Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist by Gary B. Nash (review)

Gary B. Nash's biography of the indefatigable Warner Mifflin aims to place the almost forgotten Quaker activist at the center of a revised account of abolitionism during the Revolutionary era. The nearly seven-foot-tall, peripatetic Mifflin cast his shadow across debates about slavery in the late eighteenth century, while embracing a standard of personal conduct toward his own former slaves that shields him from the charges of hypocrisy (and worse) that bedevil the reputations of his founding-father contemporaries. He pioneered practices—the responsibility to make restitution to the formerly enslaved and to aid runaways in their journey northward to freedom—that would have put him in the abolitionist vanguard of any generation. It is impossible not to admire Mifflin and his biographer for their dogged pursuit of an alternative narrative to the new nation's betrayal of its boldly claimed egalitarian principles.

Mifflin's abolitionism billowed outward from personal renunciation. In 1774, at age 29, the Delaware planter who grew up in a wealthy slaveholding family on Virginia's eastern shore manumitted three adult slaves and promised three enslaved children freedom at age 18. Three months later he freed the other 17 people he owned. Warner's father soon followed suit, freeing approximately 100 slaves. As imperial crisis exploded into war, Mifflin ranged as far as Massachusetts to shore up his fellow Friends' pacifism. Starting in the late 1770s, Mifflin also impressed upon Quakers that their commitment to former slaves did not end with manumission. What Nash labels from the outset as "reparations" (3), involved conveying tangible material benefits in consultation with the formerly enslaved. Mifflin's activities dramatically transcended sectarian boundaries. Until his death in 1798, Mifflin made it his public passion to press state and national officials to take action against slavery.

Nash details the striking breadth of Mifflin's lobbying activities. From North Carolina to New York, wherever there was an opportunity to persuade state legislators, congressmen, and presidents that something must be done to weaken the law's grip on the lives of the enslaved, Mifflin made his case. In 1782, he convinced the Virginia legislature to liberalize significantly the state's regulation of private manumissions. A later trip to North Carolina to support the manumission efforts in that state did not yield such positive results. Delaware's lawmakers and state-constitution writers, including John Dickinson, drew Mifflin's repeated attention. Although Delaware enacted some reforms and the free population steadily grew in that state, especially in Mifflin's home county, he did not succeed in getting gradual emancipation on the books.

Mifflin's efforts at the national level drew southern ire—and registered some measure of progress. Several months before the Continental Congress enacted the Northwest Ordinance's ban on slavery, Mifflin had carried the antislavery message to that body. In 1790, Mifflin and other petitioners pushed the U.S. Congress into an open debate over slavery by urging the national government to act against the international slave trade. While in New York, Mifflin met with President George Washington. Although Congress sidestepped concrete action, antislavery activists provoked publicity for their cause, with a congressman from Georgia denouncing Mifflin by name. In Nash's estimation, southerners viewed Mifflin as "the most dangerous man in America" (174). Mifflin did not act alone. He was a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and on the steering committee of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race, pioneering gradual emancipation organizations. In 1794, the latter group prompted Congress to ban slave-trading to foreign ports. Meanwhile, Mifflin's home drew African Americans fleeing for their safety and heading northward. He and his second wife Ann also pushed to integrate Quaker worship.

That Warner Mifflin lived in Kent County, Delaware, was the blessing and the curse that defined his life story. This Delmarva Peninsula locale placed him in the Chesapeake cradle of American slavery, nested him in Quaker networks that...