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Article Excerpt
Looking back on the relationship of Quaker meetings to the antebellum abolitionist movement, a Philadelphia associate of Lucretia Mott recounted how the abolitionist "crusade against the slaveocracy" was disliked by most Friends: Quakers in general believed "that the antislavery missionaries were stirring up strife, [and] that the preaching of hate, even of a most hateful thing, was not according to Friends' principles." While many members of the religious society admired activists such as Mott, they still remained skeptical regarding her approach to ending slavery. The writer continued, "Certainly Lucretia Mott did not intend to incite John Brown to invade Virginia and shoot half a dozen people, and then be hanged," but the "mission" of the abolitionists was nonetheless "a mistake, however good their motive," because the movement seemed to compromise with violence. (1)
The unidentified comments of this Philadelphia Friend reveal how many leaders and members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) feared violent revolution around the slavery issue long before Abraham Lincoln, the Union army, and slaves did in fact unleash a second American Revolution in 1863. The proper means and ends of emancipation nagged at the conscience of many Friends for several decades before--as well as during--the Civil War. Many Quakers discovered how supporting African American freedom could open up serious contradictions in the church's critique of state-sanctioned force. Would efforts to speak up for African American rights draw Friends into violent confrontations with mobs or slaveholders, especially if they lent clandestine support to the Underground Railroad? Was it possible for members of the new American Anti-Slavery society to avoid calling on slaves to use force to free themselves, or to simply defend their freedom once it was achieved? Finally, could pacifism
be defended even at the cost of apparent support for "copperhead" Democrats and other anti-emancipation forces during the Civil War? These were some of the issues confronting Quakers who were trying to discern the political meaning of their pacifist and anti-slavery religious beliefs during the period from 1830 to roughly 1870. (2)
In the mid-nineteenth century, approximately 200,000 American Protestants belonged to various branches of the Society of Friends (Quakers). Although Quakers adhered to a congregational organization of churches, groups of meetinghouses recognized leaders, so-called weighty Friends, who exercised disciplinary and advisory power through the regional Yearly Meetings, that numbered as many as fourteen by 1840. Not surprisingly, the largest Yearly Meetings existed in the traditional Quaker stronghold of Pennsylvania, as well as in the states to which Pennsylvanians migrated, namely Ohio and Indiana. But smaller numbers of members of the church could be found from New England, to North Carolina, to Iowa. (3)
Although they possessed differing theological views, all Quakers possessed distinctive pacifist and antislavery convictions, convictions that represented a rejection of human government in anticipation of the government of God. These ideas had once brought nothing but trouble to the "peculiar people," largely because of their anarchic implications. But they maintained their pacifism, and they constituted the largest--and arguably the first--church to disallow slaveholding in the late eighteenth century. Even as the Society of Friends was rocked by dissension beginning with the theologically liberal preaching of Elias Hicks in the 1820s (Hicks and his followers then established separate meetings of Friends called "Hicksite"--their opponents were the self-styled "Orthodox"), all of these "Quakers" continued to claim allegiance to the teachings of the seventeenth-century founder of the church, George Fox. Quakers possessed a common cultural inheritance of struggle against the world: a famous example of this had occurred in the 1750s, when leading Pennsylvania Quakers exchanged political power for pacifist principles during the French and Indian war. (4) Nineteenth-century arguments over the divinity of Christ, or over the extent of Quaker involvement in the "benevolent Empire" of missionary and Bible societies, could not erase that peculiarly Quaker, dissenting attitude toward human government. Whether they lived on the fringes of traditional Quaker territory (such as upstate New York or North Carolina) or within the city of Philadelphia, all those who adhered to the label "Quaker" struggled to work out the meaning of their basic pacifist commitments. (5)
In large part because of the well-spoken (and well-financed) position of Quakers in the early republic, members of the denomination possessed a certain degree of visibility greater than their actual numbers. Church members distinguished themselves in various mercantile and philanthropic endeavors and took advantage of the religious freedom of the new nation to defend their rights to conscientiously object from military service. They also formed the backbone of a largely middle-Atlantic and Southern manumission effort in the period from 1800 to 1830, since many Southern Quakers still owned slaves into the early decades of the nineteenth century and were required by church leaders to establish freedom for them. Benjamin Lundy, the editor of The Genius of Universal Emancipation, who personally inspired William Lloyd Garrison in his own campaign against slavery, symbolized the unpopular Quaker working in the wilderness on the slavery issue with groups such as the North Carolina and Tennessee manumission societies. In addition, British Friends in the 1820s and 1830s neared the end of their successful campaign to prod Parliament for the abolition of slavery in the empire from which Americans had revolted just five decades earlier. This fact was not lost on those Friends living across the Atlantic. (6)
At the same time that the church's image inspired reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison or Oliver Johnson in their crusade against slaveholding, representative spokesmen for the various branches of Quakerism felt pressure to reign in the anarchic implications of their theology. The Quakers, as a distinct religious minority in a nation that had recently disestablished church authority, understood better than most the revolutionary potential of religious sentiment mixing with politics to destroy private property or transform the social and political status of African Americans. Although the larger political context in which they lived changed drastically from the 1830s to the 1860s, the desire of church leaders to rescue Quaker religious testimonies from becoming excuses for protracted violence over the slavery issue remained just as strong in the 1830s as it was in the 1860s. The specter of race war and the fears of violent revolution that would get beyond the best intentions of reformers existed quite early among Friends: they witnessed the radicalization of the antislavery campaign from within their own ranks in the 1830s. The perspective of such a church--one already opposed to slavery before the radicalization of the movement in the 1830s--is one that adds to historians' understanding of the unpopularity of the movement for immediate emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century. (7)
In addition, the instability of the meaning of Quaker religious testimonies in the nineteenth century has sometimes been forgotten in the better-known stories of heroic antislavery Quaker leaders such as the Motts, the Grimke sisters, or John Greenleaf Whittier. It seems at times as though the words "Quaker" and "abolitionist" are nearly synonymous. Historians, often for important reasons, focus on Quakers in relation to principled support for the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Underground Railroad, or women's rights. In many ways groups like the Quakers epitomize the sort of modernizing Protestant reformers who formed the principled core of the Republican party. (8) And, when they entered the polls, Quakers did vote overwhelmingly Republican. (9) Yet the more complicated truth that many in this religious denomination often advanced skepticism for the abolitionists and radical Republicans offers an important reminder of the cautious nature of even many antislavery Christians on race both before and after the war. Quaker uncertainty toward abolitionism and radical Republicanism--sometimes caused by fears that Quakerism might be a religion of servile insurrection and popular violence--is another example of just what those radical movements within the party of Lincoln were up against from a staunchly antislavery, Republican constituency.
For many, uncertainty surrounded the political implications of Quaker antislavery in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and at the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison could only hope that the Friends would adopt a supportive stance toward their movement. Garrison viewed the campaign of the Anti-Slavery Society as a continuation of the Quaker theological traditions of "Barclay, Penn, and Fox," which taught the "practical righteousness" of moral and political dissent from unjust human institutions. In the early 1830s Garrison told Friends that "the example of their ancient predecessors" should "not be lost upon them" by turning away from efforts to divorce slavery from the laws of the U.S. government. (10) Other reformers, such as Oliver Johnson, remembered adopting for themselves the image of the lone Quaker "shaking the earth for twenty miles around" when they defiantly left churches that had criticized the politics of abolition. Johnson counterpoised the true Quaker spirit against "parish popes ... who would have stopped the mouth of any person whose humanity impelled him to remember those in bonds as bound with him." For Johnson, "nothing was too holy for public examination"; a man's own conviction must remain "paramount to all human authority" when combating racial injustice. (11)...
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