On Quakers and Slavery: A Reply to Jack Marietta

On Quakers and Slavery: A Reply to Jack Marietta Jean R. Soderlund* Jack Marietta's attack on my book, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit, is a puzzle. Challenging a book eight years after its publication, without adding substantially to our fund ofknowledge on the topic ofQuaker opposition to slavery, seems minimally useful. Rather than a closely argued article employing historical evidence about the motivation and activities of early Quaker abolitionists, "Altruism and Egoism in Quaker Abolition" is a personalized diatribe thatmisrepresents my work and applies shoddy reasoning . To what purpose are we presented a prolonged discussion of the views ofJoseph Butler, an eighteenth-century Anglican bishop, on eating and other pleasures? Why do the abolitionist activities of Quakers and African Americans figure so slightly in Marietta's argument? This exchange with Professor Marietta is one that I would have gladly avoided, forourcontrasting interpretations ofmid-eighteenthcentury Quaker reform arise from differing perspectives, not, I have believed, from some bitterpersonal dispute. Quakers and Slavery was not an assault on his book; The Reformation ofAmerican Quakerism, 1748-1783 appeared in 1984, when my manuscript was finished. My research addressed the literature on Quaker abolitionism more broadly, including studies by Thomas E. Drake, David Brion Davis, Frederick B. Tolles, Sydney V. James, and Gary B. Nash.1 I argued that no scholar had evaluated adequately the conflicting interests and ideas that influenced Friends' thinking on slavery and abolition. While surely not the first to suggest that Delaware Valley Quakers were divided overthe issue ofslavery, my book demonstrated connectionsbetween slaveholding interest and opposition to reform. Further, I suggested that Quaker reformers adopted abolition for a variety of motives, some more directly concerned with the welfare of blacks than others. Jack Marietta deplores my emphasis on dissension; he denies most vehemently that mideighteenth century reformers felt varying levels of commitment to the antislavery cause. As scholars, we should challenge each other's analyses. We should seek out new evidence to improve our knowledge of the past. Unfortunately, in this article, Marietta has failed to move our understanding of early Quaker abolitionism forward. While Marietta and I disagree on the existence ofdivision among Friends, the distinction between our interpretations is not as sharp as he would have usbelieve. In the traditionofcreatinghistoriographicalhullabaloos, Marietta *Jean R. Soderlund is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Campus. 24Quaker History builds a rigid straw man from an argument I left intentionally elastic. Significantly, he takes just three short quotations from my book, only one of them a complete sentence. Otherwise, he tells us in his own words about this orthat"assertion" I allegedly made. Such labels as " 'true' abolitionists" and " 'false' abolitionists," attributed to my work, are terms I have never used. According to Marietta, I created two Quaker reform groups, the abolitionists andthedisciplinarians, characterizingthem"asprofoundly different, notonly in behaviororinthe speedwith which they tookupabolition,butalsodiffering in spirit. . ." (Marietta, "Altruism" 3). Never did I state that an inflexible boundary existed between these two groups. Indeed, I presented evidence to demonstrate the complexity of the 1 750s reform. The impulse for abolition came from one small group of Friends, while the drive for purification arose from another. Woolman, Benezet, members of Shrewsbury meeting, David Ferris of Wilmington, and others, regarded the Quaker testimony that all people are equal in God's eyes, which mandated emancipation, as the central tenet of their religion. The more tribalistic reformers, on the other hand, were less interested in abolition at first, though they eventually came to view slaveholding as one kind of worldly behavior that must be purged from the meeting. Nevertheless, there was enough overlapping in membership ofthe YearlyMeeting committees thatdealt with these two kinds ofreforms in the 1750s to show that, while each group had its particular focus, each supported the other type ofreform. (Soderlund 171; emphasis added) I then pointed to overlap in the membership of key Philadelphia Yearly Meeting committees concerning slavery and enforcing the marriage discipline , andlateractivities ofJohnandJamesPembertonforabolition. Marietta acknowledges none ofthis discussion in his article. Instead, he contends that I "have drawn a line separating Friends involved in the renewal." The distinction amongreforming FriendsthatIleftflexiblebecomes in Marietta's rendition absolute. He creates afixed line where there was...