The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II
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than Woolman in his belief in black equality, advocating that slaves lived as equals in the sight of God. Woolman and Benezet worked together to advance abolitionism within the Philadelphia meeting. Throughout the 1760s they discussed education reform for blacks, the lynchpin in Benezet’s agenda, and created a transatlantic network of abolitionism that traded ideas, beliefs, and empirical evidence to assist abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic.8
Woolman’s death in 1772 did not silence the debate within the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on slavery. Benezet, especially after his 1771 publication of Some Historical Observations of Guinea, which firmly advocated that Africans were equal to whites, forcefully supported a pro-abolition agenda in Philadelphia.9 Along with Benezet, other Jersey Quaker abolitionists joined the discussion that Woolman had begun. In 1773, William Dillwyn of Burlington published a tract that he directed at both Quakers and political powerbrokers in the legislature. Dillwyn rightfully observed that although “many in these northern provinces” might admit the “injustice of the slave trade in general,” they “may yet be unwilling to view it as a matter sufficiently important” for legislation.10 Dillwyn argued that the issue of abolition must be addressed by making a comparison to the distressed situation between the American colonies and Great Britain, asking how can the colonies, “when so loudly complaining of (England’s) attacks on our political liberty,” tolerate “this violent invasion of natural liberty, subjecting the Africans . . . to the most abject state of perpetual personal slavery?”11
Other Jersey Quaker abolitionists picked up on the same linkage between the burgeoning abolition movement and the brewing discontent over British imperial policies and made that link a central focus of the revolutionary period. In 1774, Burlington Quaker Samuel Allinson wrote to Patrick Henry and claimed that the call for abolition had never been louder “than at a time when many or all the inhabitants of North America are groaning under unconstitutional impositions destructive of their liberty.” Allinson further pondered if God would forgive Americans for their failure to treat African Americans humanely. Granville Sharp, one of Britain’s leading antislavery advocates with whom Woolman and Benezet had corresponded, echoed Allinson’s words when in 1774 he told Allinson that if the colonists “hope(d) to maintain their own natural rights and to have justice on their side . . . they ought not to deny the same rights to others by persisting in the practice of the most abominable and unchristian oppression.”12
Faced with increasing pressure from multiple angles, Quaker meetings began to prohibit their members from owning slaves in 1774. By 1776, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting banned members from slaveholding and placed pressure on those recalcitrant Quakers who refused to abandon it.13 At this point, Quaker support for abolitionism was overwhelming compared to the tepid support that Woolman and Benezet first received when they authored the 1754 Epistle. The Yearly Meetings’ instructions to abolish slavery set to work a manumission process that freed hundreds of Quaker-owned slaves. As the state had not yet developed a uniform system to record manumissions, Quaker meetings took responsibility for mediating slave freedom. In the Burlington Monthly Meeting, for example, Samuel Allinson dutifully kept a register of the forty-five manumissions completed by members from 1776 to 1781. This support paid dividends when in 1776 the Egg Harbor Monthly Meeting reported that it had freed all of its slaves, save one, and, in 1778, the Burlington Monthly Meeting claimed all but a few slaves under age twenty-one had been freed.14
Despite the large number of manumissions administered by Quaker Meetings, many within the society were reticent to free their slaves due to the substantial economic losses that freedom necessitated. Since 1713, the state required masters to post sizeable bonds to guarantee that former slaves would not become destitute and therefore dependent on poor relief, and many owners became understandably dissuaded from manumission. Many in Chesterfield slowed their support for abolition while the same lack of enthusiasm occurred at Salem in 1777 when that monthly meeting indicted Charles Fogg for selling “two girls . . . (and) render(ing) their case little better than slaves.” Even though the meeting managed to buy back one of the two, Fogg’s choice to sell rather than manumit illustrates the continuing power that economic incentives had over ideology. Similar incidents took place in Shrewsbury in 1772 when the freedom of two slaves dramatically divided the meeting. The Yearly Meeting stepped in to adjudicate the Shrewsbury dispute while in Chesterfield most members felt “discouraged from the apprehension of encumbrance which it might occasion to their outward estates and some few refuse at present” to liberate their chattel. Chesterfield continued to drag its feet on abolition, reporting in 1778 to the Quarterly Meeting that many members still did not wish to free their slaves.15
Fear of economic losses persuaded many Quakers to fulfill their abolitionist duty while maintaining the labor of their young slaves. As most Americans firmly believed in the indenture and unfreedom of minors, many Jersey Quakers granted provisional freedom to slaves under twenty-one but required them to complete a term of service before they could achieve legal freedom. Quaker meetings tacitly approved of this process as it ensured future freedom at adulthood. In one such case, Rachel Moore of Burlington manumitted her slave, seven-year-old Negro Jane, in 1771 by confirming her future freedom at age thirty, but first sold her to Thomas Gordon, a fellow Quaker from Philadelphia. Though Moore made it “clearly understood . . . that Negro Jane is hereby manumitted and made free,” she first had to serve twenty-three years with Gordon.16
Even though some Quakers voluntarily left or were disowned by the society over slavery, a much larger percentage of Friends hoped to “erase the moral blot of slavekeeping” from their memory. Many Greater Philadelphia Quakers atoned for their lapse in moral judgment in owning slaves through a coordinated effort to assist their former chattel in their new role as freed people. In 1775, the Yearly Meeting remarked that abundant progress had been made in the promotion of abolition and “a considerable number (of blacks have) been restored to liberty.” The overall success of the abolitionist movement within the Society of Friends led to a substantially freer West Jersey and a more concerted emphasis on the religious care of former slaves. Schools aimed at religious instruction, some led by Benezet, developed in the region along with the continued growth of abolitionism.17
Quaker attention to atoning for slavery in the late 1770s and early 1780s led Samuel Allinson and other Burlington Quakers to develop a system of religious and educational meetings for ex-slaves that met at rotating West Jersey meetinghouses in Burlington, Mount Holly, Crosswicks, and Mansfield to, in the words of the Burlington Quarterly Meeting, promote “their instruction in the principles of Christian religion and the pious education of their children.”18 Though the organizers of the meetings had a definite tone of moral superiority (they needed to “educate” their “uneducated” ex-slaves), these meetings soon became not only about religion but afforded free blacks badly needed educational opportunities. Indeed, they also promoted the formation of free black communities by bringing together a rural black population at regular intervals. These former slaves latched onto these meetings because of their usefulness—they endured the paternalistic rhetoric and embraced them to create alliances, bonds, and relationships that would help them survive in a society where blacks were still overwhelmingly enslaved. By 1783, Philadelphia Quakers formed a school dedicated to providing education to free black children while the Salem and Gloucester Quarterly Meeting began raising funds for its own school as early as 1780. However, the Salem Monthly Meeting had taken the initiative even earlier in 1778 when it built a school to educate both freed and enslaved blacks.19
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As West Jersey Quakers pushed abolition in their own communities, they called for a much larger debate on slavery in New Jersey. Dillwyn’s political tract against slavery echoed the intent of several petitions filed with the state legislature in the early 1770s. In 1773 and 1774, Jersey Quakers called for an end to slavery in the state and for an easing of manumission restrictions and limitations to the state’s harsh slave code. In 1775, Chesterfield Quakers advocated for a gradual abolition program, claiming that they wished to “avert the judgments of God from our heads.” The Pennsylvania Gazette replicated this use of religious ideology when it noted that several petitions had been filed with the legislature that advocated support for abolition as “we are Children of one common father.” As the petitions from Chesterfield arrived in the legislature,