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2 Slavery, Religious Liberty, and the “Political” Abolitionism of the Indiana Anti-Slavery Friends The steady escalation of disputes over slavery between Quaker abolitionists and their more conservative brethren soon led to divisions between the reformers and their coreligionists. The ¤rst open break within Quakerism caused by the abolitionist movement occurred in 1842 among the orthodox branch of Friends in Indiana. After being on a collision course with their leadership regarding support for immediatism for nearly a decade, a well-organized group of “orthodox” Quakers within the Indiana Yearly Meeting came to the conclusion that continued membership in the Society of Friends was inconsistent with support for the American AntiSlavery Society. In 1843, these dissident Quakers founded the Anti-Slavery Friends, a group that applied the “orthodox” Quaker support for voluntary associations in a manner viewed as inappropriate by leaders of the church in Indiana. The abolitionist controversy between the “orthodox” Indiana Quakers and the Anti-Slavery Friends demonstrated the limits of evangelical Quaker reform whether in the United States or Great Britain. Those Friends who had defended their involvement in voluntary associations out of a belief that the larger world was in desperate need of moral leadership from church communities often stopped short of attacking the American slaveocracy and racial prejudice in the years before the founding of the Republican Party. In the 1840s, most orthodox Friends belonged to, or displayed great sympathy toward, the Whig party of Henry Clay, and it is signi¤cant that the establishment of the Anti-Slavery Friends had followed a public confrontation between abolitionists and Clay when the presidential hopeful was visiting Richmond, Indiana, in 1842. As the voice of Whig moderation, Clay tied opposition to the abolitionists as necessary for the success of America’s experiment in disestablished religion , as well as for the preservation of every other civil liberty enjoyed by white Americans. Paralleling American Whig caution on the abolition question, the same British Quakers who had earlier called upon American Friends to support the immediatist movement changed their tune when confronting evangelical abolitionist “comeouterism.” These former radicals seemed to agree with men like Clay, who claimed that abolition in the United States was a more dif¤cult act than in Britain, in large part because of the country ’s supposed inability to assimilate African Americans as equal citizens. The marginalized status of abolitionists among orthodox Friends on both sides of the Atlantic reveals how Friends were willing to accommodate their oppositional theology to the public life of a slaveholding republic. Orthodox Friends understood the power of dissenting religiosity to damage American civil society, and they made clear their adherence to the private, unobtrusive nature of Quaker opposition to slavery and war. The Indiana Quaker and abolitionist Benjamin Stanton repeated the widespread view within his church that Quaker involvement in a political movement to end slavery was dangerous and that “the Lord would abolish slavery in his own time.” Stanton went on to state that the “view that the removal of moral evils and the promotion of virtue are religious concerns” not to be brought into politics “has done much to render the policies of this nation corrupt and wicked.”1 Yet this did not stop many Friends, such as the New York Hicksite Quaker David Geraeau, from continuing to accuse the Anti-Slavery Society of sowing “the seeds of discord and contention , and with unbridled zeal” promoting “the ¤erce spirit of party strife.”2 This fear of party strife destroying the republic, shared by other Quakers, had been expressed by many anti-slavery clerical leaders who also opposed American abolitionism. Catharine Beecher, for example, believed that those advancing immediatism needed to recognize the “liabilities to faction and party-spirit” existing in a nation that had legalized the “right of free discussion.” Christians opposed to slavery, in her view, must eschew Slavery and the Meetinghouse 42 “party strife” and only support social movements that acted with Christian “charity and peace” toward other Americans.3 During the 1830s and 1840s, Christian ministers and politicians warned groups potentially sympathetic to the cause of immediate emancipation , such as the Society of Friends, that religious dissenters must not meddle in the affairs of state. The Anglican minister Calvin Colton reminded Friends that their church, in his opinion, had not previously supported efforts to “overthrow a fabric [of governance] which [you] cannot conscientiously support.” Quakers, in Colton’s opinion, were “good neighbors , good citizens, good, we presume, in domestic and private life . . . such is the legitimate...

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