From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 by Brycchan Carey (review)

Brycchan Carey’s From Peace to Freedom contributes to a growing body of scholarship about how Qukers helped shape early American culture. One indication of the breadth of the Quaker presence, from New England to the Carolinas, is that they established important communities in Newport, Nantucket, Philadelphia, Burlington (New Jersey), and New Garden (later Greensboro, North Carolina). Another is the wide range of recent historical books on the topic, including David E. Shi’s The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (University of Georgia, 2007), J. William Frost’s A Perfect Freedom: Religious Liberty in Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), Emma Jones Lapsansky and Anne A. Verplanck’s Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), and most recently, Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye’s Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship (Quaker Press, 2009). To the general public, Quaker values are probably most widely recognized in the early women’s rights and antislavery movements, for which Friends have received much attention. It’s to the history of antislavery efforts that Carey makes a contribution.

In particular, Carey sets out to answer the question of how Quakers became the forerunners of colonial American antislavery efforts. He begins his study by examining a letter by George Fox written in 1657 and ends with the decisions of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (1758) and London Yearly Meeting (1761) to make participating in the slave trade a breach of Quaker discipline. Carey is interested in process as much as outcomes, and thus examines documents in “the rise, progress, and consolidation of the Quaker discourse of antislavery” (3). As he points out in his introduction, his goal is to produce a literary criticism that can be seen also as literary history, cultural history, or narrative history “with an eye for rhetorical nuance” (6).

Carey also asks: why the Quakers and why Philadelphia? There were other writers who addressed slavery, some more directly than others: Richard Baxter, a London-based pamphleteer; Morgan Godwyn, an Anglican vicar in Virginia and Barbados; Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall; Aphra Behn in Oroonoko, along with Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of it; Daniel Defoe’s poem “The Reformation of Manners: A Satyr”; and at the end of the eighteenth century the Rhode Island clergymen Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles (although the latter two fall outside the scope of Carey’s study). He shows how the internal structure of the Society of Friends is a major reason why Quaker writings came to the fore: “Although Quakers are often portrayed as egalitarian or even anarchic,” Carey says, “they in fact worshipped within a society that was hierarchical, tightly knit, and well able to discipline members who broke its rules” (28).

In chapter 1, Carey examines several documents that addressed slavery in Barbados. The first, the short letter of 1657 by George Fox, is remarkable not only because the Quaker movement had only gotten traction five years earlier, in 1652, but also because Fox’s letter, which addresses Friends in the Americas, marks the already international phase of the movement. Carey notes that Quakers must have been buying slaves at the outset, and once Fox learned of the practice, he rapidly came to the conclusion that slavery was incompatible with their faith. Carey points out the universalizing impulse in Fox’s letter. Drawing on Acts 17:26, Fox says, “he is the God of the Spirits of all Flesh, … And he hath made all Nations of one Blood” (41). A hundred years later, John Woolman would make similar universalist claims. In this first chapter, Carey also examines writings and letters by William Edmundson and Alice Curwen from the 1670s. He argues that, although Fox, Edmundson, and Curwen only briefly mention slavery, they demonstrate “that a small but influential minority of seventeenth-century Quakers were troubled by slavery when they encountered it in...