USA > North Carolina > Toward freedom for all : North Carolina Quakers and slavery > Part 11
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Friends was not open to question. Others found the struggle of living as opponents of slavery in a slaveholding society such a heavy burden to bear that they abandoned the soil of their fathers to start life anew in free states. But in Jamestown, the Mendenhalls and the Hunts succeeded each other in genera- tions of labor for the cause, while in the East the Whites, Newby's, Nixons, Newlins and Winslows maintained the witness even after many of their neigh- bors had gone west.
Under the burden of their convictions and sense of responsibility, it was not enough simply to free those whom they had received in inheritance, even though the necessity of this was the bulk of their labor. They undertook vigor- ous legal action to recover black persons from manstealers who were on the alert and prepared to fight costly legal battles to get possession of anyone who did not have clear claimants or valid manumission papers. They reached down as far as Alabama to recover slaves who had been sold down South, and in one case they bought four slave men for fourteen hundred dollars so they could emigrate with their four wives, all of whom belonged to the yearly meeting.74
For seventy years, North Carolina Friends tried to keep within the law in their work of liberation, although toward the end of the period a strong minority felt it right to flout the law for a higher principle by spiriting slaves away secretly. Yet, the great attention of North Carolina Quakers to the demands of the law, and their persistent efforts to change the law at the same time, bespeaks a mentality of rectitude and conscience.
TASK NEAR COMPLETION
By 1848, it is obvious that the meeting for sufferings considered that it had accomplished the task set before it in 1823. This is the meaning of the publica- tion of the condensed report on "The Subject of Slavery Within Its Limits" in that year. The slaves belonging to the North Carolina Yearly Meeting had been removed from the state. The report concluded:
There are at this time (1848) still a few persons to whom our Soci- ety retains the legal title - perhaps not more than 12 or 15 in all. It is believed there is no instance of any being held among us so as to deprive them of the benefit of their labor.75
There seems to be no way of knowing how many black persons reached free governments because of the work of North Carolina Friends. Francis Anscombe estimated one thousand.76 My own estimate, based on those reported in the records (which are clearly incomplete) is 525 to free states, 681 to Haiti, and 479 to Liberia, a total of 1685. How many were taken informally, like the Black Jim taken by Thomas Newlin, or the Little Jane taken by the Wilson family, would be very difficult to ascertain.77
The effect of this effort, and the consistent witness of Friends in North Carolina, is not to be measured in terms of numbers alone, however, Except for
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the significant sum of human travail and adventure, the numbers are modest. It might be measured more appropriately in terms of what North Carolina was and became as a result of it. George W. Gibson, writing in the North Carolina Historical Review in 1960, observed:
Anti-slavery sentiment declined in the South in the 1830s and largely disappeared after 1840; however, it did not die out as swiftly or completely in North Carolina as in the rest of the South. The large Quaker settlement in North Carolina with its solid stand against slavery perpetuated anti-slavery feelings in that state.78
Again, Frederick Law Olmstead observed a different spirit in North Carolina when he visited the South in 1856. He wrote:
The aspect in North Carolina with regard to slavery is less lamen- table than in Virginia. There is less bigotry upon the subject and more freedom of conversation.79
If there is "less bigotry ... and more freedom of conversation" in North Caro- lina today than in other Southern states, perhaps the stupendous effort of nine- teenth century Quakers had some small part in creating such an atmosphere.
The Underground Railroad and Abolitionism
Friends had been struggling with the problem of slavery for a very long time North Carolina as the fourth decade of the nineteenth century began. Having ailed to win more lenient manumission laws or to start a general emancipation movement, they had spent twenty years transporting their own former slaves states and countries where they could enjoy their freedom unmolested. By 843, the position of Friends on slavery had become an ancient tradition, and that year the yearly meeting said to its membership and to the public: ". .. it a well known testimony of the society of friends that they do not allow their members to hold slaves."1 The North Carolina General Assembly knew this well om the many antislavery petitions it had received from Friends. Sarah reeman knew it when she willed her slaves to "a steady old Quaker who would not own slaves," for she knew that he would treat them as free persons. he courts where Friends defended the freedom of black persons knew it. It vas public knowledge.
The printed report of the meeting for sufferings issued in 1848 announced the irtual completion of the effort begun in 1824 to settle all Quaker-held Negroes free governments. Even the black persons who still occasionally asked riends to defend them in court had never really been owned by Friends them- elves. In the case of Stringer vs. Burcham, Mary Stringer, whose freedom was hreatened, was the granddaughter of the last member of her family to be wned by Quakers. The McKim Negroes had been living as free persons for two enerations. But if it is true that Friends in North Carolina had managed to ash their own hands of slavery, it was also true that the institution of slavery till flourished in the communities where they lived. In the final decades before he Civil War they had achieved a coexistence with slavery which was deeply isturbing to some Quakers, and to some critics outside the fellowship as well.
Daniel Worth, the former North Carolina Friend who had returned to the tate as an antislavery missionary of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1840, poked about him and decided that the Quakers had lost all their old anti-
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slavery zeal. Indeed, he charged that Quakers were a sham and "one of the firmest props the infernal institution has in the land."2 His charge seems to be confirmed by the remarkable Epistle of Advice issued by the North Carolina Yearly Meeting in 1843 which cautioned Friends against harboring runaway slaves or interfering in the relationship between master and slave. It said:
Whereas it is a well known testimony of the society of friends that they do not allow their members to hold slaves or in any way to interfere with the system of slavery further than by petition reason and remonstrance in a peaceable manner; and it having through report come to the body of society that some one or more of the members thereof have suffered themselves to be so far overcome through sympathy to allow and give shelter improperly to one or more slaves and thus occasioned several of their fellow members to be accused of like improper conduct. We have therefore thought it due to ourselves and to the people at large of the country in which we live thus to make known our long established practice and utter disapproval of such interference in any way whatever while at the same time we do not in the least degree relinquish our testimony to the injustice of slavery.3
The yearly meeting ordered that this epistle be published at its expense, and Richard Mendenhall and Aaron Stalker were appointed to see to the matter. Clearly, this expressed the view of powerful forces in the yearly meeting. It was a view shared by George F. White of the New York Yearly Meeting of Friends.| White praised a fugitive slave for returning to his master, declaring: "I had a thousand times rather be a slave and spend my days with slaveholders than to dwell in companionship with abolitionists."4 The newly formed Methodist Episcopal Church South, issued a statement in 1846 that was similar to that of North Carolina Quakers in 1843. It announced "the broad and explicit disavowal of the Methodist Episcopal Church (sic) of any right, wish or intention to interfere, in any way, with the relation of master and slave, as it exists in the slaveholding states of the union . . . "5
APATHY CHALLENGED
But the Quaker resolution of 1843 forbidding Quakers to harbor runaway slaves did not stand unchallenged among Quakers. It was noted by the newly organized Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-Slavery Friends, a group consisting largely of former North Carolinians. That body issued an "Address to Members of the Society of Friends on the American Continent" which declared that it was "deeply grieved to witness such a low, time-serving, man-fearing, popularity- seeking spirit manifested by a Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends."6
Apparently smarting from such criticism, and perhaps from complaints of its own members, the North Carolina Yearly Meeting approached the slave ques- tion again in 1844. It issued a letter to the subordinate meetings in which it
1
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seemed to make amends for the harsh epistle of 1843. It concluded by remind- ng non-Friends that they, too, must answer for the sin of slavery, and urged Friends to proceed against the evil of slavery in such ways as they could "in good conscience."7 Considering the tone of the epistle of 1843 and its pointed condemnation of harboring runaway slaves, one is forced to conclude that the proponents of the practice had won an important concession in 1844. Certainly hose who were harboring runaways in 1843 were doing so in "good conscience," as they were in 1844. Since we know from Levi and Addison Coffin that certain Friends were active in the Underground Railroad, this discussion of harboring 'unaway slaves emerges as one of the very few possible references to that clandestine network in the minutes of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting.
How many Quakers took part in the Underground Railroad may never be Known. The very existence of a close-knit organization of that kind is brought nto question by some scholars.8 There had always been runaway slaves, but he number was clearly very large during the first half of the nineteenth century. The slaveholders themselves claimed that one hundred thousand laves deserted them between 1810 and 1850, and the Ohio emancipationists boasted that they alone had helped forty thousand blacks escape.9 This con- ributed to a state of nervousness on the part of the planters which always ncreased when plots like the Denmark Vesey Insurrection of 1822 were dis- covered, and when Nat Turner's massacre occurred in 1831. Restlessness mong the slaves had accompanied the emancipation of British slaves in the Caribbean in 1833, and any slave disturbance anywhere in the world was likely o have its repercussions in the American South. The reaction of the planters was to increase vigilance and restrict the activities of the slaves, which, in turn, ncreased their restlessness.
Ever since the slave trade from Africa had been stopped in 1808, there had been an increase in the slave trade from the Upper to the Lower South. Par- icularly in Virginia, planters often found it more profitable to rear and sell slaves than to work them on their plantations. Whether or not there was a deliberate policy of "slave breeding" in Virginia is a matter of dispute, but it does appear to be true that the natural increase of the slaves outstripped oppor- unities for employment. For whatever reason, Virginia planters did sell a total of one hundred-eighteen thousand slaves to the southwest in the decade of the 1830s.10 This heavy traffic across the state of North Carolina was in full view of the public and caused great anxiety among North Carolina slaves, for they feared that they, too, might be sold to unknown masters farther south. They sometimes ran away from sheer fear of being sold. A Georgia slave, Billy Proctor, expressed the feeling of many when he wrote to a Mr. Lamar begging him to buy him for one thousand dollars. "I am fearful that if you do not buy me," he wrote, "there is no telling where I may have to go."11
ABOLITIONISM IN NORTH CAROLINA
Any slave who ran away probably knew something about the northern
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abolitionist movement. It may not have been so much that he learned about it from abolitionist propaganda, but that he knew that somewhere there was a place where he would be received as a free man if he did run away. But aboli- tionist ideas did not circulate in the South. Mention has been made of Daniel Worth, who was in the state as an avowed foe of slavery, preaching to his own small congregation but also seeking out every means open to him to combat the evil institution. He had been the first president of the Anti-Slavery Society of Indiana when it was formed in 1840, and he came back to North Carolina with a supply of abolitionist literature, including fifty copies of Hinton Rowan Helper's The Impending Crisis. In 1859, he was accused in Greensboro of violat- ing the law of 1830 prohibiting the teaching of black people and of distributing copies of The Impending Crisis. He did not deny either of these charges, but defended his actions, an attitude which landed him in the Greensboro jail. There he spent the winter of 1859, finally being released through the interven- tion of his influential cousin, Jonathan Worth, then a state senator. The terms of his release were that he leave the state, which he did.12
Hinton Rowan Helper himself was a native of North Carolina, and his aboli- tionist arguments were based largely on his observations in his native state.13 lt is likely that many North Carolina Quakers were familiar with the inflammatory Impending Crisis, a book which became something of a bible for Northern abolitionists. Nereus Mendenhall, principal of the New Garden Boarding School, was one Quaker who read the book. There is a story that authorities in Greens- boro once heard that he owned a copy of the forbidden book and went to his home to arrest him, but when they arrived at the Mendenhall home they could not find the incriminating evidence. The principal's faithful wife had been fore- warned and burned the book.14
In 1856, an event occurred in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which revealed the great sensitivity of the public to the slave question. Benjamin Hedrick, a profes- sor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina, was dismissed from his post because he declared his opposition to slavery in a letter to the North Carolina Standard, of Raleigh.15
While Friends in North Carolina lived in an atmosphere capable of such great hostility to anyone opposing slavery, British Friends continued to urge them to persevere in the struggle against that institution.16 In 1853, the North Carolina Meeting for Sufferings received a communication from the London Yearly Meeting concerning the visit to the United States that year of a commission charged with presenting an antislavery petition, or "address," to the President of the United States and to the governors of the several states. It was received, say the minutes, "with much sympathy and deep exercise."17
Again in 1856, the meeting for sufferings considered printing and distributing a communication from the London Yearly Meeting concerning slavery. A committee was appointed to consider it, but it reported back that while the statement contained "interesting matter" it would "not be best to publish it at this time." A similar message came from London in 1861, but it also was allowed
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to lie dormant in the files.18 Public discussion of slavery had become much more difficult than in the time of the Manumission Society.
The northern yearly meetings of Friends were all devoted to abolitionism before the 1850s. They had, however, been diverted somewhat from anti- slavery activities by the great Hicksite division which split the Society along theological lines and involved it in many years of painful controversy.19 The extreme militancy of the abolitionist movement also alienated many Friends, especially as they began to suspect that the issue would be war. Yet, they remained committed to abolitionism as a society, and some of their members were among the most active leaders of the movement. Best known among the Quaker abolitionists was John Greenleaf Whittier. In North Carolina, Delphina Mendenhall of Deep River Monthly Meeting carried on correspondence with the poet-propagandist.20
On the national scene, a sustained and well-organized effort had enabled abolitionism to win out over every other form of antislavery doctrine. Coloniza- tion had been discredited as both an insult to the black race and as an impossible solution to the race problem. The feeble antislavery sheets published by Elihu Embree and Charles Osborne,21 and the respectable, if militant, Genius of Uni- versal Emancipation, published by Benjamin Lundy, had been succeeded by the flamboyant Liberator, edited by William Lloyd Garrison in Boston. The Liberator warned slaveholders in its masthead: "YOUR COVENANT WITH DEATH SHALL BE ANNULLED AND YOUR AGREEMENT WITH HELL SHALL NOT STAND." The Anti-Slavery Society operated under a resolution adopted in 1837 which said that "all those laws ... admitting the right of slavery are, before God, NULL AND VOID."22
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
Shamed by such people as Daniel Worth, and encouraged by the printed word from the North, some activist Quakers in North Carolina came to the con- clusion that the only right thing to do was help slaves achieve their freedom by whatever means available. It was the activists versus the quietists who created the discussion in the North Carolina Yearly Meeting in 1843 and 1844, and in the decade following.
Actually, aid to fugitive slaves by individual Southern Quakers had begun much earlier. It was when Levi Coffin was a young man, in about 1820, that he came under conviction of the great sinfulness of slavery and his duty as a Chris- tian to help any fugitive slave he found to make his way to freedom.23 More than anyone else, he created the legend of the Underground Railroad, and most of the literature about it stems from his Reminiscences.
Born of a Quaker family of farmers near the New Garden Friends Meeting a few miles west of modern Greensboro, North Carolina, Levi Coffin acquired his antislavery feelings from his Quaker heritage and from the Nantucket back- ground of his family. The Coffins were in full agreement with the antislavery testimony of their church and went further than many Quakers by giving
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refuge to runaway slaves. Black persons came to their home secretly in the full knowledge that they would be harbored.
The case of the fugitive woman Ede serves to illustrate the attitude and behavior of the Coffin family. Ede was a slave woman who belonged to their eminently respectable neighbor, Dr. David Caldwell. The daughter of Dr. Cald- well was married to a Presbyterian minister who lived a hundred miles away, and the poor woman heard that she was to be separated from her husband and children to be given to the Caldwell daughter as a gift. She fled to the woods with her baby and came to the Coffin home by night for help.
"Father was liable to fine and imprisonment if she was discovered at our home," wrote Coffin later, "yet we could not turn her away. The dictates of humanity came in opposition to the law of the land, and we ignored the law."24 Subsequently, young Levi went directly to Dr. Caldwell and persuaded him to take Ede and her baby back and not send the mother away, but the principle of placing "the dictates of humanity" above the law was one to which he adhered all his life. Certainly to many sober, law-abiding Quakers in North Carolina, the Coffins' cavalier attitude toward the law seemed reprehensible.
It is obvious that Levi Coffin took delight in tricking the masters of fugitive slaves when he found it necessary to do so in order to guide the slaves to freedom. On one occasion, by his own account, he found himself in Virginia with a fellow North Carolinian who told him that he was looking for his runaway slave, Jack Barnes. Coffin expressed concern for the slaveholder's plight and offered to help him find his "property." To make it easier to escape suspicion, he encour- aged the North Carolinian to drink freely at the tavern, and then went in search of the slave. He had no trouble finding Jack Barnes, and when he did he warned him to make his getaway quickly. The hapless owner never did find his slave, but another black man continued his journey northward on the Under- ground Railroad. Coffin described a number of similar incidents.25
The so-called Underground Railroad was made possible by a network of people who were sympathetic to the slaves. It was arranged so that the fugitive could reach such a person about every twenty miles on his route. In the case of Jack Barnes, the local tavern owner was willing to help. Often blacks travelled in emigrant trains going west. When danger approached, they were hidden in the cargo, or, in other cases, in special compartments under the floor, made especially for the purpose. Knowledge of this caused the self-appointed vigilantes to stop wagons on the westbound trains and search them. Sometimes the drivers were able to prevent this, but in other cases slaves were returned to their masters for a reward.26 When Joe was taken from Asa Folger in Kentucky, he was brazenly held for ransom.27
There is a tradition that the woods behind the New Garden Meetinghouse and Boarding School were frequently inhabited by fugitive slaves, so much so that it has come to be known as the North Carolina terminus of the Underground Rail- road. The slaves are said to have hidden in hollow trees and caves dug in the banks of the creek. The Coffin house was nearby. How many other Quaker
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families helped can never be known, for Quakers were not united in the matter, and nothing seems to have been committed to writing at that time. Harboring fugitives was in violation of North Carolina law, and it was left to Levi Coffin and his cousin Addison to write about it many years later in their reminiscences.
Addison Coffin wrote that although Quakers and others who were active in the Underground Railroad were always happy to respond to the wishes of any slave who had made up his mind to abandon his master, they never tried to persuade anyone to do it. Indeed, they queried prospects very carefully to make certain that their determination was firm before they agreed to help them. They also insisted that their proteges be tight-lipped, discuss their plans with no one, and be capable of keeping quiet on the dangerous trek out of slave territory. They were given careful instructions. If they failed the test, they were sent back to their masters.
Usually, the fugitives traveled at night and hid in the woods or in friendly homes in the daytime. The story of their following the North Star appears to be more than legend. When they came to a fork in the road at night, they could choose the right fork by examining some prominent tree, stump or post nearby. Scouts had driven nails in them, located to the right, left, or straight ahead, as the case might be. On a dark night they could feel the nails with their hands. Probably some of the nails were driven by Levi Coffin, for he boasted that he had walked the entire distance from North Carolina to Indiana three times.
When the fugitives came to a river, they followed their instructions for making a raft. Lifting a few rails from a nearby fence, they lashed them together with vines, being careful not to use wire or nails. To do so would have been to leave evidence of their trail. They then floated their crude rafts in the river and paddled them across with their hands. Once there, they cut the vines with a knife and allowed the loose rails to float down the river. When some passing farmer noticed the rails the next day, he concluded that some mischie- vous boys had thrown them into the river.28
Addison Coffin wrote that there was a regular "Underground" route across Virginia to Pennsylvania, and another by way of the "great Virginia Turnpike" from Richmond to the Ohio River at the mouth of the Kanawah. Most of the "conductors," according to him, were North Carolina Quakers. At the other end of the line in Ohio and Indiana, there were known houses and persons to whom they could go for safety, because the owners or their agents were in constant search of them. When Levi Coffin settled in Newport (Fountain City), Indiana, he found himself on an already established route of the Underground Railroad. Until 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, it was illegal to apprehend a slave in Indiana or Ohio and return him to slave territory. Whenever Levi Coffin heard of such efforts, he threatened to prosecute the pursuers as kid- nappers, a device which generally brought results. Later, it was necessary to hide the fugitives and hurry them on to Canada, for under the Fugitive Slave Law they could be apprehended and returned to slave territory legally. Coffin said that he received an average of about one hundred fugitives a year in his
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