USA > North Carolina > Toward freedom for all : North Carolina Quakers and slavery > Part 10
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There was usually a note of reticence in the correspondence from Indiana, sometimes revealing the views of the writer transparently enough, in other cases indicating a genuine willingness on the part of the leadership in the face of a reticent constituency. The conservative views of Indiana were said to have culminated in a law of 1833 forbidding further immigration of black persons into the state.30 Obviously, if such a law did indeed exist, it was not strictly enforced. Thomas Evans wrote for the Indiana Meeting for Sufferings in 1833 that the discriminatory laws of his state "are barriers in the way of our becom- ing active agents in bringing them into these states," yet, he suggested that
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North Carolina Friends "act in accordance with their consciences, and should some of them come to our country we trust we shall pay the attention to them which would be consistent circumstanced as we are."31
David White gave an account to the North Carolina Meeting for Sufferings of his reception in Ohio and Indiana in 1835. Having travelled with his fifty-three black charges from eastern North Carolina, he managed to leave four of them at Chillicothe, Ohio, and twenty-three at Leesburg in the same state. The balance of twenty-six he left near Newport (Fountain City), Indiana, in Wayne County. On the entire journey, he reported, he met with no opposition, although he made no effort to conceal his mission. Among the farmers in Ohio and Indiana he found:
quite a willingness in many to have the coloured people settle on their lands; to clear and cultivate it under several year leases; l wrote and signed Deeds of manumissions to all that went with me and left money with friends to have the manumissions registered in the counties where such persons were located.32
Finding that freed slaves brought west by Thadeus White and Phineas Nixon the previous year had no proof of their freedom, he wrote, signed and delivered "upwards of 30" deeds of manumission for them by virtue of his authority as an agent of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting. He did the same for four other black men he had brought along with him and took their notes in the amount of $1,161 to cover costs of their purchase and transportation. 33
Among those travelling to freedom in Indiana under the care of an individual Quaker was a person known as Black Jim. He did not become a statistic in the work of the meeting for sufferings. Black Jim was bought by Quaker Nathaniel Newlin at a sale in Alamance County, North Carolina, in 1842. The seller was one Claiborne Guthrie, a brother-in-law of Nathaniel Newlin. Newlin's purpose in buying the slave was to set him free, and this he undertook to do by deeding him to his brother Thomas Newlin, who was then on a visit to Alamance County from Indiana. Thomas agreed to take Jim with him to Indiana, and once there he proceeded to manumit him in Paoli, Orange County, Indiana. In the words of the manumission document, Thomas Newlin declared that he did "forever, absolutely and unconditionally release discharge manumit and set free the said James Guthrie (Black Jim) .. . " This can be taken as typical of many such manu- missions of North Carolina blacks in Indiana and Ohio.34
Another case, quite separate from the work of the meeting for sufferings or the clandestine Underground Railroad, is "The Story of Little Jane," as told by Elmina H. Wilson (formerly Coffin). She writes of her life with her husband and two small children near New Garden Boarding School until they decided to emigrate to Indiana in 1849. They bought two wagons and otherwise prepared for the long journey, when a person came to them asking them to take a five- year-old girl called Jane with them. She was the daughter of an "octoroon"
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slave woman and her well-to-do master, and came equipped with a clear bill of sale. Her mother had been sold to a slave dealer and shipped to Georgia at the insistence of the slaveholder's legal wife. Little Jane was light complexioned and had light-colored straight hair. Apprised of the circumstances, the Wilsons agreed to take her along. The child had an earache and cried a lot on the five hundred-mile trip, but once in Indiana she was adopted by some English Friends who reared her as their own daughter.35
But to return to reactions to the official activity of the North Carolina Meeting for Sufferings, we meet Jordan Harrison, of Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, area Friends. A frequent correspondent, he wrote to Nathan Mendenhall in 1827 to report that the Ohio Yearly Meeting had refused to make an official contribution to the work of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting with slaves, but that he and other sympathetic Friends, with yearly meeting approval, had collected $440.62 privately.36 There was a similar note with a contribution of $290 made in 1828.37 An Ohio law of 1831 forbade the bringing of black persons to Ohio for the purpose of freeing them, and Harrison, dutifully and sorrowfully, advised his North Carolina friends that any further bringing of blacks to Ohio was out of the question.38 Yet, the anti-black laws seemed only to heighten the zeal of the friends of the slave. In 1834, Isaac Parker wrote to Jeremiah Hubbard, with the approval of the Ohio Meeting for Sufferings, that, in spite of the laws, North Carolina Friends should feel free to send them small groups of blacks and promised that they would be looked after there by Friends.39
The incident of the Julius Pringle illustrates vividly the kind of problem faced by Pennsylvania Friends. As early as 1827, John Cooke, writing for the Phila- delphia Meeting for Sufferings, advised against bringing any more black people from North Carolina to that city. "This description of people," he wrote, "generally mingle with the lowest classes here and thus remain in a degraded state." He, and Philadelphia Friends in general at the time, were in favor of colonization in Liberia and Haiti. A friend of Cooke's who had recently visited Haiti found the blacks sent there by Friends to be in a happy state.40 A letter from Edward Bettle of Philadelphia to Nathan Mendenhall in 1832 expressed the alarm of the Quaker community in Philadelphia at the thought of a large consignment of blacks from North Carolina. He begged the meeting for suffer- ings to direct the Julius Pringle toward Liberia instead of Philadelphia.41 Yet, as was noted earlier, Philadelphia Friends rallied to help the black refugees once they had arrived in Philadelphia.
New York, too, reached the point where it was reluctant to receive more black refugees. Samuel Parsons, as clerk of the Meeting for Sufferings of New York Yearly Meeting, was the principal correspondent during the most active years of North Carolina's removal program. Like those in Philadelphia, New York Friends were deeply interested in the work and contributed heavily to it, but in 1833 Samuel Parsons wrote to Jeremiah Hubbard that there was no more room on Long Island for more blacks.42 So many of them had come, he said, and most of them were of very poor conduct. But a new enthusiasm was then
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arising in New York: abolitionism. Later the same year, Parsons wrote that public opinion was beginning to say: "Let the oppressed go free."43 Yet, in 1834, Miles White managed to have a few black people received in New York City, Brooklyn and Long Island.44 David White reported a "kindly" reception in New York when he arrived there with twenty-three former slaves in 1836.45
Much closer to North Carolina, the state of Tennessee manifested some interest in receiving free blacks. Eastern Tennessee actually formed a part of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting of Friends at that time, there being a few Friends in the area southeast of Knoxville. One James Jones of eastern Tennes- see carried on correspondence with Richard Mendenhall in 1827 in which he gave advice freely to the meeting for sufferings. He urged Friends to use a firmer and more paternalistic policy with the black persons under their care. Jones conveyed a request from one Mark Reeve for five or six free blacks to hire for wages. Reeve was a discriminating person, however, and wanted only honest, virtuous and hardworking persons with "prudent wives."46 There is no indication that the meeting for sufferings attended to his request.
SOME BLACKS ABANDONED
As noted, white Quaker emigration went on concurrently with the movement of Quaker-held Negroes to the West and North. Most of the Quakers went west, but some also made their way to Philadelphia and New York. A tragic aspect of the Quaker effort at responsible manumission of slaves in North Carolina was the problem of former slaves abandoned by some of their members. Even before the decision was made in 1833 to remove all the blacks held by Quakers in North Carolina, there was complaint about this practice. Joseph Hoag, a Vermont Quaker who visited North Carolina in 1812, was disturbed by the way some Friends were leaving the state and simply turning their slaves loose. 47
Reference already has been made to the legal troubles encountered by Friends in their efforts in behalf of free blacks. In the case of Redman vs. Coffin they were accused of removing persons from the state illegally - that is, re- moving persons who were not their legal property. It was thus the course of prudence to take the greatest care to see that they had the proper legal docu- ments for each person whom they proposed to remove to a free state. Accord- ing to a report from the Eastern and Contentnea quarterly meetings, in 1826 there were about one hundred black persons within their jurisdictions who had been abandoned by Quakers who had emigrated without leaving proper papers for the Quaker Free Negroes under their care. Accordingly, a committee con- sisting of Richard Mendenhall and others was appointed by the meeting for sufferings in 1826 to correspond with eight individuals who were then living outside the state in order to call attention to their former slaves. In one addi- tional case, the original owner was dead, and the committee was instructed to get in touch with his heirs.48 Apparently, a formal letter was sent to each of the negligent Quakers, and the one sent to Richard Jordan by Nathan Mendenhall was probably typical:
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Our Meeting for Sufferings, on being informed that many friends had left this state and their people of colour also, appointed a com- mittee to write to them and request the care and attention of those in whom the legal title is vested, they are said to be in a very pre- carious situation, fifteen of these are said to be vested in thee, thee wilt attend thereto.
Respectfully thy friends,
Nathan Mendenhall, one of the Committee.49
The individuals involved, their residences in 1826, and the number of former slaves for which they were being held responsible, were as follows: Richard Jordan, New Jersey (Philadelphia Y.M.), 15; Catherine White, New Jersey (Philadelphia Y.M.), 40; John Howard, Ohio, 4; Joel Judkins, Ohio (and their children), 2; Aaron Brown, Ohio, 2; Samuel Charles, Indiana, 2; John Smith, Indiana, 8; Horton Howard, Indiana, 18; John McKim (deceased), (Write to Baltimore Yearly Mtg.), 25 (?).
Rejoinders to these letters were not long in coming. Samuel Charles wrote to Jeremiah Hubbard and Henry Ballenger that he had left a power of attorney with Henry Winslow to look after his former slaves. In response to the letter, however, he sent a new power of attorney to him, empowering him to "act for me in their behalf Either to protect them there or to send them to some other part of the country as he and other Friends think best."50
John Howard defended his actions from Ohio. He said he had liberated his slaves and advised them to leave the state. Some of them he helped to leave, but he had not felt free to force those who were married to slaves to abandon their mates and leave against their will. He gave authority to his neighbor, William Phisiac, to look after the free blacks that stayed behind, but Phisiac deceived him and sold two of them.51 Learning of this, he sent a power of attorney to Francis Mace to recover those sold and protect the rest. He then wrote to the North Carolina Meeting for Sufferings and was told by them that they could not receive slaves from non-members, an attitude which he resented. In 1827, Thomas Kennedy proposed sending John Howard's ex-slaves to Haiti,52 and in 1832 Jonas Mace was eager to evacuate the "Howard and Brown set."53 Most of the Howard blacks finally went on the famous odyssey of the Julius Pringle to Philadelphia and Liberia, but in 1834 the aging Ohio immigrant was still brooding over his former slaves. In a letter to the North Carolina Meeting for Sufferings in that year, he offered to do anything he could for them. If possible, he wanted to receive them in Ohio and care for them there.54
Elisha Bates, clerk of the Ohio Meeting for Sufferings, responded to a letter he received asking him to counsel with the absentee owners who were resident in that state. Without naming names, he said that, of the three who were living in Ohio, one had not bothered to become a member of the Ohio Yearly Meeting, another was in a state of mental derangement, and a third was in a precarious
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financial condition.55 John Howard had complained of not having money to attend to the matter as he might have wished, so he was apparently the third party.
In New Jersey, Richard Jordan was outraged by the accusation of the meet- ing for sufferings. It is easy to understand his reaction. He was the son of Joseph Jordan, who had manumitted his slaves in Northampton County, North Carolina, forty years earlier, and it was absurd to think that his father would have willed him his slaves. The insult, he said, required satisfaction before the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, for he was assuredly not a slaveholder.56 In point of fact, Richard Jordan had borne testimony against slavery from early youth, and in his journal twice mentions accompanying the delegations presenting anti-slavery petitions to the North Carolina State Legislature. When he received the letter he was in declining health, following a lifetime as a very active Friends minister. He would die within the year.
Nevertheless, Nathan Mendenhall took up the matter with the Eastern agents and ascertained that Joseph Jordan had manumitted his slaves in 1784, after the law of 1777 prohibiting the manumission of slaves except for meritorious service. As a consequence, it was thought that the manumissions were ineffec- tive.57 In friendly but firm language, Nathan Mendenhall remonstrated with Richard Jordan to send an agent with a power of attorney to remove "his" black charges from North Carolina.
Catherine White, also a resident of New Jersey, responded to the accusation that she had abandoned her slaves by declaring that she had assigned them to the Rich Square Monthly Meeting in North Carolina in 1805, three years before the yearly meeting decided to accept slaves. Records of the Rich Square Monthly Meeting confirm her claim.58 By the time Catherine White received her notice, she was, according to Richard Jordan, in "indigent circumstances." Jordan rose to her defense, saying that when she gave up her slaves she thereby gave up all her property. But Nathan Mendenhall remained firm. He replied that legal steps were necessary to authorize the free blacks to receive wages. "We shall be very sorry for the poor blacks," he wrote, "if Catherine White does nothing." In the end, Josiah Parker found an old letter from Cather- ine White authorizing her slaves to go to any free government they chose, but this was just after the meeting for sufferings had sent them to Africa!59
Aaron Brown was able to produce a power of attorney which had been prepared by a justice of the peace in Ohio in 1806. It made William Mace of Carteret County, North Carolina, his attorney to deal with the slaves he had left behind.60
John McKim, the man who had already died prior to the decision of the meeting for sufferings to take action on the abandoned free blacks, had settled in Baltimore. Perhaps because he was no longer living, the "McKim Negroes" lingered on and on in the annals of the meeting for sufferings. The matter was not yet settled in 1852, for in that year James Davis, an agent of the meeting for sufferings authorized to protect Quaker-held Negroes, reported that two
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McKim Negroes, named Allen and David, had been bought by two slave traders and removed from the state. Being informed of this, Davis had gone to Newbern, North Carolina, where he obtained a writ of habeas corpus against the alleged purchasers, Borden and Stanton. In the meantime, the two black men had arrived in Charlestown, South Carolina, against their will, and there insisted that they were free men. As a result, they were taken from their purchasers and lodged in jail. Davis employed the law firm of Atmore and Hubbard to prosecute the case and requested an advance of one hundred dollars from the meeting for sufferings to carry the case forward. The meeting for sufferings commended Davis and authorized the funds. According to Davis, public opinion in Beaufort, where the case was tried, was favorable for Friends. Success in the case, he said, would have the effect of freeing many other Quaker Free Negroes who were being held in bondage illegally in the area.61
There were still McKim Negroes in North Carolina in 1858. In that year, Thomas Kennedy reported for a committee which had been assigned by the meeting for sufferings to report on the case of Brookfield (Bookfield) vs. Stanton. William Brookfield, a "McKim Negro," was suing Jonathan Stanton for his freedom, a continuation of the 1852 case. With legal aid from the Friends committee, he won his case in Carteret Superior Court and was awarded four hundred dollars damages. Kennedy indicated that there were then members of the same family living in Guilford County, and three in Mobile, Alabama. All of these, he said, "are attempted to be held as slaves, and others have been held as slaves," contrary to the will of the deceased owner, John McKim. It seemed to Thomas Kennedy that Brookfield should be advised to use his four hundred dollars to help free his relatives.
Jonathan Stanton, who already had been fighting this case for six years, appealed to the State Supreme Court. John Kennedy again took up the case and was so diligent in its pursuit that he paid the expenses of several witnesses who were so aged that he arranged to have them declare in court before they died. Hearing about two persons in Hyde County who knew about the McKim families, he sent James McCrae there to take their depositions, at a cost of forty dollars. The Supreme Court gave a verdict for Brookfield (Bookfield) in the case of Bookfield vs. Stanton. The persistent Stanton obtained a technical reversal of the decision, but the freedom of Brookfield was not annulled.62
The significance of the labors of North Carolina Quakers in behalf of the slaves is to be measured more in terms of dedication, time and effort than in money, but it was an expensive undertaking. The value of a dollar was many times more than now. A summary financial statement prepared for the meeting for sufferings in 1828 shows that the total amount of money received for the work to that date was $13,585.97. The money was kept in a separate "Africa Fund," which had a separate treasurer from the yearly meeting treasurer and received funds from the yearly meeting as well as from all other contributors. Of the total amount received to that date, only $2,067.861/2 was received from the North Carolina Yearly Meeting. The rest came from Philadelphia, New
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York, Rhode Island, Baltimore, Ohio, Indiana and London yearly meetings. The meeting for sufferings had expended $10,285.271/2 of the total amount received, as follows:
About 140 persons to the West. $1,800.00
16 to Philadelphia. 80.00
120 on Sally Ann to Haiti. 2,927.501/2 6 Tryton (?). 181.30
In unsuccessful efforts. 157.851/2
261 in four outfits to Liberia.
4,753.081/2
Contingencies.
385.523/463
An undated letter from the North Carolina Meeting for Sufferings to its sister body in London, perhaps written in the early 1830s, declares that about one thousand free blacks had been sent to free governments, at a cost of "near $20,000." Five hundred persons were said to remain under the care of Friends at that time. 64
An account book of the meeting for sufferings gives the amount spent on the "Wayne Suit," which was the case of Contentnea vs. Dickenson. That case was settled in 1827 with the following cost reported:
John Stanly, attorney fee. $30.00
Wm. Taston, attorney fee.
50.00
N. Mendenhall & F. Swaim.
44.78
G. Swaim for attending court.
20.00
Thos. Kennedy, cost of a suit.
393.39
George Swaim.
50.00
Postage.
1.50
Jeremiah Hubbard attending witness.
15.00
Total.
$603.6765
It seems impossible that the case of Contentnea vs. Dickenson was settled for such a modest sum. The accounting would seem to be partial. The cost of the case of Redman vs. Coffin is hard to compute, because it involved so many people over so many years. It is enough to remember that the judgment against Friends in that suit totaled $3,621.74, in addition to the fees and expenses attending a total of sixteen years of litigation.
A committee appointed to prepare a summary of the work with the slaves up to 1830 reported to the meeting for sufferings that 652 persons had been removed to free governments up to that time at a total cost of $12,769.51. Four hundred and two persons under the care of Friends were said to remain at that time.66 In 1835, a similar committee reported that between 1823 and 1835 a total of $22,028.381/2 had been expended on work with slaves and former slaves. 67
Among the myriad money transactions attending the work with the blacks
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can be listed a sampling. In 1828, the meeting for sufferings authorized the sale of a small plot of land belonging to a Quaker-held Negro woman, the proceeds of which were to be used to buy her husband's freedom.68 In 1835, agents of the yearly meeting, and even individual Friends, were given discretionary powers to pay small debts for black persons so they might leave the state unencumbered, the meeting for sufferings promising to refund such sums.69 In 1836, David White was allowed two hundred dollars to buy a fifty-year-old man so he might go to New York with his wife and six children.70 John Sussel requested and received thirty-seven dollars in 1840 to recompense him for that amount spent in ransoming a black person under his care who was wrongfully arrested enroute to Indiana.71 David White, who had so freely taken the notes of the four men whom he bought in North Carolina to manumit in Ohio in 1834, found collecting such notes difficult. The value of the notes held for the four men was $1,161, but in 1858 the meeting for sufferings released him from collecting a note of $328 from Daniel White, a black person of La Fayette County, Ohio. In 1838, he had likewise been released from collecting $347.90 on a note from Job Felton of Wayne County, Indiana. 72
North Carolina Friends gave an enormous amount of time and attention to the matter of the slaves. Members of the meeting for sufferings would seem to have had little time for their private affairs, considering the amount of corre- spondence they carried on, the consultation with the agents of the yearly meeting in the quarterly meetings and their negotiations with Friends in other parts of the world, attending court, and always driving toward the achievement of their goal of removing all their charges from North Carolina. Yet, all these persons were laymen and amateurs.
Agents like David White must have given almost full time to the work for many years, necessarily neglecting their private affairs. Yet, it should be under- stood, as appears from the selections from the account books, that certain types of work were compensated. For those who took groups to free states, the rate was one dollar per day plus expense money.73 Members of the meeting for sufferings and the agents in the quarters received travel expenses as they moved around the state, and when they spent long days in court received per diem compensation.
The remarkable thing about this episode in philantropy was not so much its cost in time and money, however, but the extraordinary tenacity of this minority group in the midst of an often hostile slaveholding society. It was not a fad lasting a few months or a few years, but a serious dedication to a cause that lasted from 1777 when Thomas Newby released his first slaves, until the Civil War. North Carolina Friends rejected slavery eighty years before the Proclama- tion of Emancipation. For three generations, from father to son, the doctrine that the white Christian must treat his black brother "as he would be done by" was maintained not only as an article of faith, but also in deed. It is true that not all the sons of Quakers where faithful to this testimony, but they either withdrew or were expelled from the fellowship. The position of the Society of
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