Book of Discipline, the Society prohibited the importation of blacks and the buying or selling of Indian slaves ("to avoid giving them occasion of discontent"), but the meeting still strongly resisted pressure from individual Quakers for additional reform. During the 1710s, William Southeby renewed his crusade. In 1712 he had petitioned the Pennsylvania Assembly for the emancipation of all slaves, a move the Quaker-dominated legislature promptly rejected (though it did pass a restrictive tariff that was subsequently disapproved by the Crown). Then in 1716, Southeby published several papers against slaveholding without securing permission from the Quaker overseers of the press. Philadelphia Monthly Meeting censured and threatened him with disownment for this breach of discipline. Still, he died apparently in good standing in 1722. John Farmer, an English Quaker visiting Friends in America, called for the liberation of all slaves owned by members of the Society. The Newport, Rhode Island, Friends disowned him because he refused to be still, and when he appealed to Philadelphia Monthly and Quarterly Meetings they also condemned him for publishing papers "tending to division and contrary to good order used among friends." Philadelphia Yearly Meeting made the final decision in 1718 and agreed with the others about his publications, "being fully sensible of the ill Consequences of such pernitious practices." John Hepburn of East Jersey, possibly a follower of the schismatic George Keith who continued to consider himself a Quaker even after other Keithians joined the Anglicans, also published an abolitionist tract, The American Defence of the Christian Golden Rule, during these years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Quakers & Slavery by Jean R. Soderlund. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- FIGURES, pg. viii
- TABLES, pg. ix
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xi
- ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xiii
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- CHAPTER 1. Abolitionists Confront the Meeting, pg. 15
- CHAPTER 2. Leadership and Control of the Yearly Meeting, pg. 32
- CHAPTER 3. Slavery: Temptation and Challenge, pg. 54
- CHAPTER 4. The Local Meetings Debate Slavery, pg. 87
- CHAPTER 5. Shrewsbury and Chesterfield Meetings, pg. 112
- CHAPTER 6. Chester and Philadelphia Meetings, pg. 148
- CONCLUSION. The Limits of Quaker Reform, pg. 173
- APPENDICES, pg. 189
- INDEX, pg. 211
What People are Saying About This
"Quakers and Slavery is an impressive monograph, a carefully argued and unpretentious study that provides the best analysis yet available of the origins, character, and limits of antislavery sentiment for any segment of the slave society of eighteenth-century colonial British America. This is a work of genuine excellence."—Jack P. Greene, The Johns Hopkins University