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13 Thomas Clarkson’s Quaker Trilogy Abolitionist Narrative as Transformative History Dee E. Andrews and Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner Who was Thomas Clarkson? In his lifetime, he was the abolitionist par excellence, an advocate of social justice in a cause whose founders—the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade—fit inside one small printing-house office. By the end of his life, abolitionists’ regard led to Clarkson’s election as presiding officer of the first international gathering of many dozens of antislavery’s leading lights. Clarkson’s visage graced the commemorative medal cast for the occasion, and his presence, surrounded by an admiring younger generation, was immortalized in B. R. Haydon’s massive group portrait.1 Although his renown faded after his death, recent scholarship and popular culture has rekindled interest in Clarkson as a powerful player in the history of Britain’s decision to outlaw the African slave trade, most especially through the work of scholars Adam Hochschild, David Brion Davis, Christopher Brown, and Brycchan Carey.2 Yet Clarkson’s story remains elusive, the nature and caliber of his significance as often assumed as understood. At the core of his importance were two intertwined aspects of his lifework rarely explored by his biographers and admirers: his connections with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and his profession as an author. Clarkson’s fascination with Quakers began early, with his involvement in the London committee and his award-winning Cambridge University thesis, published as An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species by Quaker printer James Phillips in 1786. Thereafter, he became immersed in Quaker antislavery networks and friendships, forming an especially close alliance with Quaker pharmacist and reformer William Allen, as well as making connections with Friends’ monthly and quarterly meetings throughout the British Isles. Although Clarkson never joined the Society of Friends, and although not all Quakers were abolitionists, these networks were critical to his development as an activist in the mass mobilization against the slave trade. Thomas Clarkson’s Quaker Trilogy 195 The Quakers were also essential to his development as a writer. From his pioneering activism in the 1780s, through his temporary retreat to the safe haven of the Lake District at the height of the French Revolution, to his reemergence in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Clarkson’s empirical and moral approaches to writing about social reform and virtue were often based on a romantic narrative of Quaker culture and history. In the spirit of what literary historian Richard Holmes has called “the age of wonder,” Clarkson blended the moral system of Quakerism with history-as-scientificfact and his personal memoir as abolitionist-hero to become the antislavery movement’s first authoritative chronicler.3 What we will call Clarkson’s “Quaker trilogy”—comprising A Portraiture of Quakerism, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, and The Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William Penn—appearing between 1806 and 1813, embodied the author’s efforts in the wake of the French Revolution to reestablish abolition of the slave trade as a respectable and still international cause.4 In the Portraiture and the Memoirs, Quakers were unsurprisingly center stage. But in the History , they are central as well, though with little attention given to Quaker abolitionists’ on-going struggle to raise the Friends’ own consciousness about the dangers of slaveholding, or Quaker activists’ sometimes “strategic deceptions ” for achieving abolition.5 In the process, Clarkson not only slanted the Friends as the unambivalent agents of antislavery and himself as the premier chronicler of this great moment in British and American social activism, but he also designed a new kind of history: one that sought to combine the empirical drive of social science with the passion of social reform. The Burden of Radical Fame ThomasClarksonwasonthe cutting edge of histime.His1786Essay catapulted him into international fame. By May 1787, when the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade was formally organized, Clarkson, already aspiring for authorship, embarked upon an ambitious writing program. While sustaining a grueling investigative agenda for the committee, by 1791 he had composed five antislavery titles that were published by London Quaker printer and book seller James Phillips, a founder of the committee and Clarkson’s chief earlypatron.Amongthese,theEssayandAnEssayontheImpolicyoftheAfrican Slave Trade were rapidly reissued by American Quaker printers. The young author was Phillips’s most important antislavery spokesman.6 [18.224.73.125] Project...

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