This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. Contributors from a range of disciplines, nations, and faith backgrounds show Quaker's beliefs to be far from monolithic. They often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about the morality of slaveholding and the best approach to abolition.
Not surprisingly, contributors explain, this complicated and evolving antislavery sensibility left behind an equally complicated legacy. While Quaker antislavery was a powerful contemporary influence in both the United States and Europe, present-day scholars pay little substantive attention to the subject. This volume faithfully seeks to correct that oversight, offering accessible yet provocative new insights on a key chapter of religious, political, and cultural history.
Contributors include Dee E. Andrews, Kristen Block, Brycchan Carey, Christopher Densmore, Andrew Diemer, J. William Frost, Thomas D. Hamm, Nancy A. Hewitt, Maurice Jackson, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner, Gary B. Nash, Geoffrey Plank, Ellen M. Ross, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, James Emmett Ryan, and James Walvin.
This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. Contributors from a range of disciplines, nations, and faith backgrounds show Quaker's beliefs to be far from monolithic. They often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about the morality of slaveholding and the best approach to abolition.
Not surprisingly, contributors explain, this complicated and evolving antislavery sensibility left behind an equally complicated legacy. While Quaker antislavery was a powerful contemporary influence in both the United States and Europe, present-day scholars pay little substantive attention to the subject. This volume faithfully seeks to correct that oversight, offering accessible yet provocative new insights on a key chapter of religious, political, and cultural history.
Contributors include Dee E. Andrews, Kristen Block, Brycchan Carey, Christopher Densmore, Andrew Diemer, J. William Frost, Thomas D. Hamm, Nancy A. Hewitt, Maurice Jackson, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner, Gary B. Nash, Geoffrey Plank, Ellen M. Ross, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, James Emmett Ryan, and James Walvin.
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This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. Contributors from a range of disciplines, nations, and faith backgrounds show Quaker's beliefs to be far from monolithic. They often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about the morality of slaveholding and the best approach to abolition.
Not surprisingly, contributors explain, this complicated and evolving antislavery sensibility left behind an equally complicated legacy. While Quaker antislavery was a powerful contemporary influence in both the United States and Europe, present-day scholars pay little substantive attention to the subject. This volume faithfully seeks to correct that oversight, offering accessible yet provocative new insights on a key chapter of religious, political, and cultural history.
Contributors include Dee E. Andrews, Kristen Block, Brycchan Carey, Christopher Densmore, Andrew Diemer, J. William Frost, Thomas D. Hamm, Nancy A. Hewitt, Maurice Jackson, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner, Gary B. Nash, Geoffrey Plank, Ellen M. Ross, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, James Emmett Ryan, and James Walvin.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252096129 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 927 KB |
About the Author
Brycchan Carey is a reader in English literature at Kingston University, London, and the author of Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658-1761.
Geoffrey Plank is a professor of history at the University of East Anglia and the author of John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire.
Read an Excerpt
QUAKERS AND ABOLITION
By Brycchan Carey, Geoffrey Plank
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09612-9
CHAPTER 1
"Liberation Is Coming Soon" The Radical Reformation of Joshua Evans (1731–1798)
ELLEN M. ROSS
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY QUAKER REFORMER Joshua Evans, although little known today, was an important voice in Quaker antislavery, Indian rights advocacy, and American peace history. Recent transcriptions by Jon Peters and Aaron Brecher of all known extant manuscripts of Evans's journals provides an opportunity to reexamine this figure, a friend and sometime neighbor of John Woolman, and a "beloved friend" of Elias Hicks. Evans was a critic of the developing capitalist economy. He perceived that people were increasingly implicated in the exploitation and oppression of enslaved people, the poor, Indians, even animals, and the land itself. For Evans, war was the fundamental symptom of humans' alienation from God and the most potent catalyst for the ills afflicting eighteenth-century society. He objected to an interconnected market system that perpetuated war: an economy increasingly dependent upon slavery and overreliant on tariffs and foreign trade, the oppression of Indians, the export of grain to import rum, the cultivation of tobacco, and the production and consumption of luxury goods.
Evans labored to bring to reality an alternative vision of America, one that would hold all people in equal regard. The divine injunction to "do unto others as one would have others do unto one" was for him the fundamental principle guiding the formation of the new society. The means to the transformation was a "regeneration," a "reformation," inspired by the "ancient testimonies" of Friends. The vision Evans articulated included a critique of particular Quaker practices that he thought manifested degeneration within the Society of Friends, and it moved beyond that to a critique of American society, and, at times, to a critique of the universal state of humankind.
Evans's life and work provides a rendering of the American ethical lineage in which the cultivation of personal transformation is prescribed as the most critical strategy for promoting social transformation. He sought to make the new America a reality in his own life. His hope was that as others were persuaded of the need for personal reformation, the pernicious and misguided war-based economy would give way to a harmonious world in which "the hungry would be fed & the Naked Cloathed, no hard thinking against another, nothing would hurt or destroy." For reformers like Evans antislavery advocacy was a part of a larger and overarching concern about the disposition of the Quaker community and society in general.
The location of the concern about slavery within a wider theological perspective helps explain the tenacity and influence of people such as Evans. Obedience to God yielded freedom in the world. The power of visionaries like Evans was in their willingness to stand over and against the customs of their day in order to bring to reality another way of being. At times, this reformation of the mid– and late eighteenth century is depicted as signaling Quaker withdrawal from society. The story of Evans offers an alternative narrative. Rather than separating himself from society, he made a claim about what the center of society could be and sought to bring that to reality in his own life and, through his public ministry, to call others to walk with him. Scholars often underestimate the power of religious faith to sustain movements for reform. Consideration of Evans's life sheds light on the critical connection, common to many Quaker antislavery advocates, between personal religious convictions and methods of social transformation.
In 1756, during the French and Indian War, Evans refused to join the militia or to participate in the common practice of paying another person to go in his place. In his journal he wrote, "I cannot reconcile War with Christianity nor the devouring spirit with the Lamb's nature, No More than Murther [murder] and theft with the Royal Law of doing to others as [we] would they should do unto us." Eventually he also refused to pay property taxes that would have been used to finance war. He observed in his journal that he was "much reproached," but, he concluded, "I could not pay my money to defray the expense of sheding blood." Evans's journal is a window onto the world of eighteenth-century Quaker activism. Although at times he described himself as a lone voice crying out in the wilderness, he emerged among other Quakers who were similarly awakened to the unified agenda that drove his ministry. Jack Marietta's The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 locates Evans and Woolman in a spectrum of Quaker reformers and in particular within what Marietta aptly calls the ascetic and prophetic branch of the reformation. Freed from the constraints of social custom by the command to obey God, Evans and other Quakers were empowered to disregard many sacrosanct practices of their day. Evans urged Quakers and non-Quakers to free their slaves. He called for all people to desist from using the products of slave labor, because to use anything produced by slaves was to be implicated in the institution of slavery. He also advocated for Native American rights and warned people not to buy imported goods, the taxes on which were used to support war against Indians. Although scholars often place Quakerism among the less theological Christian traditions, the late-eighteenth-century movement for reform had a practical, prophetic theology that, its practitioners claimed, was rooted in early Quaker life and thought. The themes of this reformation were knit together by what Evans called the "capstone," the divine command to "have love to God and one to another." Like the early Quakers, reformers such as Evans and Woolman believed that as the kingdom of God was realized in the lives of individuals, it would come to be a reality on earth.
Evans lived by the divine directive to "do unto others as you would have others do unto you." This command ran like a plumb line through the heart of his life and work. He used it to distinguish good customs from evil customs and to distinguish the godly course of action from other, human-centered paths. Living in accord with this precept was, Evans and his peers believed, the means of bringing God's realm to earth, and literally re-forming the world into a "harmonious whole." His vision was shared by contemporaries such as Woolman, Hannah Foster, Anne Emlen Mifflin, Warner Mifflin, Samuel Allinson, and John Hunt, Quakers who embraced the reformation agenda, and who themselves invite further study.
Evans's journal chronicles his own spiritual growth and delineates the process of religious transformation with a transparency rare in religious literature of this period. He offered his journal to mark the way for those who would come after him. The cornerstone of his personal spiritual practice, as well as of his public teaching, was his call for people to conform their wills to the will of God. His starting point was that "God is Love, and those who dwell in God must dwell in Love saith the Apostle." Echoing the early Quaker George Fox's vision, Evans articulated the hope that God's love would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. His journal is the narrative of his own growth in love "to God the Brethren and my Neighbours & fellow Creatures throout the World." His life was a pilgrimage of deepening compassionate response to the world, in which awakening to one kind of injustice led to awakening to others. By 1791, after almost forty years of spiritual journeying, he wrote: "I love the Brethren and Mankind Uneversally."
Evans understood himself to be an instrument, a ram's horn, through which God became manifest to the world: "I sometimes feel it [love] flow from the inexhaustible fountain thro me to the whole world, wishing all to harmonize in singing his praise who made all things good." Evans narrated many tales of his painful journey to accept God's will. He frequently described the Quaker progression from the early stages of spiritual transformation, when humans perceived their sinfulness, to the stage when they were sustained by the light and mercy of God.
Like many biblical prophets, he was often without honor in his own country. Oscillating between agonizing and yearning, his journal frequently witnesses his struggles to bear the reproaches of the world as he strives for the peace that comes from doing God's will. At times Evans's prophetic voice thunders from the pages of his journal: "Some day their will be an overturning ... the land is Stained with the blood of negros & indeans and the Crie of the Slain no doubt hath reached the holy ear." He carried this message for thousands of miles, visiting all but four Quaker meetings in the colonies and Canada and speaking in meetinghouses, Baptist churches, courthouses, homes, schoolhouses, in meetings with individuals and families, ministers, political leaders, enslaved and free, Quakers and non-Quakers, in small groups and in large assemblies. While preaching the way to harmony, he lamented the suffering he perceived around him, most poignantly in witnessing the ill treatment of enslaved peoples, and the oppression of Indian peoples through the seizing of their lands.
Evans asked repeatedly, "How can I be clear of the blood of the poor innocent ones"? His rhetoric evoked the story in Genesis of Cain's murder of Abel: "And the Lord said to Cain, 'What have you done? Listen; your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength'" (4:9–12). Human disorder caused cosmic disorder, because for Evans all creation was interconnected. "The opreshon of the black people couseth a Cloud of dearkness to hang over this land yet the Lord has a little remnant that Cryeth against this Crying Sin of Slavery." When he traveled in North Carolina, he wrote that he was not surprised that the land was barren. Spiritual disorder was written onto the natural landscape as well as onto the bodies of the suffering Indian and black peoples. Natural disasters and political and social unrest were signs for Evans that humans were not right with God. Nonetheless, he retained unwavering confidence that God was on the side of the oppressed: "way will be made for theire liberation."
When Evans's journals were edited, first by his son-in-law Abraham Warrington, and then by George Churchman in 1804, prophetic passages were excised, toned down, and often stripped of their power to evoke the world of the biblical prophets and the early Quakers. In the edition of the journal published by John Comly in 1837, Evans's prophetic voice was almost entirely erased. Just as earlier generations of Friends had expressed discomfort with the apocalyptic worldview of the Quakers of the 1650s and 1660s, the silencing of Evans's prophetic voice was an indication of the later Society of Friends's discomfort with the apocalyptic confidence of some eighteenth-century reformers.
Evans proffered the joy and "Sweetness of God's peace" as possible for all persons, but attainable only by those who passed through the flames of relinquishing self-will in obedience to God. The joy of the "indwelling of the peaceable spirit of Jesus" was for Evans, as for all of the ascetic and prophetic reformers, the measure of the rightness of his actions in the world. He lived his life in the confidence that, as more and more people experienced God's peace, God's kingdom would come, and the world would be transformed:
Come taste and see how good the Lord is ... his Sweet Peace for obedience ... has been sweeter than the Honey-comb.... Then might they come to know the in-dwelling of the peaceable Spirit of holy Jesus; This would put an end to quarrelling & [w]ars, to hard thoughts and hard Speeches, and introduce in us the coming of his kingdom. Men would thus be taught and enabled to love enemies, & to bear reviling for Christ's sake: without reviling again; They would find no better way to gain victory, than by overcoming evil with good.
Evans was aware that he was "led in a way very uncommon in this age," but he sought to let the experience of God's peace outweigh the discomfort caused by the misunderstanding of the world. As a young man, beginning in 1752, Evans underwent a series of dramatic life changes. Like many other Quakers, including Woolman, he began to reform his frivolous ways after an illness (pleurisy) and thereafter resolved to live more fully engaged with his Quaker roots, his early experiences of the light of God, and the power of Quaker meetings for worship. His escalating opposition to war was one of the earliest manifestations of his willingness to challenge social customs.
Another of Evans's early convictions was that he should wear undyed clothing, because the dying process caused cloth to be wasted, and because hiding dirt was analogous to spiritually hiding sins. At first, he decided to wear white stockings and a white hat. Over the course of four trips (at least three of them to Philadelphia) to buy a white hat, his resolve completely failed, and he bought a black hat. Then, when he was "finally willing to be accounted a fool," he bought a white hat and white wool stockings. At last, he returned to "sweet peace and joy." Evans's decision to wear all undyed clothes was an action he believed to be in accordance with God's will, "but much in the cross to my own." In this instance and throughout his writings he expressed concern that he might not be able to bear the "reproach" of those who criticized him for being "singular."
Evans first mentions his growing concerns about slavery in journal entries in 1761, three years after the condemnation of slavery at the 1758 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. In the company of like-minded Friends, he visited Quaker families in order to persuade them to free their captives. "As wise as Serpents and as harmless as Doves" (as Evans put it, echoing Matthew 10:16), they met with all of the household at first, and then addressed their antislavery witness only to the holders of the enslaved persons so as not to be perceived as inciting armed rebellion. Evans was increasingly haunted by the specter of the mistreatment of human beings in the institution of slavery: "It seemed as tho the Cries of the Slaves in the West Indes reached my ears day & night for some months, and in a special manner when partaking of their labor." He began to refuse items produced by slave labor, although people initially told him that he was going "too far" in this. Eventually others began to imitate him, and he lived in the hope that the concern to end slavery would "spread thro all Opposition of men."
Once, at a time of sickness, Evans dreamt that he was in a dreary land trying to make his way home. People slowed him down, directing him toward worldly pleasures; although feeble and weak, he pushed on. He came to a town inhabited by "widows and fatherless the poor, the Lame and the halt," a beautiful place with simple buildings and a central green, where everyone lived "in sweet harmony and love without respect to Circumstance." Passing an aged and sorrowful black man, Evans inquired about the cause of the man's dejection. He replied that he had a hard master. When Evans offered to talk with the master, the old man appeared to be taken up to heaven, and Evans awoke. In the dream, it was those who were often overlooked by society who lived in harmony and love. The dream compelled Evans to "take an Ancient Black Woman to my house who had been turned [out] in Old Age to shift for herself." She stayed with Evans for three or four years until she died. He commented that some people thought she was a burden to him, but it felt light to him "for the peace of my mind so far outbalanced it."
In journal entries in 1762, Evans recorded that God required him "to be cautious of taking life, or eating any thing in which life had been." Like others before him, he believed that meat eating arose only after the fall and signaled the breakdown of the original harmony in creation. "Life in all is sweet the taking of which has been for some time a tender point with me." The meat-eating habit was not easily broken: "my appitite seem'd to crave flesh more than ever." Evans acknowledged that at first some of his friends stood aloof from him, and some people even treated him with disdain. He was "evilly spoken of by many." Evans was cautious about censuring those who did not agree with him, acknowledging that they might be attending to the business God called them to, but he wanted to be accorded the same respect by his detractors.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from QUAKERS AND ABOLITION by Brycchan Carey, Geoffrey Plank. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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