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14 The Hidden Story of Quakers and Slavery Gary B. Nash The story of Quaker leadership in the abolition movement has been known and proudly recounted by Friends and friends of Friends for two centuries. Though only a miniscule fraction of religionists in America, Quakers were indisputably in the forefront of the crusade to end slavery, just as they were on the front lines of other reform movements for penal reform, public education, women’s suffrage, Native American rights, civil rights, and the end of war. Yet the Quakers’ role in ending the Atlantic slave trade and chattel bondage has been obscured for generations, and it is nearly as obscured today as it was a century ago so far as the general public is concerned. To be sure, the scholarly literature on the Quaker involvement in abolishing slavery has mushroomed; yet public consciousness remains largely as it was in the days of our grandparents. One way of measuring this historical amnesia is to consult the schoolbooks read by American youth. For the period before World War I, when only about 2 percent of all Americans went to college, it is reasonable to assume, as Ruth Miller Elson argues, that ideas and attitudes held by ordinary persons were largely shaped by what they found in their schoolbooks.1 With that in mind, it is instructive to observe that young Americans before World War I learned almost nothing about the Society of Friends and the Quakers’ foundational principles and even less on Quaker attitudes toward slavery and their role in its abolition. Most of the books were written by Protestant New Englanders, whose own ideological leanings were not friendly to much of what Quakers held most dear. For example, the ideal woman had “no interests or ambitions of her own,” spending “her life in happy submission to the will of others and taught that public speaking was ‘highly improper.’”2 The activist role was universally proscribed and thus a woman such as Lucretia Mott was hardly to be held up as a model American woman. Quaker pacifism raised a second problem about the appropriateness of American youth studying Quakers at all. Elson has a thoughtful discussion of the yearning for peace presented to youthful readers in some books, but 210 gary b. nash shows that it was greatly outweighed by the emphasis on militant nationalism . “Nationalism and pacifist sentiments are often mutually exclusive,” she writes, “and, with [a] few exceptions . . . nationalism always conquers.” For more than a century, the schoolbooks portrayed “the most illustrious activity in which one can engage” as fighting and dying for one’s country.3 Another reason to steer clear of Quakers and their abolitionist activism was the schoolbook authors’ unquestioned certitude that Africans and their descendants were the most degraded of the so-called races “defined by inherent physical, intellectual, and spiritual qualities.”4 Even after the Civil War, when the books began to accept the rightness of emancipation, they typically noted the inherent, unpromising qualities of the enslaved African, and once free, black Americans “disappear from the schoolbooks.”5 If it is true that the golden age of children’s literature was from about 1870 to 1920, it was certainly not the golden age of children’s history. As Elson has shown, the schoolbooks were designed to nurture moral values and unconditional patriotism, while bringing into the master national narrative only a narrow slice of people who created the past.6 For schoolbooks read after World War I, we can focus on the ones written by David Saville Muzzey, a patrician New Englander descended from a long line of preachers and teachers extending back to the Puritans. Probably half of all youthful readers between World War I and the Cold War, some fifty million, imbibed their American history from his pages. Muzzey was mildly liberal on some issues such as the neglect of the nation’s poor and Progressive era political reform, but he was offended by radical laborites, appalled by radical Reconstruction, and dismissive of Americans with dark skin.7 Muzzey commended the “peace-loving Friends, or Quakers” for fair dealing with Indians (though Indians displayed “a stolid stupidity that no white man could match”); for scaling back capital offenses; and for becoming the first province “to raise its voice against slavery.”8 However, Muzzey never explained the Friends’ peace testimony or later their passive resistance, and this avoidance of what it meant to be “peace-loving” or “peaceful” was followed by all subsequent textbook...

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