Writings of Warner Mifflin: Forgotten Quaker Abolitionist of the Revolutionary Era

by Warner Mifflin, Gary B. Nash (Editor), Michael R. McDowell (Editor)

Overview

In The Writings of Warner Mifflin, Gary Nash and Michael McDowell present the correspondence, petitions, and memorials to state and federal legislative bodies, semi-autobiographical essays, and other materials of the key figure in the U.S. abolitionist movement between the end of the American Revolution and the Jefferson presidency. Virtually unknown to Americans, Mifflin has been brought to life in Nash’s recent biography, Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist (2017). This volume provides an array of insights into the mind of this conscience-bound pacifist Quaker who became instrumental in making Kent County, Delaware, a bastion of free blacks liberated from slavery and a seedbed of a reparationist doctrine that insisted that enslavers owed “restitution” to manumitted Africans and their descendants. Mifflin's writings also show how he became the most skilled lobbyist of the antislavery campaigners who haunted the legislative chambers of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania as well as the halls of the Continental Congress and the First and Second Federal Congresses. An opening introduction and introductions to each of the five chronologically arranged parts of the book provide context for the documents and a narrative of the life of this remarkable American.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644531860
Publisher:	University of Delaware Press
Publication date:	05/21/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	608
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

GARY B. NASH is a professor of history emeritus and director emeritus of the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught since 1966. He was co-director of the National History Standards Project in United States and World History and editor of the standards first published in 1994 with a revised edition in 1996. Nash served as President of the Organization of American Historians in 1994-95 and is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Society of American Historians. He was a member of the National Park Service Second Century Commission, which published its report to the U.S. President and Congress in 2010. He also coauthored Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service (2012). He has published many books and essays in his fields of Early American History, African American History, and Native American History. Among them are Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681-1726 (1968); Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America, also published in Spanish, 7 editions (1974, 1982, 1992, 2000, 2006, 2010, 2015); The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979); Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (1989); Race and Revolutions (1993); Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in Pennsylvania, 1690-1840, co-author (1994); History on Trial: Culture Wars, and the Teaching of the Past, co-author (1998); Forbidden Love: The Hidden History of Mixed-Race America (1999; revised ed., 2010); First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (2002); African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom, with Clay Carson and Emma Lapsansky (2005); The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (2005); The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (2006); Friends of Liberty: Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal in the New Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeuz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull, with Graham Hodges (2008); The Liberty Bell (2010); Revolutionary Founders, coedited with Alfred Young and Ray Raphael (2012); and Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist (2017). He currently resides in Pacific Palisades, California.
 
MICHAEL R. MCDOWELL, for more than fifteen years, has researched eighteenth-century Delaware Quaker Warner Mifflin’s antislavery activism using primary documents, including Mifflin’s extensive correspondence. McDowell is a member of the board of the historic Hale-Byrnes House in Delaware and has published articles on Mifflin and an early Delaware Quaker antislavery petition in Delaware publications. He has also given presentations on Warner Mifflin’s antislavery activism at Camden Delaware Friends Meeting (2005), Newark Delaware Friends Meeting (2015), and as a part of a 2013 symposium in Wilmington, “Let This Voice be Heard: 18th Century Abolitionists.” McDowell also presented “Laying the Track for the Underground Railroad: Warner Mifflin’s Eighteenth-Century Antislavery Legacy in the Delmarva Peninsula” at the 2016 Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Conference. He currently resides in Newark, Delaware.

Table of Contents

Illustrations                                                                                                           
Editorial Apparatus
Abbreviations                                                                                                                          
Introduction
                                                                                                                           
Part One                                                                                                                                 
Before the Revolution                                                                                                           
Warner Mifflin’s First Deed of Manumission, ca. mid-1766                                                     
To John Pemberton, September 22, 1774                                                                                
Warner Mifflin’s Second Deed of Manumission, October 22, 1774                                         
Warner Mifflin’s Third Deed of Manumission, January 9, 1775                                               

Part Two
The Revolutionary Years                                                                                                         
Warner Mifflin’s Freedom Pass for Manumitted Slave, February 15, 1777                               
To Unknown Friend, October 16, 1778                                                                                   
To Alexander Huston, January 17, 1779                                                                                   
Mifflin’s Statement Concerning His Refusal to Use and Circulate Continental Currency, August, 1779                                                                                                                                        
From Rebecca Jones, August, 1779                                                                                          
To Nicholas Waln, December 1780                                                                                         
To Henry Drinker, January 11, 1781                                                                                        
To Moses Brown, July 26, 1781                                                                                               
To John Willis, Elias Hicks, and Others, July 26, 1781                                                 
To French Naval Officers at Newport, Rhode Island, [after August 6, 1781]               
To James Pemberton, August 26[?], 1781                                                                                 
To John Pemberton, August 26, 1781                                                                                     
To Moses Brown, October 3, 1781                                                                                          
To Thomas McKean, November 5, 1781                                                                                 
From David Cooper, December 1781                                                                                      
To John Pemberton, December 5, 1781                                                                                   
Some Remarks Proposed for the Consideration of the People of Virginia, and Particularly of Those in the Legislature and Executive Powers of Government, ca. May 1782                   
To the Speaker and House of Delegates in Virginia, The Memorial of a Committee of the People Called Quakers, May 29, 1782                                                                                      
To John Parrish, August 18, 1782                                                                                           
To Henry Drinker, September 8, 1782                                                                         
To John Parrish, October 31, 1782                                                                                         
To John Parrish, January 6, 1783                                                                                             
To James Pemberton, January 6, 1783                                                                          
To James Pemberton, January 19, 1783                                                                                    
To Henry Drinker, January 19, 1783                                                                                        
To Nicholas Van Dyke, July 16, 1783                                                                          
To the United States in Congress Assembled, The Address of the People Called Quakers, October 4, 1783                                                                                                                       
To John Parrish, October 12, 1783                                                                                          
To Nathanael Greene, October 21, 1783                                                                                
From Nathanael Greene, [late November 1783]                                                                       
To John Parrish, November 4, 1783                                                                                        

Part Three
After the Revolution                                                                                                              
To James Pemberton, December 9, 1783                                                                                
To John Parrish, December 14, 1783                                                                                     
To John Parrish, May 13, 1784                                                                              
To James Pemberton, August 17, 1784                                                                            
To John Parrish, August 27, 1784                                                                                           
To Henry Drinker?, November 16, 1784                                                                             
To James Pemberton, December 11, 1784                                                                            
To James Pemberton, January 16, 1785                                                                              
To James Pemberton, February 16, 1785                                                                             
To John Parrish, August 22, 1785                                                                                         
To the General Assembly of the Delaware State~The Memorial and Address of the People Call'd Quakers Inhabitants of This State, December 27, 1785                                              
To Daniel Mifflin, June 6, 1786                                                                                            
To John Dickinson, August 11, 1786                                                                                    
To Governor William Smallwood, August 31, 1786                                                               
To James Pemberton, December 12, 1786                                                                          
To James Pemberton, February 3, 1787                                                                               
To John Parrish, February 9, 1787                                                                                         
To John Parrish, April 30, 1787                                                                                             
To Abigail Parrish, May 13, 1787                                                                                         
To Abigail Parrish, June 4, 1787                                                                                             
To John Parrish, June 19, 1787                                                                                              
To John Parrish, June 29, 1787                                                                                           
To the Archbishop of Canterbury, June 30, 1787                                                                    
To John Parrish, July 6, 1787                                                                                              
Testimonial for Negro Grace Hicks, August 8, 1787                                                           
To Edward Stabler?, October 14, 1787                                                                                  
To Moses Brown, December 3, 1787                                                                                     
To John Parrish, December 13, 1787                                                                                      
To Thomas McKean, December 14, 1787                                                                               
To John Parrish, December 16, 1787                                                                                    
To James Pemberton, December 21, 1787                                                                              

Part Four
The Early Republic                                                                                                                
To John Parrish, April 5, 1788                                                                                     
To John Parrish, April 16, 1788                                                                                              
To John Parrish, April 19, 1788                                                                                              
To John Parrish, May 11, 1788                                                                                 
To James Pemberton, May 28, 1788                                                                                       
To John Parrish, June 23, 1788                                                                                         
To James Pemberton, November 17, 1788                                                                        
To John Parrish, November 19, 1788                                                                                
To John Parrish, November 29, 1788                                                                                   
To James Pemberton, December 29, 1788                                                                         
From Louis Philippe Gallot de Lormerie, ca. late 1788                                                         
To William Tilghman, February 24, 1789                                                                                
Appointment of Committee by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to Prepare an Antislavery Petition to Congress, September 29, 1789                                                                                
Memorial of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to Congress, October 3, 1789                
Appointment of Committee to Present Petition to Congress, October 3, 1789                  
To James Pemberton, December 28, 1789                                                                              
To Henry Drinker, February 1790                                                                                      
Testimony to the House of Representatives Select Committee, February 15, 1790                   
To Abiel Foster, Chairman of the House Select Committee, ca. February 17–26, 1790          
Queries to the House Select Committee, March 2, 1790                                                         
To William Loughton Smith, March 10, 1790                                                           
To President George Washington, March 12, 1790                                                                 
To Members of Congress, March 16, 1790                                                                           
To John Parrish, April 10, 1790