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  • From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 by Brycchan Carey
  • Michael Goode
Brycchan Carey. From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Pp. xi, 257. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $35.00.

If Quakers were key players in the drama of transatlantic abolitionism, Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley were the stage upon which they made [End Page 199] their best performance. Until recently, historians have showered most of their attention on events from the 1750s onward, when Friends famously made slave trading, then slavery itself, a disciplinary offense within their ranks. Two of the most celebrated Pennsylvania Quaker abolitionists from the 1750s, Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, are the subject of numerous popular and scholarly biographies. By contrast, the earlier period, from the founding of Pennsylvania to about 1750, has garnered less attention, partly because the narrative appears less heroic. Instead of Benezet and Woolman, the main protagonists feature eccentric cranks like Benjamin Lay, who once kidnapped his neighbor’s child to demonstrate the sinfulness of slave trading, and George Keith, the notorious Quaker preacher who is best remembered for instigating a contentious schism. In this earlier, more ambiguous era, a few outspoken Friends criticized slavery but were unable to persuade the majority of their coreligionists to do anything about it.

Far more than previous scholarship, Brycchan Carey’s From Peace to Freedom successfully mines the discursive origins of Pennsylvania Quaker abolitionism in painstaking detail. Carey’s main contribution is to demonstrate that, in his words, “Quaker discussions about slavery were far more extensive and far more interconnected than a reading of the printed sources alone would suggest” (22). Carey’s approach is revisionist, and he takes issue with previous historians, most notably David Brion Davis and Christopher Brown, who have characterized earlier Quaker antislavery as a series of disjointed texts and protests that lacked coherence or relevance. According to Carey, Pennsylvania Quakers did in fact develop a sustained and coherent set of arguments against slavery that began with the Germantown Protest of 1688 and culminated with the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s decision in 1758 to ban slave trading among its members. Acting like common law jurists, Quaker antislavery writers elaborated on the moral arguments of their predecessors while introducing new ones to the mix. The cumulative effect over decades was to create an interlocking set of arguments against slavery that convinced a critical mass of Friends to take the first real steps toward abolition. Although Carey mentions Eric Williams’s “decline thesis” only briefly, his book is clearly making a larger statement about the importance of ideas in motivating abolitionists at a time when, even among Quakers, the financial interest in slavery posed serious obstacles to moral reform (20, 179–80).

Carey’s training as a literary scholar serves him well. His readings of antislavery texts are rigorous and nuanced. He is also not shy about applying [End Page 200] the techniques of rhetorical analysis to speculate on motivation when other evidence is lacking. Despite the abundance of manuscript and printed texts for the period, Quakers left few candid remarks about their state of mind or what motivated their actions. Carey does a good job of reading between the lines and putting human flesh and emotion into otherwise frustratingly vague or incomplete texts. In discussing George Fox’s Gospel Family Order, for example, Carey argues that it at times reveals “a man very troubled by what he has witnessed” (57). Elsewhere in Fox’s writings, he identifies “grammatically lazy but rhetorically effective sentences” that functioned more like “a hymn or catechism” than a philosophical treatise (52). In another tract from the early eighteenth century, Carey creatively speculates that it may “originally have been intended for oral delivery” or as a primer “supplying simple propositions and answers for [antislavery activists] to use in the field or the meeting house” (137).

At times, From Peace to Freedom could use more historical analysis to bolster its argument for the exceptionalism of Quaker antislavery. In the introduction, Carey briefly considers why Pennsylvania Friends were the first to make anti-slavery a “central plank...

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