USA > North Carolina > Toward freedom for all : North Carolina Quakers and slavery > Part 13
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Another black woman named Amy Alston was of great concern to Delphina Mendenhall. She had been left in North Carolina when her husband was emancipated and sent to Ohio before the war. In about 1863, he sent Delphina one thousand dollars for the purchase of his wife. Delphina bought her and then appealed to John B. Crenshaw to provide her with a "passport" to join her husband in Ohio. Her plan was to consign her to Miles White, a veteran of the great removal effort thirty years earlier, who was then living in that state.21
It was during 1864 that Delphina undertook an adventure that took her to the enemy lines. In a letter to Judith A. Crenshaw, she related how she started off fourteen black persons on their way to freedom. Accompanied by one J(oseph?) Harris, she left Greensboro at two o'clock in the morning, apparently by train. It was all quite legal, for improbable as it might seem, she had "passports" for all her emigrants. The destination was Baltimore, and thence to Ohio. Arriving at a place called Murphy's Station the next day, they found the depot burned down and went to the home of Friend Joshua Pretlow for shelter from the rain. She continued in her letter:
We went from there across Blackwater to Lawrence's - then to Henry Hare's then to William H. Hares - then to Suffolk - then to the Yankee picket post - 22nd could not go to Norfolk without permission of Genl. Shepley - which would require 3 to 5 days - After only one hour of deliberation, we felt satisfied to send the immigrants on - to Norfolk. A boat was going out next morning to Baltimore - and I hope they are now safe in Ohio.22
Delphina and J. Harris then returned to Jamestown, suffering from colds but well satisfied with their mission. Although they had some opposition, "some- times expressed in words that alarmed our poor people," they had had a strong feeling of divine protection. Local people had been astonished that Delphina had been able to get "passports" for her charges, but she explained in a letter to John B. Crenshaw that "collected statements made by citizens in regard to the necessity and propriety of the removal of certain persons," together with the certificate and seal of the "CC (County?) Clerk as to the respectability of the parties who made the statements" sufficed to secure all "passports" requested from Richmond except one.23
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After the fourteen free blacks had been started toward Ohio in November of 1864, Delphina still had twelve men and boys of those emancipated in her hus- band's will.24 The Supreme Court of North Carolina had validated the will free- ing George C. Mendenhall's slaves, his son James Ruffin notwithstanding.25
A year after the dramatic trip to the "Yankee Picket Post," Delphina wrote to John B. Crenshaw that the "family" of fourteen had arrived safely in Ohio and were under the tutelage of A.S. Benedict, a Quaker minister.26 At that time she still had seven black persons remaining of the twelve she had the year before. These seven were exempt from the draft, because they were working on the railroad.27
In the midst of all this activity on behalf of the blacks by Delphina Mendenhall, there were practical problems to be faced on the Mendenhall estates at James- town. As soon as the fourteen were gone in 1864, Delphina distributed "the provisions these persons would have consumed," among the remaining ones who were "just 'ready to perish.' " The joy of humanitarian service was mingled with the burden of sustaining a small colony of people. She promised to write to Judith Crenshaw "as soon as the trial of providing clothing, & homes, for the col. boys is off my hands."28
No doubt other Friends in North Carolina found ways to help slaves to free- dom during the Civil War, but as noted, the major anxiety of Friends in the state was the pressing one of holding fast to the peace testimony and working dili- gently to help those Quakers who were forced into the army or were imprisoned.
AFTER THE WAR
When the war finally came to an end and the century-long dream of Friends was realized with the final emancipation of all slaves, Delphina Mendenhall celebrated the occasion with a poem:
The Freedman's Song
Midst glorious Alleluiahs, loud Resounding through the holy Heavens, Our Father's tender ear still bowed To deep, low groans - our chain is riven!
Four long, sad, and dreary years, We heard the raging Red Sea roar,
The awful Sea of Blood and Tears - Its surges stilled, we tread the shore.
Free! Free as the mountain breezes are - Free as the deep's blue, bounding wave - Free as the beaming of the star - Free from the cradle to the grave!
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CIVIL WAR AND AFTER
Four millions disenthralled we stand - Four millions with unfettered feet - Four millions with unshackled hand To raise toward the Mercy-seat!29
Many years later, another Quaker woman recalled the war years. She was Mary Mendenhall Hobbs, the daughter of Nereus Mendenhall, granddaughter of Richard Mendenhall, and grandniece of George C. Mendenhall - and a person as remarkable in her own right as Delphina Mendenhall. She wrote of those years:
We had been a little band of believers in peace in the midst of war, of antislavery abolitionists in the heart of slave territory, of hearts almost to a unit loyal to the Union in the midst of secession. The way had not been strewn with flowers. Espionage and a degree of persecution had drawn us closer together and intensified both our principles and our prejudices. We had had almost no intercourse with the outside world . . . 30
The feeling of isolation and loneliness described by Mary Mendenhall Hobbs, coupled with the depressed state of the economy, caused many North Carolina Quakers to think again of emigration. Some had had to postpone earlier plans to go west because of the war, and at its end they were free to go. After so many years of migration, most of them already had relatives in the West, and the latter often urged them to escape from the devastated South. Addison Coffin, by then a long-time resident of Indiana, became an active immigrant agent and claimed to have arranged for sixteen thousand persons to leave North and South Carolina between 1865 and 1872. He calculated that about one-tenth of this number were Friends.31
The encouragement of emigration by Addison Coffin was counterbalanced by the work of Francis T. King, representing the Baltimore Association of Friends. He made thirty-five visits to North Carolina, encouraging Quakers to remain and devote themselves to rebuilding the economy and institutions of the state. The Association helped organize and staff forty-one schools, and dur- ing the peak year of 1870 there were 2,774 pupils enrolled in them. Between 1865 and 1887, the Baltimore Association spent $138,300 on aid to North Caro- lina Friends, including, in addition to the schools, a model farm at Springfield (near High Point), crucial assistance to New Garden Boarding School, repairs to old meetinghouses, and construction of new ones. The work was supported by all American yearly meetings and, most heavily of all, by the London and Dublin yearly meetings.32
Schools for Freedmen were a program of the Baltimore Association, and they prospered under Friends care for several years. In 1867, they maintained six such day schools and twenty-one Sunday Schools in North Carolina with an
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estimated attendance of between sixteen hundred and two thousand. After 1872, however, little more is heard of these schools.33 More permanent was the High Point Normal and Industrial Institute for black children at High Point, which was sponsored by the New York Yearly Meeting. This school later became the William Penn High School and continued until 1968 as a part of the High Point City School System. In that year, it became a part of the new biracial T. Wingate Andrews High School, and S.E. Burford, the black principal of William Penn, was made principal of the new school.34
Despite the laudable work with blacks undertaken in cooperation with the Baltimore Association and the New York Yearly Meeting in the post-war years, it must be said that by and large the prevalent race attitudes of the region gradually found their way into the Religious Society of Friends in North Carolina. Afro-Americans did not join Friends meetings in any significant numbers, nor would they have been welcome in most of them. Guilford College, which became the successor to New Garden Boarding School in 1888, admitted its first black student in 1962, eight years after the Supreme Court decision which initiated the integration of the public schools.35
The North Carolina Yearly Meeting, weakened in numbers, continued along the lines which were developing before the Civil War: There was ever-growing interest in the liquor question and in the development of New Garden Boarding School-Guilford College. Gradually, prejudice against a "hireling ministry" diminished, and patterns of worship and organization came to bear more and more resemblance to those of the dominant Baptist and Methodist churches. By mid-twentieth century nearly all Friends meetings in the North Carolina Yearly Meeting had paid pastors. Plainness in "dress and address" faded, and the attire of Quakers came to be like that of their neighbors. Only rarely did one hear the "thee" and "thou" of their ancestors. Disownment for marrying a non-Friend was a dim memory; indeed, disownment for any cause was almost unheard of. Growth of the yearly meeting was not spectacular, but respectable, in terms of a denomination used to small numbers. At 13,480, it stood as one of the major Friends yearly meetings in the world in 1983.36 The low point had been reached in 1866, when there was an adult membership of only 1,785.37
Activity in race relations was greatly stimulated among North Carolina Friends by the establishment of a regional office of the American Friends Service Committee in Greensboro in 1947. Enlisting the help of North Carolina Friends, as well as like-minded non-Friends, this body pioneered in the fields of school integration and equal opportunity in employment. Across the state, individual Friends were commonly found on committees smoothing the way for this social revolution, even when their local meetings were sometimes reluctant to have any part in it. As in the case of the slave controversy, the national consensus finally prevailed over regional reluctance, but this time there was fortunately no resort to civil war. In the long run, Friends have been active in the transition, both as individuals and in their institutions.
In retrospect, it must be said that the century preceding the Civil War was a
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very remarkable one in the three-hundred-year history of the Society of Friends in North Carolina. That was an age when an entire religious fellowship made a covenant with God that it would cleanse itself of the taint of holding men and women in bondage, whatever the cost. It held steadfast for nearly a century, faced great inconvenience and made great personal sacrifices, petitioned the legislature incessantly for a change in the laws, fought for the freedom of manumitted slaves in court, and delivered more than a thousand slaves from bondage into freedom. No generation since has equaled it in courage to tilt at the windmills of the state and majority opinion in order, as they said, that "men's liberties might be enlarged."
Notes
THE ORIGINS OF NORTH CAROLINA QUAKERISM
1. Edmund S. Morgan. "The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18," American Historical Review 76 (1971), pp. 595-611.
2. These matters are well chronicled. This treatment follows Elbert Russell, The History of Quakerism (Richmond, Ind .: Friends United Press, 1979), pp. 18- 29. James Nayler became the object of adoration by his followers in a famous reenactment of Jesus' Triumphal Entry, which Christians remember on Palm Sunday. He was called Prince of Peace and Son of God, all of which brought him condemnation for blasphemy. He suffered cruel punishment. Later, he was reconciled to Friends, and his dying words are a classic of Quaker literature.
3. Ibid., pp. 67-72.
4. Ibid., p. 138.
5. Rufus M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (London: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 28, 417-22.
6. Sidney V. James, A People Among Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 1-22. A lucid and perceptive summary.
7. Jones, op. cit., chronicles the establishment of these yearly meetings.
8. In the case of a foreign visit, authorization was by the yearly meeting. For example, at the North Carolina Yearly Meeting of 1818, Nathan Hunt expressed a concern to visit Friends in England. The yearly meeting, acting on the recom- mendation of his monthly and quarterly meetings, directed the select commit- tee to issue him a certificate, and the standing committee was directed to supply him with funds from the treasury. North Carolina Yearly Meeting Minutes, 1818, 160-161.
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NOTES
9. North Carolina Yearly Meeting Minutes, October 14, 1757, and November, 1824. Hereinafter, the minutes of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting will be referred to as NCYMM.
10. James, op. cit., p. 17.
11. Hugh T. Lefler and Albert Newsome, The History of a Southern State, North Carolina, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), pp. 5-11.
12. William L. Saunders, The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, 1 (Raleigh 1886-1890), pp. 187-206.
13. Ibid., 20-33.
14. Ibid., 187-206.
15. Ibid., 601-602.
16. Hugh T. Lefler, North Carolina History as Told to Contemporaries, 2d ed. (Chapel Hill: University of N.C. Press, 1948), citing William Byrd, Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, ed. by W.K. Boyd, pp. 54,72, 90,96.
17. Lefler and Newsome, op. cit., pp. 41-42.
18. Jones, op. cit., pp. 284, 285-287.
19. William Edmundson, A Journal of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, and Labor of Love in the Work of the Ministry of that Worthy Elder, and Faithful Servant of Jesus Christ, William Edmundson (Dublin: S. Fairbrother, 1715), pp. 53, 97.
20. Jones, op. cit., pp. 286, 307.
21. Ibid., pp. 343-353. See also Henry G. Hood, Jr., The Public Career of John Archdale (1642-1717), (Greensboro, N.C .: North Carolina Friends Historical Society, 1976).
22. Jones, op. cit., p. 286.
23. Lefler and Newsome, op. cit., p. 59.
24. Saunders, op. cit., 1, p. 596.
25. Saunders, op. cit., Il, pp. 260-261. Cited by Hugh T. Lefler, op. cit., pp. 54-55.
26. Saunders, op. cit., 1, pp. 187-206.
27. Robert Horne, Narratives of Early Colonies, 1650-1708, edited by A.S. Salley, pp. 65-73. n.d., n.p.
28. Saunders, op. cit., 1, pp. 86, 204.
29. Oscar T. Barck and Hugh T. Lefler, Colonial America (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 48.
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30. Saunders, op. cit., Il, pp. 260-261.
31. Barck and Lefler, op. cit., p. 240.
32. Saunders, op. cit., Ill, pp. 90-118.
33. Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven, Conn .: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 23-24.
34. Addison Coffin, Early Settlement of Friends in North Carolina, Traditions and Reminiscences (Greensboro, N.C .: Friends Historical Collection, 1894. Ms.). This manuscript is published in part in The Southern Friend (Greensboro: 1983) 5, nos. 1-2.
QUAKERS AND SLAVERY IN COLONIAL NORTH CAROLINA
1. Rufus M. Jones, Quakers in the American Colonies (London: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 111, 510.
2. North Carolina Yearly Meeting Minutes, October 26, 1789. This is a para- phrase and summary of the queries.
3. Since Friends did not concede that the established church was in fact a church, this term being reserved for the invisible body of the faithful, they al- ways added "so-called" in reference to the church tax.
4. NCYMM, 1757. Perquimans Monthly Meeting reported sufferings in the amount of 30 pounds, 13 shillings and 10 pence.
5. John Griffith, A Journal of the Life, Travels and Labours in the Ministry of John Griffith (London: J. Phillips, 1779), p. 375.
6. Philip P. Moulton, The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman (New York: Oxford, 1971).
7. C. Henry Smith and Cornelius Krahn, The Story of the Mennonites, 3d ed. (Newton, Kan .: Mennonite Publication Office, 1950), p. 534. Mennonites also have laid claim to this first protest against slavery.
8. Meeting for Sufferings, A Narrative of Some of the Proceedings of North Carolina Yearly Meeting on the Subject of Slavery Within its Limits (Greens- borough, N.C .: Swain and Sherwood, 1848), p. 5.
9. Ibid.
10. Minutes of the Perquimans Monthly Meeting, June 6, 1738.
11. NCYMM, August 3, 1740.
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NOTES
12. Ibid., October 10, 1755.
13. Ibid., October 15, 1758.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid. October 29, 1768.
16. New Garden Monthly Meeting Minutes, January 28, 1769.
17. William Wade Hinshaw, Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, vol. 1-7, (Ann Arbor, Mich .: Edwards Bros. Distributors, 1936-1962).
18. Moulton, op. cit.
19. Hugh T. Lefler and Albert R. Newsome, North Carolina, The History of a Southern State (Chapel Hill: University of N.C. Press, 1965), pp. 70-71.
20. Richard F. Zuber, Jonathan Worth, a Biography of a Southern Unionist (Chapel Hill: University of N.C. Press, 1965).
Ethel Arnett, William Swaim, Fighting Editor (Greensboro, N.C .: Piedmont Press, 1963).
Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, 2d ed. (Cincinnati: R. Clarke and Co., 1880).
E. Hudson Long, O. Henry, The Man and His Works (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949).
21. New Garden Monthly Meeting Minutes, October 28, 1775; February 28, 1778.
22. Ibid., August 29, 1772.
23. NCYMM, October 26, 1770.
24. Ibid., October 25, 1771.
25. Ibid.
26. NCYMM, February 23, 1771.
27. Ibid., October 23, 1772. Letter dated December 10, 1771.
28. Ibid. Copy in minutes for October 25, 1771.
29. Lefler and Newsome, op. cit., pp. 171-178.
30. Minutes of the Cane Creek Monthly Meeting, April 1, 1769. The 1764 date is given in Hinshaw, Encyclopedia, I, p. 9, addenda & errata.
31. Minutes of the New Garden Monthly Meeting, August 31, 1771.
32. Ibid., July 30, 1768.
33. NCYMM, October 23, 1772.
34. Ibid.
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35. Minutes of the Wells-Perquimans Monthly Meeting, May 5, 1773.
36. The standing committee was then the permanent body which handled the business of the yearly meeting between sessions.
37. NCYMM, copy in the minutes of July 11, 1772.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., November 23, 1773.
40. Minutes of the Wells-Perquimans Monthly Meeting, April 6, 1774.
41. NCYMM, October 23, 1774.
42. Minutes of the Wells-Perquimans Monthly Meeting, August 9, 1774.
43. NCYMM, October 27, 1775.
44. Ibid., August 24, 1777.
45. Helen C. Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro. (Washington: Carnegie Institute, 1926), p. 4.
46. NCYMM, August 24, 1777.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., August 26, 1778.
49. Ibid., August 22, 1779.
50. Adelaide Fries, Records of the Moravians (Raleigh, N.C .: Edwards and Broughton Printing Co., 1922), p. 897.
51. Catterall, op. cit., p. 4.
52. John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: Uni- versity of North Carolina Press, 1943), pp. 20-23.
53. For example, at a sheriff's sale of emancipated slaves by Perquimans County Court on July 17, 1789, informers received "29-2-9" as their share of the proceeds. Slave Papers, Archives of the Perquimans County Court, North Caro- lina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh.
54. William L. Saunders, The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, XIII (Raleigh, 1886-1890), p. 697.
55. Box of Petitions sent by North Carolina Yearly Meeting, Friends Historical Collection, Guilford College, Greensboro, N.C.
56. NCYMM, August 22, 1779.
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NOTES
SLAVES GIVEN FREEDOM
1. North Carolina Yearly Meeting Minutes, October 26, 1781, and October 28, 1799.
2. Ibid., November 1, 1791.
3. Cane Creek Monthly Meeting Minutes, May 5, 1764.
4. Fernando Cartland, Southern Heroes (Cambridge, Mass .: Riverside Press, 1895), pp. 41-42.
5. Andrew A. Lipscomb, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the U.S., 1903), 1, p. 34.
6. Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1918), p. 425.
7. Nicholas Halasz, The Rattling Chains (New York: D. Mckay Co., 1966), p. 59.
8. Minutes of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, XX, 349, 351, 352 and passim. Also Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 109.
9. Slave Papers, Perquimans County Court, 1759-1799, North Carolina Depart- ment of Archives and History, Raleigh.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. NCYMM, October 24, 1777.
13. Slave Papers, Perquimans County Court, 1759-1799.
14. NCYMM, August 24, 25, 1777.
15. Ibid., October 29, 1776.
16. Slave Papers, Perquimans County Court, 1759-1799.
17. Stephen B. Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1896), p. 8.
18. North Carolina General Assembly, Acts Passed by the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina at the Session of 1830-1831 (Raleigh, 1831), v, pp. 12-14.
19. Slave Papers, Perquimans County Court, 1759-1799.
20. Ibid., 1759-1864.
21. Ibid.
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22. Slave Papers, Pasquotank County Court, 1799-1818, North Carolina Depart- ment of Archives and History, Raleigh.
23. Nathan Mendenhall to Richard Jordan, October 11, 1826. Item 59. Corre- spondence of the meeting for sufferings, Friends Historical Collection. Guilford College. Hereinafter referred to as "Items."
24. Ms. Item 3.
25. Ms. Item A-1.
26. Slave Papers, Perquimans County Court, 1759-1799.
27. David White to Richard Mendenhall, December 5, 1825. Item 19.
28. NCYMM, October 26, 1781.
29. Extracts from the minutes of the Old Neck Preparative Meeting, Wells- Perquimans Monthly Meeting, Regarding Slavery, Friends Historical Collection, Guilford College.
30. Minutes of Contentnea Quarterly Meeting, January 12, 1793.
31. NCYMM, October 26, 1781.
32. Ibid., October 25, 1782.
33. Ibid., October 24, 1783.
34. Ibid., October 27, 1783.
35. Saunders, Colonial and State Records of North Carolina (Raleigh, 1886- 1890), XXIV, 20, 1788, p. 964.
36. J.S. Bassett, "Slavery in the State of North Carolina," Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 16 (1896): No. 6, p. 20.
37. Ibid.
38. Slave papers, Perquimans County Court, 1759-1799.
39. Ibid.
40. NCYMM, October 26, 1778.
41. Ibid., November 28, 1788. Saunders, op. cit., XX, 225, November 26, 1787.
42. NCYMM, November 28, 1788.
43. Ibid., October 31, 1791.
44. Ibid., October 29, 1792.
45. Ibid., October 28, 1793.
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NOTES
46. Copies of these petitions with a description of their reception are to be found in the North Carolina Yearly Meeting Minutes as follows: October 31, 1791; October 29, 1792; October 28, 1793; October 26, 1795 (containing also a description of a petition prepared in 1794); October 31, 1796; October 30, 1797; October 29, 1798; October 28, 1799; and October 31, 1803.
47. NCYMM, October 29, 1798.
48. Ibid., October 31, 1803.
49. Joshua Evans, Friends Miscellany: Containing Journals of . .. Joshua Evans and John Hunt, edited by John and Isaac Comly. (Philadelphia: Byberry. Printed by J. Richards, 1837) 10, pp. 144-146.
50. NCYMM, October 30, 1797, and October 26, 1801.
51. Weeks, op. cit., p. 269.
52. Ibid.
53. See Chapter VIII for a more ample treatment of this topic.
54. NCYMM, October 29, 1798. See also Henry J. Cadbury, "Negro membership in the Society of Friends," Journal of Negro History (1936) 21, pp. 151-213.
55. See Anne C. Loveland, "Evangelicalism and 'Immediate Emancipation' in American Antislavery Thought," Journal of Southern History (May 1966), 32, pp. 172-188.
56. Epistle from London Yearly Meeting, 1791, Friends Historical Collection, Guilford College.
57. Charles Osborne, Journal of that Faithful Servant of Christ, Charles Osborne, Containing an Account of Many Trials and Exercises in the Service of the Lord, and in the Defense of the Truth, as it is in Jesus. (Cincinnati: Printed by Achilles Pugh, 1854), p. 185. Quoted by Patrick Sowle, "The North Carolina Manumission Society, 1816-1834," North Carolina Historical Review (1965), 42, no. 1, pp. 47-49.
58. Daniel Worth later became a Wesleyan Methodist preacher of note and an ardent abolitionist in Indiana, where he became the first president of the Indiana State Antislavery Society. Sent by his church as an antislavery mission- ary to North Carolina when in advanced years, he accused "the Quaker Church - with all its antislavery pretensions - with being one of the firmest props the infernal institution has in the land." His zeal landed him in the Greensboro jail in 1859, but he was eventually released through the efforts of his cousin, Jona- than Worth. Noble J. Talbert, "Daniel Worth, Tar Heel Abolitionist," North Carolina Historical Review (July 1962), 39, no. 59, p. 290
59. The historian, Charles A. Beard, was descended from the North Carolina Beard family of Quakers. His grandfather married a non-Quaker and was dis-
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