Toward Freedom for All: North Carolina Quakers and Slavery (review)

Book Reviews67 a paradigm of the Quaker struggle to sustain spiritual convictions in times of cultural respectability. Not only academic freedom was at stake but also whether Christians who enjoy establishment status through their institutions can find both the courage and the means to sustain their central convictions. Reflecting upon goals of the Friends Association of Higher Education, to which organization Edwin Bronner has made significant contributions, I am prompted to recommend this book as a gift to presidents and trustees of our Quaker colleges with the account of Cadbury noted. George Fox CollegeArthur O. Roberts Toward Freedomfor All: North Carolina Quakers and Slavery. By Hiram H. Hilty. Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press, 1984. x, 159 pp. $4.95. Slavery in its myriad forms of forceful social control has existed almost since the dawn of time. Its labels have changed — call it serfdom, peonage, involuntary servitude, indentured service, or work in the salt mines of Siberia or the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. But the hard fact remains that slave labor is labor obtained by and secured by force, without compensation except for minimum maintenance; American farmers and plantation owners readily bought the Africans which slave traders had been bringing to the English colonies since 1619. In the beginning Friends were indistinguishable from their neighbors in this respect. For nearly a hundred years after the time of their arrival in the Carolinas they bought, owned, and sold slaves, particularly in the eastern Tidewater where plantation-type agriculture prevailed. They treated their Negroes kindly, as George Fox had admonished them. But eventually the Quaker belief of that of God in everyone caused a few early prophets to question their Biblical right to keep men in life-long bondage. Particularly they queried the righteousness of buying and trading people who were victims of war and violence. Finally, after much agitation and discussion, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Ministers and Elders sent Carolina Friends an epistle of caution and advice against buying and keeping Negroes. John Woolman and other Friends journeyed south to visit Friends and labor with them on the subject. And in 1768 Western Quarterly Meeting at New Garden, in the small-farming Piedmont area around Greensboro, asked the yearly meeting whether it was permissible for Friends to buy and hold slaves. The question was complicated by the fact that the largest of Quaker slaveholders lived in the Tidewater area where Eastern Quarterly Meeting was located. Furthermore, as the tensions of the revolutionary period developed, and many Friends opposed both war taxes and militia service, their more radical neighbors looked upon them as Tories and troublemakers, whose freed slaves might be a danger to whites in time of war. But as the western part of the colony began to fill up in the 1760s and 1770s with Quaker immigrants from Pennsylvania and further north the pressure among Friends against slavery grew. In 1777 in the eastern region Quaker masters freed some forty slaves. In the face of the 1777 law that emancipated slaves must be removed from the state upon penalty of re-enslavement, many Friends there had to transfer their titles in their slaves to the yearly meeting in order that their slaves might be freed and prevented from being seized by the state and sold back into slavery. The yearly meeting then stood bond for the freed slaves' behavior until arrangement could be made for them to emigrate. This was not an easy undertaking. But by 1840 the task, nearly completed, 68Quaker History resulted in over 680 slaves being sent to Haiti, and 490 to Liberia, the colony of the American Colonization Society. Five hundred and twenty-five went to the free states of the north and west. Other American yearly meetings as well as London helped with the costs which ran up into scores of thousands of dollars. It is no wonder that many Carolina Friends accompanied their freed slaves westward as Southerners reacted violently to the radical anti-slavery movement which sprang up in the North in the 183Os. Some individual Friends worked openly or secretly in the Underground Railroad. Others who stayed on in North Carolina retreated into quietism or became Baptists, Methodists or Presbyterians. Quakers...