Category: Quaker Abolitionists
Categories: Quakers | Abolitionists
The roots of the abolition movement are in the struggles of the enslaved and the fugitives of slavery to resist their enslavement. Their resistance and their stories inspired Quakers and others to argue that slavery was immoral, in violation of human rights, leading them to call for an end to the slave trade and to slavery.
In 1663 Dutch Mennonites around New Castle, in what would become Delaware, were the earliest religious body to prohibit slavery amongst themselves in the North American colonies. The Quakers banned their members from holding slaves a hundred years later in 1776. Neither George Fox nor William Penn ever condemned slavery. Both believed that enslaved Blacks should not be mistreated but that slavery was necessary for economic development.
The distinction between anti-slavery and abolition is widely held. The abolition movement began in the 1830s. According to the Quaker historian Thomas Hamm, "after 1830, a new generation of abolitionists...repudiated older themes of moderation to advocate the immediate abolition of slavery." The historian James M. McPherson also defines an abolitionist "as one who before the Civil War had agitated for the immediate, unconditional, and total abolition of slavery in the United States."
Prior to the 1830s, the anti-slavery movement had been led by Quakers. In stark contrast, the abolitionist movement divided Friends. By 1842 nearly every yearly meeting had cautioned members about participating in abolitionist activities, and many had ordered that meetinghouses be closed to traveling abolitionist lecturers and the meetings of antislavery societies.
However, no salient difference can be found between the moral grounds for the argument for anti-slavery and the moral argument for abolition. Thus this category includes those who argued for an end to the slave trade even if they made no explicit call for the abolition of slavery.
See:
- J. William Frost, George Fox's Ambiguous Anti-Slavery Legacy at Brynmawr.edu Quakers and Slavery.
- Quakers in the Abolition Movement at wikipedia.org
- Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven & London: Yale Univ. Press, 2016).
- Brycchan Carey & Geoffrey Plank eds., Quakers & Abolition (Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 2018).
- Katharine Gerbner, "The 1688 Germantown Protest Against Slavery Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Vol. 74, No, 2, 2OO7, pp. 149-172.
This category is managed by the Activists_and_Reformers Project in association with the Categorization Project. For assistance with this or related categories ask in G2G making sure to tag your question with both categorization and Activists_and_Reformers.
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