Clark T. Moorman, Quaker Emancipator

CLARK T. MOORMAN, QUAKER EMANCIPATOR By Philip J. Schwarz* Historians have long acknowledged the preeminence of the Society of Friends in the early stages of the abolitionist crusade. American historians frequently refer to such prominent antislavery advocates as Anthony Benezet of Pennsylvania and Robert Pleasants of Virginia.1 Few scholars, however, have paid much attention to "average" Quakers, whose limited socioeconomic status made witnessing the truth so difficult when the decision to emancipate their own slaves was contemplated. The document presented here provides a much-needed look, therefore, into the manner in which one Virginian member of the Society of Friends cleared his conscience of the sin of slaveholding and thereby avoided being disowned, or excommunicated, from the Society. The Society in Virginia moved gradually towards abolition in the pre-Revolutionary years, starting with admonitions against the slave trade, progressing to censure of individual Quakers' purchases and sales of Africans and Afro-Americans, and culminating in the late 1770's, when the yearly meeting urged that all Friends liberate their slaves, and 1784, when the yearly meeting required manumission of all Quakers' slaves. Aided by secular resistance to the trade in Virginia, Quakers lobbied effectively in the Virginia legislature, securing in 1782 a law which made private manumissions possible without costly, tedious, and ineffective petitions to the government. After this victory, Friends in Virginia could openly register their acts of liberation in county records. No longer would they have to make surreptitious arrangements, which would place the freedmen in a highly vulnerable position, and which could later be challenged *Department of History and Geography, Virginia Commonwealth University . 1. The most useful discussions of the Society's early antislavery program are to be found in David B. Davis's The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y, 1975). 27 28QUAKER HISTORY in the courts.2 Clark Terrell Moorman of Caroline County, Virginia, freed his slaves during the successful Quaker campaign against members' ownership which followed upon passage of the 1782 law. According to the most complete study of the topic of Virginia manumissions in the post-Revolutionary era, the Society of Friends enjoyed virtually complete success in obliterating ownership of slaves from among its members. This accomplishment can be attributed in part to the concentration of effort on Society members alone. Very few Virginia Quakers sought the total elimination of slavery from their state. Even those who advocated the 1782 manumission law saw it primarily as a means of protecting Quaker manumissions .8 The Quaker emphasis upon clearing Quaker consciences of the sin of slavery corresponded with the concern of several evangelical sects of the time that their members not be contaminated with the great social sin. It is the mark of a number of antislavery expressions of the late 18th century, secular and religious alike, that they focus as much or more on the corrupting effects slavery had on slaveholders as on the degrading consequences it had for slaves. Similarly, attitudes towards individual and general manumission varied according to the results the observer predicted for the particular liberator and for society as a whole. Quakers occasionally made certain, to be sure, that emancipated black Virginians would have access to the eighteenth-century equivalent of economic and educational opportunity, but discussions of the motivation of manumission generally concentrated on white Virginians, especially Friends. Clark Moorman's story bears this out.4 2.Kenneth L. Carroll, ed., "Robert Pleasants on Quakerism. 'Some account of the first settlement of Friends in Virginia' " Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXXXVI (January, 1978), 3-16, esp. 13-16; Stephen B. Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery (Baltimore, 1896), 21011 ; Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia (Urbana, IU., 1964), 141-62; Peter Joseph Albert, "The Protean Institution; the Geography, Economy, and Ideology of Slavery in Post-Revolutionary Virginia" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1976), 159-204; William Waller Hening , ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia (13 vols.; Richmond, 1809-23), XI, 39-40. 3.Albert, "The Protean Institution," 159, 173. 4.Ibid, 159-204; Davis, Problem of Slavery in the...