Quakers and Their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause, 1754-1808

Maurice Jackson, Susan Kozel, Maurice Jackson, Susan Kozel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317272786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This volume explores the significant connections between the Quaker community and the abolitionist cause in America. The case studies that make up the collection mainly focus on the greater Philadelphia area, a hotbed of the abolitionist movement and the location of the first American abolition society founded in 1775. Despite the importance of Quakers to the abolitionist movement, their significance has been largely overlooked in the existing historiography. These studies will be of interest to scholars of slavery and abolition, religious history, Atlantic studies and American social and political history.

1 WARNER MIFFLIN (1745–98): THE
REMARKABLE LIFE OF AN UNFLINCHING
ABOLITIONIST

Gary B. Nash

Though little remembered in our history books, Warner Mifflin was one of the most unflinching anti- slavery spokesmen of the late-eighteenth-century age of revolutions and reforms. This essay investigates the role he played in the construction of a network of American reformers who led the campaign, through petitions, pamphlets and lobbying, to make good on the inalienable rights that Enlightenment and American Revolutionary figures believed would usher in a new world order. The essay also discloses the precedent Mifflin set for offering reparations to those he freed and how he helped other Blacks to obtain and preserve their freedom. For the mild-spoken but steely Quaker this was a matter of simple justice and a concern for human suffering. Finally, we will see how African Americans — both free and enslaved — operated in the shadows in the shaping of Mifflin’s lifelong mission.

Descended from the English Quakers who preceded William Penn to Pennsylvania, Mifflin was born in 1745 in Accomack County, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Late in life, Mifflin explained that the nearest Quakers lived some sixty miles away, and ‘while exemplary in their lives’, his parents enslaved Africans like most other plantation owners on the Eastern Shore. While John Woolman and Anthony Benezet were mounting the first sustained Quaker crusade against slaveholding in the early 1750s, and Woolman was making the first of his walking ministries to soften the hearts of slave owners, Warner

had no opportunity of having my heart and views enlarged … by conversing with such of my brethren in profession, who had come to see the necessity of an impartial inquiry into the nature and tendency of [the] atrocious practice [of slavery].¹

Then, at age fourteen, working ‘in the field with my father’s slaves’, Warner was struck by the first of ‘successive visitations’. A young slave toiling beside him, ‘questioned me, whether I thought it could be right, that they [the slaves] should be toiling in order to raise me, and that I might be sent to school; and by and by, their children must do so for mine’. Though flustered and irritated, Warner continued, the slave’s ‘reasoning so impressed me, as never to be erased from my mind’. That thought faltered, however, when at age twenty-one — apparently star-struck — he married out of meeting Elizabeth Johns, the daughter of wealthy slave owners in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. With her sumptuous dowry, Mifflin purchased land south of Dover in Kent County, Delaware.²

Mifflin became much like his neighbouring landowners, farming wheat, corn and orchard fruit with the slaves his wife had brought to the marriage. Soon they were joined by other slaves, sent by his father to work on his plantation. Regarding himself as a kindly master, young Warner ‘became almost persuaded I could not do without them’. A man of unusual stature and pleasing personality, he was appointed a justice of the peace in Kent County at age twenty-six. His ‘thirst for preferment, he wrote, ‘furnished an additional idea of the necessity for slaves to support me in that mode of life’.³

In the early 1770s, during a violent thunderstorm, the seed planted by his father’s slave germinated. With terrifying lightning strikes crashing around him, Mifflin became convinced that the ‘convulsion in the outward elements’ was meant by God to instruct his mind. ‘My fig leaf covering of excuse was stripped off’, he remembered. Convinced that ‘being visited with affliction and the presentation of an awful eternity’, Mifflin vowed to bear ‘a faithful testimony against the abominable practice of enslaving my fellow-man’. At age twenty-nine, in 1774, he manumitted five slaves brought into his marriage by his wife. Three months later, he freed the sixteen slaves sent by his father from Virginia. Among them was Ezekiel, age twenty-five, who would become a founding father of Delaware Black Methodism. The deed of manumission ran:

I, Warner Mifflin fully persuaded in my Conscience that it is a Sin of a deep dye to make Slaves of my fellow Creatures, or to Continue them in Slavery, and believing … those that have as just and Equitable Right to their Freedom and Liberty of their persons as myself … I declare all the Negroes I have hereafter … Named, Absolutely Free, them and their Posterity forever.⁴

Here was the melding of religious commitment, moral rectitude and the natural rights philosophy that was spreading as part of the American colonists’ case against what they conceived as English oppression. Mifflin now stood in the footsteps of Benezet and Woolman, who taught that ‘a Friend could not attain essential Christian meekness and humility’ while mastering other humans, almost necessarily with violence.⁵

Mifflin’s account of his anti-slavery conversion focused on two personal experiences occurring in 1759 and about 1772. But the gathering transatlantic cadre of abolitionist stalwarts played an important role as well. Since Mifflin’s youth, a small number of dedicated Quaker anti-slavery advocates, led by Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, had pushed the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (hereafter PYM) hard to cleanse the Society of Friends from slave trading and slave keeping. As the Seven Years War broke out in 1754, this effort of the young Quaker reformers broke through the resistance of the wealthy, slave owning Quaker leadership. Within a few years, few questioned that slaveholding was sinful; rather what was to be done about such iniquities became the operative question. By first banning participation in the slave trade, and then the buying and selling of slaves, increasing numbers of Philadelphia-area Quakers freed their slaves in the 1760s and early 1770s. By 1776, the refusal to free slaves became a disownable offense.⁶

But this was not the case in Kent County, Delaware, even though John Woolman. in the first year of Mifflin’s marriage, trudged on foot to visit Kent County Quakers, preaching that the foundation of slaveholding was greed — the inordinate desire for worldly goods that could be wrung from the labour of the enslaved. But Mifflin was as yet unmoved. Nor was he swayed by the efforts of David Ferris. a leading Quaker in adjacent New Castle County, who as early as 1766 described slave owners as ‘Leprous persons’ hindering ‘Israel’s march’.⁷ Led by Ferris, the Wilmington Monthly Meeting began freeing slaves as early as 1761, and by 1766 ‘the meeting reported that few members still owned slaves’ — an accomplishment matched by almost no other monthly meeting to the north.⁸ But in Kent County, just to the south, Quakers moved forward only slowly as Mifflin took up residency there.

Soon after that, Mifflin claimed he was overcome with guilt for coveting worldly goods and keeping slaves, now convinced that ‘I should be excluded from Happiness if I continued in this breach of the Divine law, written upon my heart, as by the finger of God’.⁹ Yet he was also severely tested by fellow Quakers when he traveled to Philadelphia, beginning in 1771, to represent the Western Quarter at the PYM. The Yearly Meeting would not appoint Mifflin to committees — a quiet rebuke for resisting the long-standing urgings to quit slave keeping — until he began freeing his slaves in October 1774. Within months his Duck Creek Meeting proposed him as an elder — a weighty position usually reserved for seasoned and unassailably upright Friends.

Once he bent to the pressure of the Quaker leadership in Philadelphia to free his slaves, Mifflin became the leader of the infant anti-slavery movement in Kent County. As part of visiting committees carrying the conscience question from home to home in early 1775, Mifflin could report that by 1779 ‘only one member of the meeting house … still held slaves’. By 1792, as the appointed clerk of the Duck Creek Monthly Meeting, he recorded the manumission of 460 enslaved Africans, held by 123 Quaker or Quaker-influenced slave owners. By 1790, nearly 53 per cent of Kent County’s African Americans were free, while in New Castle and Sussex counties, where resistance to emancipatory arguments ran high, 80 per cent of New Castle County’s Blacks, and 85 per cent in Sussex County, were still in bondage.¹⁰

If Philadelphia stood as the centre of northern emancipationism, Mifflin’s Duck Creek Monthly Meeting now became the most important wellspring of abolitionist activity south of the nation’s capital. ‘Chestnut Grove’, his plantation, had become the place of counsel, succour and encouragement for those hoping for freedom or just achieving it. ‘Hundreds of slaves’, writes one historian, ‘listed Warner Mifflin and other Kent County Quakers as friend or advocate in their freedom suits, and the deeds of manumission frequently bore Mifflin’s name as a witness’.¹¹ By 1785, slaves making a break for freedom were finding their way more than one hundred miles to Mifflin’s home seeking sustenance and guidance on the way north. ‘I am abundantly straitened at times to know what to do with and for the poor blacks’, he wrote to his Philadelphia friend, John Parrish; ‘they have such a source [of information] of flying to me, running from their holders, many from Virginia, some from the West Shore thinking I will give them papers to go about as free men’.¹² Southerners charged that Mifflin encouraged the flight of the enslaved and forged passports for those seeking refuge to the north. It was the other way around: slaves did not have to be encouraged to flee; terrified at being sold to distant parts, they found their way to Mifflin’s Kent County home. Defending himself, Mifflin averred ‘I am troubled at seeing any run from their masters, and generally counsel such, that it is my judgment they had better remain at home, in quiet resignation, as much as possible, to their allotment’.¹³

Where Mifflin outshone most of his fellow Quaker abolitionists was in providing reparations for freed people, determined ‘to make restitution to those I had held in a state of bondage, for the time so held’. But what did restitution mean? It was a fraught question, leading many Quakers to painful debate and self-interrogation. David Ferris of Wilmington had insisted in 1766 that ‘exslaves should not be sent away empty-handed; rather, they should be rewarded for their years of service’. A few years later, Woolman was advocating that ‘a heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us, and that … it would appear that there was considerable due to them’.¹⁴ Soon Friends were considering ways of doing social justice to aggrieved Africans: teaching former slaves a trade, sending them off with tools and loans or hiring them as paid servants or wage labourers. But this was something less than reparations. That is where Mifflin led the way.

Stung by charges that ‘Mifflin had set free a parcel of lazy, worthless negroes, that he could make nothing by them, and therefore had set them at liberty’, Mifflin went further. He ‘propose[d] their having land and teams; and in return, they should give me half their produce’. He put this in execution with those who chose to accept the terms’.¹⁵ Beyond this, he ‘made restitution to them for the time I had kept them over age, paying each freed male the annual wage for free labour for all years that had served him as a slave after the age of twenty-one and a like amount for each freed female who had laboured for him after the age of eighteen. ‘This’, he explained to a Quaker friend, ‘was in justice the property of the negroes’.¹⁶ Mifflin went even further. ‘On reflection’, he wrote, he was under an obligation to seek out those he had sold before 1774, to purchase them ‘to a considerable amount’, and then to free them. Beyond that, Mifflin bound his estate ‘to pay in every case’ what the Western Quarterly Meeting, to which his local meeting belonged, judged equitable. In 1784, at least a decade after he had sold a rebellious slave to a West Indies purchaser, he still felt it might be his duty ‘to go in quest of him, although I had an account years back that he was hanged. By this time, other Kent County Quakers were following Mifflin’s lead, making restitution payments for the adult years of servicer rendered by the men and women they freed.¹⁷

The account by one of Mifflin’s freedmen yields unusual insights into the liberation dynamic between master and slave. Ezekiel was the first male Mifflin released in his January 1775 deed of freedom. Fifty years later, Ezekiel, ‘aged upwards of eighty-three years’, related to his relative Samuel Canby that he had been sent from Virginia by Mifflin’s father to serve at Chestnut Grove. After eighteen months, Warner sent him to work at another plantation — there he laboured for ‘about four years’. Then Mifflin called Ezekiel ‘from the field where he was ploughing’. Told that he was to be free, Ezekiel protested that he was ‘so well satisfied with his situation that … he could not leave’ his master. ‘Their conversation on the subject produced such feelings of tenderness’, Ezekiel related, ‘that they both wept much’, for he and Warner ‘were brought up children together, slept together, and eat at the same table, and never quarreled’. Mifflin insisted that his conscience would not permit slaveholding anymore but that he would give Ezekiel land to work on shares. For fourteen years, until 1789, Ezekiel fulfilled this ‘mutual agreement’. Then, as Washington was assuming the presidency, Mifflin gave Ezekiel ‘a piece of land upon which he built a house, where he remained until he came to reside in the neighborhood of Wilmington’. Ezekiel told of how deeply he grieved at Mifflin’s death in 1798, but believed his old master was ‘now an angel in heaven’ and hoped ‘that after suffering a few more pains, I shall live with him forever, in sweet communion’.¹⁸

Ezekiel’s success must have pleased Mifflin while fortifying his belief that freed Blacks, if given a chance to succeed, would become valuable citizens. After gaining freedom, Ezekiel took the surname Coston and after his move northward to Wilmington, became one of the original Black worshippers at the Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church. Coston soon became a follower of Peter Spencer, the Black minister who in 1805 founded Ezion Methodist Episcopal Church, soon to become the first truly independent Black church in the United States.¹⁹

By the time bells and bonfires were rocking a tumultuous Philadelphia after independence had been declared in early July 1776, Mifflin, still in Delaware, was entering a new chapter of life. From an office-hungry, comfort-seeking, prospering slave owner and merchant-farmer, he was becoming the voice of anti-slavery in mid-Delaware, an important member of the PYM leadership cadre, a Quaker emissary of the Friends peace testimony in the midst of a blood-filled American Revolution and a father of three young daughters in a household where he and his wife were practising plain living and strict moral rectitude.

The American Revolution went hard with Friends, especially in the mid-Atlantic region. In the stormy years leading toward independence, most Philadelphia-area Friends remained neutral or stayed loyal to King George III, refused to join the boycotts of English imports, deplored the democratic surge that culminated in the radical Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, refused to pay war taxes or even fines in lieu of military service, discouraged the use of Continental Congress-issued currency and adopted a siege mentality as they were reviled for their neutrality and refusal to support ‘the Glorious Cause’. Now reduced to a small minority of the population, Quakers were widely seen as making ‘conscience a convenience’ and as ‘Enemies to the Liberties … of America’. The war fulfilled the Friends’ darkest prophecies of persecution, Indeed the beleaguered Friends adopted the position that ‘suffering has been the fate of true Christians in every age and if rightly understood a boon to reformation’.²⁰

Through these dark days, Mifflin gladly accepted the mantle of suffering. Beginning in 1776, he served on committees of the PYM to write epistles to the London Yearly Meeting and other American yearly meetings publicizing the sufferings of Friends under attack as unpatriotic, if not treasonous, in the long war with England. Also, as a delegate to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction — Maurice Jackson and Susan Kozel
• 1 Warner Mifflin (1745–98): The Remarkable Life of an Unflinching Abolitionist — Gary B. Nash
• 2 Sarah Woolman and the Anti-Slavery Family — Geoffrey Plank
• 3 Friends, Family and Freedom in Colonial Philadelphia: A Black Slave-Owner Settles her Accounts — Julie Winch
• 4 ‘What Shall Be Done with the Negroes ?’ Anthony Benezet’s Legacy: Then and Now — Maurice Jackson
• 5 ‘Samuel Meredith (1741–1817): American Patriot and Welsh Philanthropist’ — Richard C. Allen
• 6 ‘Come Out of Babylon, My People’: John Woolman’s (1720–72) Anti-Slavery Theology and the Transatlantic Economy — Jon R. Kershner
• 7 Rejecting the Gain of Oppression: Quaker Abstention and the Abolitionist Cause — Julie L. Holcomb
• 8 The Trouble with Quakers: Creating Racial Tensions in East and West Jersey, 1770–85 — James J. Gigantino II
• 9 In Pursuit of Natural Rights and Liberty — The Brothers Waln in Greater Philadelphia and the Atlantic World — Susan Kozel
• 10 The Abolitionist Circles of Benjamin Franklin: A Reluctant Abolitionist in Context, 1750–90 — Louisiane Ferlier
• Notes
• Index