USA > North Carolina > Toward freedom for all : North Carolina Quakers and slavery > Part 12
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home in Newport over a period of twenty years. Other fugitives sought out the homes of free blacks who had settled in Ohio and Indiana, but after 1850 this also proved to be unsafe, and they were spirited away to Canada as quickly as possible.29
It was not illegal for free blacks to travel to Indiana until the adoption of the constitution of 1851. Ohio had passed the first of the Black Laws in 1804, prohibiting the settling of blacks in that state. However, the law was not strictly enforced. In 1823, for example, a committee appointed by the North Carolina Yearly Meeting to investigate the laws of Ohio reported that there was nothing to prevent taking blacks to that state, and, as has been noted, Quakers took blacks to both Indiana and Ohio and established them there.30 This required legal papers. That the Underground people took advantage of the authorities in this matter is suggested by the story of Vina. Vina worked as a free washer- woman at the New Garden Boarding School operated by Quakers near Greens- boro. She was married to a free man named Arch Curry. At length Arch Curry died, and then Vina began to loan out his manumission papers to fugitives who resembled her late husband. The fugitive would travel to Indiana with his false papers and there give them to Levi Coffin, who returned them to New Garden. In this way, it is said, fifteen slaves reached freedom with the dead man's papers.31 It would seem that this was hardly the only case of forged papers, and again one can imagine the revulsion which many law-abiding Quakers felt toward such deceptive practices.
CONTROVERSY CONTINUES
The controversy in the yearly meeting about helping fugitives must have caused much soul-searching among those whose sympathies told them to protect any poor creature who was being pursued, but whose law-abiding habits forbade them to do it. We have seen that Richard Mendenhall of James- town was one of those assigned by the yearly meeting to circulate the admoni- tion of 1843 discouraging aid to fugitive slaves, and yet family and community tradition insist that the Mendenhall Inn at Jamestown, owned and operated by him, was a station on the Underground Railroad. When Richard Mendenhall died at the age of seventy-one in 1851, a memorial was prepared for him which strongly suggests that he did harbor runaway slaves. Describing him as given to works of benevolence, it declared that in his home "The stranger ever found a friend and the wayward traveller needed only the tattered badge of poverty to secure him a place 'where to lay his head.' The widow and the orphan were never turned away."32
When North Carolina Yearly Meeting convened in November of 1851, six months after the death of Richard Mendenhall, the fugitive controversy broke out again. The Epistle of Advice issued that year reverted to the strong language of 1843:
And we have been made at this time to desire that all our mem-
bers everywhere be preserved from participation in the commo-
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UNDERGROUND RAILROAD AND ABOLITIONISM
tions which are now threatening the harmony of our beloved country on the subject of slavery. Let us on that subject maintain a true Christian principle, bearing our testimony against this un- righteous system, and show forth to the world by our truly Chris- tian works through life that we are actuated by that Spirit that breathes glory to God in the highest, on earth, peace, good will towards men. That it is our duty to be law-abiding people and in no wise improperly to interfere in the relation between Master and Slave, or with any of the commotions or excitements of the day arising therefrom, which are so well calculated to divert the mind from the true path of virtue. We fear that the present state of things above referred to, has had a tendency to unsettle the minds of many of our members, and that it is under feelings of this kind that many Friends have been induced to leave their habitations and remove from among us. We feel tenderly concerned that Friends before taking such a step may weightily consider this subject, waiting for best wisdom to direct their course.33
The reference to those who were "induced to leave their habitations and remove from among us," was not empty rhetoric, for emigration to the West had been massive. The exodus of Friends is attested by the "laying down" of numerous meetings within the state. Stephen B. Weeks lists eighty-three meet- ings laid down in North Carolina Yearly Meeting between 1800 and 1861, out of a total of 136 either existing in 1800 or founded between 1800 and 1861. This means a mortality rate of sixty percent. The scattered meetings in South Caro- lina and Georgia which belonged to North Carolina Yearly Meeting were among the earliest to disappear, and in Pasquotank County, North Carolina, the Symons Creek Meeting which was founded in 1700 was laid down.34 The Trent River Meeting picked up and moved as a body in 1800, retaining its same officers as it settled first in Pennsylvania and then in Ohio.35 The New Garden Meeting, seat of the yearly meeting since 1813, gave out letters of transfer to other meetings (called certificates of removal) to 245 persons, representing one hundred families and eighty-three single persons, between 1801 and 1866.36
Certainly, as the epistle of 1851 indicated, slavery was a heavy factor in this exodus. All Quaker communities in North Carolina suffered from it, and those with the highest proportion of slaves suffered the most. Perquimans and Pasquotank counties, on the coast, were the seed bed of North Carolina Quakerism and also the heart of slave country. The following table shows the high proportion of slaves in that area compared to Guilford County, which is the heart of the piedmont region:
County
Free Persons
Slaves
Proportion Free to Slave
1820
1840
1820
1840
1820
1840
Perquimans
4,392
4,403
2,465
2,943
1.8-1.0
1.5-1.0
Pasquotank
5,392
5,726
2,616
2,788
2.0-1.0
3.0-1.0
Guilford
12,900
16,708
1,611
2,467
8.0-1.0
7.0-1.037
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The number of meetings laid down in the coastal counties was ruinous. In Perquimans, seven meetings were laid down between 1794 and 1854, and only two - Piney Woods and Up River - remained. In Pasquotank County, as already noted, the ancient Symon's Creek Meeting was closed in 1845. Its two preparative meetings, Narrows and Newbegun Creek, had expired earlier. No meetings remained in Pasquotank County after Symon's Creek was laid down, and Cartaret, Craven and Jones counties also were left without any Friends meetings remaining.38
In Guilford County, nine meetings were laid down before 1850, and seven remained. Included among the survivors were such meetings as New Garden and Springfield, which had long provided strong leadership and continued to do so now in a time of adversity. Yet, this piedmont region also suffered severely.
Although the reasons for westward migration were many, other observers agree with Addison Coffin that many of them were "voting against slavery with their feet." The Missouri Compromise, wrote Coffin, caused great excitement in the state, and people opposed to slavery despaired of ever breaking the power of the slaveholders over the legislature. When it became clear that the North- west Territory would be permanently free of slavery, whole communities sold out and went there.39
Open enemies of slavery were subject to a certain amount of harrassment, and one should not discount this as a factor in emigration. Sometime between 1857 and 1859, Isham Cox received a threatening letter from "A Slaveholder," which has been preserved. Cox was an active Friend and a member of the meeting for sufferings. The letter accused him of being a friend of Daniel Worth and allowing him to "hold prayer in your family." It is also charged that he helped Daniel Worth circulate the pernicious "Helper's Books." His behavior was all the more to be condemned because he was married to the daughter of a slaveholder, representing "one of the worthiest families of Randolph County." The letter continued:
Now, sir, if the institutions of our country do not suit you why do you not remove to Ohio or Indiana where this evil does not exist? You may rely that the public eye is on you and I would advise you to pursue a prudent and consistent course of conduct and let Vestal and Worth take care of themselves. You will have to change your course in order to satisfy the public that you are a good citizen and a law abiding man. 40
Isham Cox refused to be intimidated, for he was active in the service of Friends suffering for their faith during the Civil War. After the war he wrote an account of that service.41
Friends, of course, were by no means the only ones to oppose slavery, nor were they the only ones to leave North Carolina. In his defense at Chapel Hill, Benjamin Hedrick spoke of the emigration from his own home community of Salisbury:
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UNDERGROUND RAILROAD AND ABOLITIONISM
Of my neighbors, friends and kindred, nearly half left the state since I was old enough to remember. Many is the time I have stood beside the loaded emigrant wagon, and given the parting hand to those on whose face I was never to look again. They were going to seek homes in the free West, knowing, as they did, that free and slave labor could not exist in the same community. If anyone thinks that I speak without knowledge, let him refer to the last census. He will find that in 1850, there were fifty-eight thousand native North Carolinians living in the free States of the West. Thirty-three thousand in Indiana alone. There were at the same time one hundred and eighty thousand Virginians living in free states. Now, if the people were so much in love with the "institu- tion" why did they not remain where they could enjoy its bless- ings?42
The effect of such a large exodus on the thinking of the communities that remained behind in North Carolina was bound to be great. Those who felt the greatest outrage at the institution of slavery were those most likely to leave. In 1849, Emory D. Coffin of North Carolina wrote to his cousin Levi Coffin in Cin- cinnati asking if he would advise him to go west. Levi advised him to leave. It would be best, he felt, for him to turn his back on "that dark land of oppression where the Tyrant's Rod is heard, and where the cries of the poor slave are con- tinually ascending." As for himself, he wrote, "I could not ... reconcile myself to live in a land of whips and chains, unless it was under an apprehension of duty as a missionary to plead their cause." 43
Those who could reconcile themselves to living in the midst of slavery, even though they themselves were not slaveholders, were by definition more tolerant of the "institution" than those who left. This, coupled with the important fact that in the last pre-war years only a remnant of Quaker-held Negroes remained to be looked after, led North Carolina Friends to turn their minds to other matters. The antislavery witness was not forgotten, for the yearly meeting sent a petition to Congress in 1849 calling for "the amelioration or extinction" of slavery,44 and litigation for the freedom of certain black per- sons continued right down to the Civil War, but other matters were demanding more attention.
One of these was the use of "spiritous liquors," which caused anxiety among North Carolina Friends as early as 1777.45 It became the custom to report to the yearly meeting each year the number of persons in the local meetings who abstained and those who imbibed. Another concern was about "Plainness in dress and address," which meant wearing the prescribed Quaker garb and using "thee" and "thou." But the absorbing new interest of North Carolina Friends was the New Garden Boarding School established in Guilford County in 1837. The original building, later known as Founders Hall, cost $7,686.871/4, and this was a heavy burden on a society whose adult membership had dropped to 2031 adult members.46 In the minutes of the meeting for sufferings,
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TOWARD FREEDOM FOR ALL
school matters began to receive more attention than the slavery question.
A STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL
The life and traditions of the Society of Friends in North Carolina were disturbed during this period by the rapid growth of the Methodist and Baptist churches. Large camp meetings attracted entire neighborhoods, and the Friends Yearly Meeting found it necessary to warn its members repeatedly about saying "lo here and lo there" as they sought greener spiritual pastures in other fellowships. Quakers were warned against threats to their spiritual well-being by the "hireling ministers" of other churches.47 Examination of the church rolls of any major denomination in any traditionally Quaker community in North Carolina would reveal very quickly how futile the warnings were and how eagerly Quakers responded to the appeal of the evangelical churches. "Quaker names" are everywhere in evidence in the state, although the Quaker membership in North Carolina in 1983 stood at a modest 13,480.48
The concern about discipline and flirtation with other churches was very close to a cry of desperation. The Society could not continue to sustain such heavy losses through emigration and defection to other churches indefinitely. The threat of extinction was real. Virginia Yearly Meeting, faced with similar problems, ceased to function as a yearly meeting in 1844.49
As war approached, another concern completely crowded the slavery question off the agenda of the meeting for sufferings: would Friends be able to remain loyal to the peace testimony as they had during the Revolutionary War? When war actually came, the effort to ensure exemption from military service took precedence over all other matters of business.50 An earnest appeal to both the United States and Confederate congresses in June, 1861, to restore peace, marked the beginning of war matters in the meeting for sufferings, and in September that body sent a circular letter to the monthly meeting urging members to be faithful to the testimony against the bearing of arms.51
For the remainder of the war period, the question of slavery was contested by the belligerents on the battlefield, not by the action of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting of Friends. It would take all the courage and ingenuity Friends could muster to keep their young men out of the army and the prisons and find some way to live in harmony with the rest of the people in the Confederate State of North Carolina.
The Civil War and After
When North Carolina Friends met at New Garden in November of 1861, they met in a nation engaged in civil war. All attempts at a peaceful settlement between North and South had failed, and on May 20, 1861, North Carolina had seceded from the Union. There had been strong Union sentiment in the state earlier in the year, and Judge Thomas Ruffin of North Carolina had attended the peace conference held in Washington in February.1 When secession finally came, however, there was general acceptance of the decision. Although Friends felt strong sympathy for the Union, they assumed an outward stance of neutrality in the conflict. Yet, they were soon made aware that however much they might try to remain aloof, they would not be permitted to do so.
The solemn Minute of Advice addressed to the general membership by the yearly meeting of 1861 declared:
This is a time of peculiar trial; but let none be discouraged. As our country becomes distracted and torn by strife, let us as a people unite more closely together. Though iniquity abound, let not our love wax cold, but rather increase, till, like Abraham, we may be prepared to make any sacrifice which may be called for at our hands.2
Included in this minute was advice to Friends to refuse to pay special war taxes and specifically to reject the exemption tax of five hundred dollars required of religious objectors to war by the Confederate Government. In this they followed the lead of the remnant of Friends in Virginia who had taken a similar stand in their half-yearly meeting.3
There was also a word of caution to Friends in the Minute of Advice against hiring any of the many new slaves then being brought into the piedmont area to replace the young white men who were going off to war. These black persons could be hired for "board and clothing," an arrangement which, of course, did not alter the fact that they were slaves.4
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TOWARD FREEDOM FOR ALL
North Carolina was less committed to the institution of slavery than some of the other states of the Confederacy. Governor Zebulon Vance declared after the war that seven-tenths of the population were not slaveholders,5 and the census of 1860 indicated that only about twenty-eight percent of the families in North Carolina owned slaves at that time.6 Except for the coastal plain, the terrain of North Carolina was not suitable for large plantations, and it seems reasonable to assume that the ethnic composition of the state also contributed to a somewhat stronger tradition of reliance on self. Despite its apparent inef- fectiveness, the work of the Quakers and the Manumission Society must have made some contribution to the more moderate atmosphere in North Carolina.
Among those who did own slaves in 1860, according to the census of that year, were many people with "Quaker" names in all the counties where large numbers of Quakers once lived. In Pasquotank County, Benjamin White, Sr., owned thirteen slaves, Joshua White listed sixty-three and John Simons, thirty- eight. Ironically, a man named Thomas Newby, bearing the same name as the first Quaker to declare his intention to free his slaves in 1774, owned fourteen slaves in Perquimans County in 1860.7 In Guilford County, one of the largest slaveholders was a lawyer named C(yrus) P. Mendenhall, sometime mayor of Greensboro. This Cyrus Mendenhall was definitely not a Quaker, although he was of the Jamestown Quaker family. He listed forty-six slaves in the census of 1860.8
As has been noted, most of the troubles Friends had in the courts concerning slaves arose precisely from disowned heirs who differed from their parents on the matter of slavery. It is fairly certain that no one who was actually a Quaker owned more than one or two slaves in 1860. These were the ones who held legal title to a few individuals "under peculiar circumstances," which were known to the monthly meetings where the owners held their membership. They were not disowned in a few such instances, but simply put "under care."9 There is one notable exception, however, in the case of Delphina E. Mendenhall. She was certainly a Quaker, and in the Guilford County Census of 1860 she listed twenty-seven slaves. 10
GEORGE AND DELPHINA MENDENHALL
The case of Delphina Mendenhall merits special attention. She was the widow and heir of George C. Mendenhall of Jamestown, who had been disowned by the Deep River Friends Meeting on two counts: 1) he married a non-Friend, Eliza Dunn of Montgomery County, and 2) he had become a slaveholder through his wife, who brought fifty slaves to the marriage. George C. Menden- hall continued to live in Jamestown among his relatives, even though disowned by the meeting. Furthermore, as a lawyer, he gave willingly of his talents to the meeting for sufferings in slave cases. He established a law school in Jamestown called "Telmont" and, as already mentioned, served in the state senate. His business affairs, based on the Mendenhall estates which went back to a grant from Lord Granville, prospered mightily. A son, James Ruffin, was born to Eliza
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CIVIL WAR AND AFTER
Dunn, and then the youthful Eliza died, less than two years after the marriage.11
For his second wife, George C. Mendenhall chose Delphina Gardner, a daughter of Barzilla Gardner, a Friend who was very active in the meeting for sufferings in its efforts on behalf of the slaves.12 Delphina shared the strong feel- ings of her father on the subject of slavery; indeed, the freedom of the slaves was her consuming passion. Although her disowned husband was a slave- holder, by accident one might say, he evidently held a strong aversion for the institution himself. Between the two of them, they began to send their slaves to freedom in other states. Delphina Mendenhall aspired to be a poet and wrote a considerable amount of verse, some of which was published.13 One of her unpublished poems described her own adventures in accompanying some of the slaves to free territory. In a style suggestive of Longfellow, she wrote:
Slowly rolled our heavy wagon Slowly fell our lingering footsteps - Though our wheels rolled on toward Freedom, Though each step unbound a chain -
Carolina! Carolina! Joy (of) (&?) grief were strangely blending
Tears of sadness, tears of gladness
In our tearful, wordless farewell, We can never meet again!
Through Virginia's lonely forests, Up her lofty steeps ascending,
We have reached the towering summits, We have crossed the crystal streams; We have rested on her bosom,
We have coiled (?) within her shadows,
We have warmed beneath the radiance, Of her summer's golden beams.
We have pitched our tents at sunset, In the loveliest of her vallies, We have spread our humble pallets, On the green breast of the earth; And around our blazing campfire, Thoughtful faces glowed with feeling, While around our rude rock-table, Little faces shown with mirth.
The poem-narrative continues, describing the beauties and the hazards of the mountain crossing. The Hawk's Nest is mentioned, and this pinpoints the route as passing near present Beckley, West Virginia, where Hawk's Nest State Park is now located. Later she describes the falls of Kanawah River, indicating that the route was roughly that followed today by U.S. Highways 21, 60 and 35,
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TOWARD FREEDOM FOR ALL
terminating at Point Pleasant, West Virginia - Gallipolis, Ohio, at the confluence of the Kanawah and Ohio rivers. Gallipolis was the gateway to Ohio, which for the slaves was free territory. But the narrative of the poem is inconclusive, and the reader is left without a complete account of this journey to freedom for emancipated slaves. 14
In 1859, George C. Mendenhall died, leaving his wife Delphina in vigorous health. He also left her a very large estate, including farms and urban properties in Missouri, lowa, Minnesota, Arkansas, Alabama, and Indiana, as well as his extensive holdings in North Carolina. His will takes up eight and one-half folio pages in the Guilford County Record of Wills, and with respect to his slaves, he declared:
It is my will that all my slaves male and female of every description and by whatever name and all their increase and descendants after the date of this will shall be emancipated and set free from slavery (this not to interfere with those which are conveyed by deed and trust to Thomas C. Dunn) in the manner prescribed by the laws of North Carolina - and that provision be made out of my estate for their removal out of this State and for them to be located in some other State or Government where slavery is not tolerated or allowed by law and for all my slaves to enjoy their freedom, and my Executrix is hereby directed to take all lawful ways and means necessary for emancipating all said slaves. 15
The will thus gave priority to the expenses of removing the slaves and emancipating them. This superceded all other claims in the will after payment of debts.
DELPHINA PROCEEDS ALONE
Ironically, by the terms of this will Delphina Mendenhall, antislavery crusader, found herself a slaveholder when the 1860 census was taken. On the other hand, she could not have had a clearer mandate for freeing the slaves. As a consequence, she devoted much of her time, energy and means to getting them to free territory. In one dramatic instance, tradition says, she was accompany- ing a group of slaves toward Ohio and freedom when she was overtaken enroute by her stepson, James Ruffin Mendenhall, who demanded their return. He was armed with the new law, passed in 186116, which prohibited the freeing of slaves by will. Sadly, Delphina Mendenhall turned back with her slaves. But she was not to be put off so easily.17
In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Delphina Mendenhall wrote to John B. Crenshaw at Richmond, Virginia, concerning a black woman named Harriet Lane who was then living at Petersburg, Virginia. She requested that Crenshaw furnish her (Harriet Lane) with papers to go to Baltimore with a white family under a flag of truce. The white man was to be provided with a power of attorney to set Harriet Lane free in Baltimore.18 Correspondence concerning
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CIVIL WAR AND AFTER
Harriet Lane continued until November of 1863, when Delphina wrote to John B. Crenshaw that Harriet and family had reached Baltimore safely. It was a source of great satisfaction to her to know that they were in a place "where provisions are cheap and plentiful."19 The degree of Delphina's involvement with Harriet Lane in a personal and emotional way is revealed in a letter of July 25, 1864, in which she again brought up the matter. Petersburg was at that time under seige by the Union Army, and Delphina was so relieved that Harriet was no longer in that city that she wrote, "If she were still there, I sometimes think . . . I should have to go to the asylum."20
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