Quakers and Abolition

Introduction Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank

Introduction Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank In the early 1760s, William Boen was held as a slave under a Quaker master in western New Jersey. In 1762 or 1763, one of his neighbors, another Quaker, told him that his master was considering offering him his freedom. Boen had been legally owned by the same man since his birth in 1735. He said nothing in reply to his neighbor, not because he was hiding anything or trying to conceal his emotions, but because he had heard similar stories before, and he could not imagine that any of them were true. “I didn’t think much about it,” he later recalled. “Didn’t expect there was anything in it, though I heard others say he talked of setting me free.” Boen may have resented the neighbor ’s comment. He was deeply unhappy about his status, and assumed that everyone around him knew that he suffered as a slave. A few days later, Boen was walking alongside his master, “going to my work,” when his master asked him, “William, wouldn’t thee like to be free?” Again, Boen said nothing, this time because he thought the question was simple-minded and superfluous. “I didn’t say anything to it. I thought he might know I should like to be free.”1 These encounters illustrate several of the central themes of this volume. The Quakers are celebrated as leaders in the campaign against slavery in the eighteenth century, but they came to that position only because, for generations , many of them were slaveholders. Enslaved men and women made their unhappiness clear, but Quaker masters began to free them only in response to pleas from other white Quakers. The Quaker antislavery movement began as a conversation among whites. Many masters initially refused to free their slaves and, as Ellen Ross shows in chapter 1 of this volume, some abolitionists self-consciously excluded slaves from the discussion for fear that including them would seem incendiary. This may help explain why, even in 1762 or 1763, several years after the Society of Friends in the Delaware Valley formally renounced slaveholding, Boen was taken by surprise when his master indicated that he might free him. For many Friends, the process of turning against slavery was slow and painful because it involved renouncing a way of life that had permeated their own households and those of their neighbors 2 brycchan carey and geoffrey plank for many years. For early Quaker abolitionists in America, the pervasiveness of slaveholding increased their sense of personal responsibility, instilling many with a strong sense of guilt but also energizing them with a passionate concern to make restitution and restore justice. At the same time, the process of emancipation in many ways reenacted and reinforced the unequal power relations that had been established in the context of slaveholding. In his subsequent relations with the Quakers, Boen was repeatedly reminded that most Friends continued to consider him inferior. He wanted to be a Quaker, but he was denied membership of the religious society until 1814.2 Shortly after Boen died in 1824, American Quakers as a group withdrew from the forefront of antislavery action. In retrospect, given the politics of that era, their withdrawal from the political struggle seems predictable, since the abolitionist movement no longer stood for the ideals that animated the first wave of Quaker antislavery action, and Quakerism itself had changed. The Society of Friends was intimately associated with slavery in the Americas almost from its inception. In 1655, shortly after the launch of the Quaker movement, Friends traveled from England to the English-ruled island of Barbados. The colony was in the midst of a demographic and legal transformation . Landowners were buying increasing numbers of slaves, and slavery was quickly becoming the dominant labor system on the island. Quaker missionaries found success among the planters of Barbados, and when the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, visited the island in 1671, it was home to the largest Quaker community outside the British Isles. At the time of the founding of Pennsylvania nine years later, there were already hundreds of Quakers living on Barbados, and others on the English-ruled Caribbean islands of Nevis, Antigua, and Jamaica. At least fourteen Barbadian Quakers owned plantations worked by sixty or more slaves.3 When the Friends came to settle in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, they were familiar with the idea of slaveholding. Ships loaded with slaves began arriving in Philadelphia in 1684.4 The demand for...