The Union Humane Society

THE UNION HUMANE SOCIETY By Randall M. Miller* The antislavery movement in America prior to the "immediate abolitionism" of the 1830's was the peculiar domain of Quakers and believers in the natural rights of man. Except for the brief concern over slavery at the time of the American Revolution when Northern states adopted legal procedures to gradually abolish the institution, American antislavery sentiment remained weak and localized. The Quakers were the only important national group wholly committed to antislavery, and they lacked sufficient numbers to effectively threaten the slaveholding South. Fortunately, Quakers were not easily discouraged in their reform efforts. Cognizant of the limitations which they as a small religious sect had in terms of establishing a national force against slavery, the Friends realistically emphasized local reform organization and especially encouraged the establishment of manumission societies in several states as the nucleus for a future national assault on slavery. Hoping to attract non-Quakers to the antislavery banner, the local societies generally pursued only moderate goals and, consequently, developed tactics which proved ineffective in the short run. Nevertheless , these early antislavery societies provided testing areas for antislavery novices and sustained a constant, though moderate, attack on slavery during a period when most Americans had little impulse toward social reform.1 One such effort occurred in eastern Ohio in 1816 when Benjamin Lundy organized Ohio's first antislavery society, The Union Humane Society (UHS). The UHS experience, somewhat typical of early antislavery experiments, reflected the Quaker interest in broadening the base of its antislavery witness among non-Quakers, *Assistant Professor of History, St. Joseph's College, Philadelphia. 1. The Quakers' role in antislavery reform is best described in Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven, 1950). The whole span of antislavery reform can be followed in the neo-abolitionist work of Dwight L. Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (Ann Arbor, 1961); while Alice D. Adams, The Neglected Period of AntiSlavery in America, 1808-1831 (Boston, 1908), is useful for a survey of the period covered in this essay. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966), properly identifies the relationship between early American reform and its Western antecedents. 91 92QUAKER HISTORY while at the same time it demonstrated the inability of Quakernatural rights tactics to create an immediate national or regional groundswell against the South's peculiar institution. The UHS was a child of the age of gradual abolitionism, largely dominated by Quaker thought. Quakers did not view slavery solely in economic or political terms, which were sometimes open to easy compromise; rather, the Quaker thrust went deeper, stressing slavery's corrupting influence on slaveholder and slave alike. This moral concern was a heritage from earlier Quaker reformers. Political and economic considerations suggested no more than the means with which to achieve a moral goal. At the same time, both gradualists and Quakers concerned themselves with the free black, seeking to educate him to become both a responsible citizen and a good Christian. The gradualist believed in social progress, orderly change, and the perfectibility of man. Unlike later abolitionists, reason rather than revolution characterized the gradualist's approach.2 The Quaker settlements in eastern Ohio provided an ideal environment for the germination of such gradualist antislavery sentiment . The prosperous villages of Mt. Pleasant, St. Clairsville, and Steubenville sat on the crossroads of trade between Ohio and the East. The Quakers of Jefferson and Belmont counties, many of whom emigrated to Ohio from the South in order to escape the contaminating influence of slavery, had a history of assisting runaway slaves and free blacks. From 1817 on Ohio Yearly Meeting reported that Friends regularly engaged in educating free blacks, petitioning Congress to end the slave trade and abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and helping free blacks to settle in Ohio.3 Benjamin Lundy, of St. Clairsville, the father of the UHS, was such a Quaker. His Quaker heritage encouraged a witness against slavery, but two other influences also prompted him to establish 2.David Brion Davis, "The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLIX (September, 1962), 212-214, 217. On later developments...