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5 The Spiritual Journeys of an Abolitionist: Amy Kirby Post, 1802–1889 Nancy A. Hewitt Clearly Quakers as a group were among the most committed advocates of abolition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were also well represented in the woman’s rights movement, prison reform, campaigns for Indian rights, and a host of other efforts aimed at progressive social change. But the Society of Friends, like other religious denominations, embraced a diverse constituency. Not all Friends were abolitionists; indeed, some individuals, mainly merchants, benefited from slavery and the slave trade. Among those who advocated antislavery in some form, many only testified to their beliefs within Friends’ meetings. Others came to abolition via Quakerism but ultimately broke with the Society of Friends in order to pursue more worldly forms of activism. For these individuals, the tension between spiritual and political commitments often raised deep conflicts and concerns. The spiritual journeys of one such abolitionist—Amy Kirby Post—can contribute to a broader understanding of both Quakerism and abolitionism in the nineteenth-century United States. Amy Kirby was raised a Quaker on Long Island, and she embraced the Hicksite meeting after her marriage to Isaac Post in 1828. She remained an active Hicksite until the mid-1840s, when she withdrew from Genesee Yearly Meeting. But she did not reject the religious teachings of her youth. Instead, she continued to embrace the concept of the Inner Light and Quaker testimonies against social injustice even as she sought a spiritual path that allowed her to act more directly in the world. Thus in 1848, Amy Kirby Post helped to found the Congregational Friends, and she continued on as a Progressive Friend and then a Friend of Human Progress into the 1850s. Participants in these meetings pursued social reform—including abolition, woman’s rights, racial equality, prison reform, peace, and Indian rights—as part of a faithbased effort to rid the world of oppressive institutions and practices. Yet at the very same time, Post participated in spiritualist circles, hosting—with her husband Isaac—meetings and séances in their Rochester, New York, home. Later in life, she attended Unitarian meetings with her youngest son Will, 74 nancy a. hewitt and when she died in 1889, her funeral was held at Rochester’s First Unitarian Society. Some of Amy Kirby Post’s great-grandchildren, including Will’s granddaughter Amy Foster Post, only discovered their Quaker heritage when the Post Family Papers were donated to the University of Rochester archives in the late 1970s. Such spiritual journeys could indicate uncertainty about one’s religious commitments. Some Quaker historians have questioned especially the rationale behind activists’ embrace of spiritualism, arguing that the concept of the Inner Light provides much the same understanding of the individual’s relationship to God. Yet questions of faith run far deeper than logical relationships between belief and practice. As British historian Phyllis Mack has argued in Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Secular historians need an angle of vision that allows them not only to accept [individuals’] spiritual concerns as sincere and legitimate, but to . . . stand with individual men and women as they worked to shape their own subjectivity, not in a single cathartic moment . . . but over a lifetime.1 My purpose, then, is not to argue that the spiritual journey Amy Kirby Post followed was the only means of bringing together her spiritual and political commitments, or that her commitment to spiritualism and then Unitarianism offered a superior religious experience to that enjoyed by those who remained Friends.Instead,IwanttoexplorewhatledanindividualwhoseQuakercoworshippers already accepted the wrongs of slavery to seek nonetheless a different path, one that she felt offered her a deeper bond between faith and action. What is clearest in examining the life of Amy Kirby Post is that she was committed to finding a spiritual home that not only allowed her to pursue social justice on this earth, but also required her to do so. For her, faith had to demand, not simply permit, efforts to build a better world on earth as well as beyond it. During the first four decades of her life, witnessing against social ills in Quaker meetings seemed to satisfy her need to improve the world. But beginning in the 1840s, she embraced a more active sense of religious and political agency, which drew her into the Progressive Friends, spiritualism, and Unitarianism, as well as into an astonishing range of movements for social change. For those not familiar with her story, you might think of...

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