USA > North Carolina > Toward freedom for all : North Carolina Quakers and slavery > Part 2
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As was to be true for nearly three centuries, North Carolina (including a few meetings in South Carolina and Georgia) was the last southern outpost of Quaker settlement. Edmundson had been visiting the Quakers in the growing colony of Virginia before he undertook to cross the forbidding Dismal Swamp to the Carolina settlements on Albemarle Sound. He wrote in his journal:
It was all wilderness and no English inhabitants or padways, only some marked padways to guide people; the first day's journey we did pretty well, and lay that night in the woods, as we often used to in these Parts. The next Day being Wet Weather we were sorely soyled in Swamps and Rivers, and one of the two that were with me for a guide, was at a stand to know which way the Place lay we
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were to go unto; I perceived he was at a Loss, turned my mind to the Lord, and as He led me, I led the Way.
Soaked to the skin and famished, they finally arrived at the home of Henry Phillips where they were warmly welcomed. Edmundson testifies to the rude state of culture in the area in his comments on the people who gathered in the Phillips home for what was to be the first recorded religious meeting in North Carolina:
Now about the hour appointed many People came, but they had little or no Religion, for they all sat down in the Meeting smoking their pipes; but in a little time the Lord's Testimony arose in the Authority of His Power, and their Hearts being reached with it, several were tendered and received the Testimony.19
Word of this meeting spread, and other meetings were held throughout the area. Later in the same year, George Fox, the founder himself, came from England to pay a visit to Virginia and North Carolina. From the meetings held by these two missionaries, the religious community grew until, in 1698, it was deemed that there were enough local groups to form a yearly meeting. The meeting was held, and North Carolina Yearly Meeting was established in that year. It has met annually since that time.20
EARLY QUAKER IMPACT
The obvious freedom enjoyed by Friends in colonial North Carolina and their considerable success in proselytizing among the populace, led them to become a political force as well. In 1695, a British Quaker, John Archdale, was appointed governor of the colony, and Quakers controlled the colonial assembly during his term.21 Archdale was a highly successful governor, but his term was brief, and the influence of Friends declined in the period following his departure. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Friends in North Carolina, in spite of their singular views regarding the oath, the established church, and war, became accustomed from the beginning to participating in government and to concern- ing themselves with public affairs. This was a custom which they never lost. While it is true that they often found themselves in opposition to government policies, they acknowledged the proper function of government, were loyal to the crown and the republic in turn, and felt a duty to be politically relevant.
The pacifism and egalitarianism of the Quakers caused them to hold special views regarding the Indians. When George Fox visited North Carolina in 1672, he made it a point to call an Indian to him and "asked him whether or not when he lied or did anything wrong to any, there was not something in him that reproved him for it. He said that there was such a thing in him that did so reprove him and make him ashamed."22 Fox used this as an object lesson of the need to treat the Indian with respect and compassion. William Penn's insistence on purchasing Indian lands is well known, and North Carolina Quakers shared his
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TOWARD FREEDOM FOR ALL
views. They believed that peace with the Indians depended on proper treat- ment of them, rather than using preponderant military force. Consequently, Quakers refused to serve in the militia for this reason, as well as for their general objection to war. Governor Edward Hyde found himself in serious straits during the Indian troubles of 1711-1714, known as the Tuscarora War, because the Quakers would not serve. 23
A TRULY NATIVE CHURCH
In sum, the early Quakers of North Carolina lived in a society with few refine- ments and were accustomed to a high degree of individual freedom. William Edmundson, in common with other visitors, even found the inhabitants some- what primitive and crude. Unlike the colonists in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, they were not, for the most part, religious refugees. By and large they were native-born Americans. Most of them had probably drifted in from Virginia, as William Byrd indicated, and a few, like Henry Phillips, had come from other American colonies. Some who were already Friends in Virginia crossed the Dismal Swamp to settle in eastern North Carolina, but the bulk of this early Quaker community consisted of converts from among the unchurched inhabit- ants who met in Henry Phillips' home to hear the preaching of William Edmundson, George Fox and others who followed later. When the North Caro- lina Yearly Meeting of Friends was established in 1698 it was probably as native as any organization could be in a continent made up mostly of immigrants. It was a religious community made up of spiritual descendants of British Quakers, but many of its members were not related to them by blood. Although the seed was planted by Englishmen, the fruit was very much American.
Everything indicates that the overwhelming majority of early Quakers in North Carolina were simple farmers, wresting a living as best they could from the lowlands surrounding Albemarle Sound and along the shores of the Perquimans and Chowan rivers. An historical marker at Hertford marks the place where George Fox and William Edmundson are said to have preached. Once a nucleus was established in the seventeenth century, Friends grew and the population grew. Their first meetinghouse of record, built at Pasquotank in 1704, is said to have been the first house of worship built in the colony,24 and for many years Friends constituted the most numerous religious sect within its confines. Although the strict discipline of the Society and its unusual views prevented Quakerism from remaining a majority religion, the descendants of that first small group gradually spread across the state westward, settling particularly in the piedmont region. The history of North Carolina Quakers and the families associated with them is deeply intertwined with the entire history of the state.
SLAVERY IN NORTH CAROLINA
Slavery in some form existed in North Carolina almost from the beginning of the colony. There, as in other colonies, Indian prisoners of war were some- times forced into slavery, and even Indian children were sometimes enslaved.
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ORIGINS OF NORTH CAROLINA QUAKERISM
The use of indentured labor in early English America must also be mentioned as a stage on the way to a universally free labor class such as exists in America today. The indentured servant, usually working off ship passage to America, was the victim of a genteel kind of debt slavery; but the period of his service was limited, and escape was often possible. As Anglican missionary John Urmstone complained in 1716, "white servants are seldom worth keeping and never stay out the time indented for."25
But if limited debt slavery was unreliable, neither does it appear that Indian slavery was very successful from the white man's point of view, for it was not practiced on a wide scale. Spain had long since furnished the precedent for a "solution" to the labor problem by importing a hardier African race into the Caribbean Islands, a precedent followed by the British in Barbados and Jamaica, as well as in Virginia.
The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina reveal that the English recognized slavery as proper for the colonies, despite the fact that Europe had been virtual- ly free of slavery for centuries. Section 110 of the 1669 edition reads: "Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves ... "26 In a pamphlet issued by the Lords Proprietors in 1666 to attract settlers, it was declared:
Thirdly, every Free-man and Free-woman that transports them- selves and Servants by the 25 of March next, being 1667, shall have for Himself, Wife and Children and Men-servants, for each 100 Acres of Land for him and his Heirs and for every Woman- servant and Slave 50 acres, paying at most 1/2 d. per acre per annum . . . 27
The earliest known reference to the possession of black slaves in North Caro- lina appears in the Colonial Records of North Carolina in 1699, when "five white men in the Albemarle region of the colony of North Carolina appeared in court to 'prove their right to land' by the importation of eight slaves."28 On the other hand, the first shipload of African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619,29 and the proximity of the early North Carolina settlements to the Jamestown area can only mean that the North Carolinians were familiar with black slavery long before 1699.
The labor involved in taming a virgin country was immense, and the habit of relying on others for domestic service was a heritage from England. The Reverend John Urmstone, mentioned above, was a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in North Carolina, and in 1716 he wrote a letter to the treasurer of the Society in England giving him his version of the state of the labor market. He was pleading for "3 or 4 negroes . . . from Guinea," for, he said, "there is no living without servants there are none to be hired of any colour and none of the black kind to be sold good for any- thing under 50 or 60 pounds . . . "30
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The demand for slaves was apparent by their high price and by the fact that the slave trade out of Africa was at that time extremely profitable. Following Queen Anne's War, England obtained the coveted asiento (privilege to import African slaves) from Spain in 1712, permitting her to ship up to 4,800 blacks annually to the Spanish colonies over a thirty-year period.31 It was during this period of flourishing slave trade that George Burrington, appointed royal governor of North Carolina in 1730, was urged by the crown to give special attention to the matter of slavery in the colony. Section 106 of his instructions reads:
You are to give all due encouragement and invitation to Merchants and others who shall bring trade into our said Province or any- wise contribute to the advantage and in particular to the Royal African Company and others of our subjects trading in Africa. And as we are willing to recommend unto the said company and others our subjects that the said province may have a constant and suffi- cient supply of Merchantable Negroes at moderate rates in money or commodities so you are to take special care that payment be duly made within a competent time according to their respective agreements . . . 32
We find, then, that African slavery not only had the official sanction of the British Crown, but that the crown urged its extension for commercial reasons. The Lords Proprietors encouraged the practice. The moral miopia of North Carolina Friends led them to accept slavery as a natural and normal thing. Nor were they alone in this within their own church, for from Virginia to Massachu- setts, Quakers held slaves. Even that champion of human rights, William Penn, owned slaves. 33
The only people in North Carolina who took the part of black people in this early period were, perhaps, the Indians. When slaves ran away from their owners, the Indians protected them as allies against the common enemy - the white man.34 Quakers at that time professed no doctrine condemning human slavery per se. In the long run, they were to find themselves rejecting it from the logic of their belief in the Inner Light, or "that of God in every one." Being essentially egalitarian, they found it impossible in the end to live comfortably from the fruits of a race in bondage.
Quakers and Slavery in Colonial North Carolina
The Religious Society of Friends was not an antislavery society. It was a church, no matter how much it may have differed from the established church, and, consequently, it was concerned with the right relationship of persons with God and of people with one another. Had Quakers been persuaded that slavery was the proper relationship between persons in different stations of life, so ordered by divine providence, they might well have been its staunchest supporters. That their founder, George Fox, held views that were basically incompatible with slavery is evident in the charge laid against him by the planters of Barbados that he incited the slaves there to revolt.1 Yet, Fox denied having done so, and the earliest Quakers in North Carolina, as those in America generally, did not hold it an evil thing to own slaves. They were concerned with pleasing God, and, in the pietistic theology which they held, this meant being kind to one's neighbor, achieving and maintaining unimpeachable integrity of character, and renouncing the world, the flesh, and the devil. Modern Ameri- cans may have some difficulty in identifying this trilogy, but early Quakers in North Carolina came to have it all quite clearly defined.
The matter was spelled out in some detail in the queries, a kind of non-creed still used by Friends, which probe Quaker consciences concerning many things. These queries were revised from time to time, and, like an amended Consti- tution, reflected a living reaction to the issues confronting the generation in course. In the late eighteenth century, North Carolina Friends were asked to reflect on these things when they gathered in their monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings.
(Did Friends:)
1. Attend meetings for worship and discipline regularly?
2. Behave properly in meeting - not give in to "drowsiness?"
3. Maintain love and unity?
4. Avoid talebearing and detraction?
5. Observe plainness?
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6. Teach their children to read the Scripture and train them in religion?
7. Avoid excessive use of spirituous liquors?
8. Avoid frequenting taverns and places of diversion except when "necessary?"
9. Avoid gambling and lotteries?
10. Refrain from importing, purchasing or disposing of mankind as slaves? (1789)
11. Instruct the Negroes under their care in moral living?
12. Relieve the necessities of the poor and educate their children?
13. Refrain from suing at the law except in those cases permitted by the monthly meeting?
14. Draw up proper wills?
15. Keep a faithful record of marriages, births and deaths ??
The monthly meeting minutes reflect a formidable concern for moral living, and such peccadillos as dancing and card playing demanded a great deal of attention, as did sexual irregularities and drinking to excess. There was also great concern for integrity in business, and no one was allowed to make an official visit to another yearly meeting, or in any way represent Friends, until a committee had ascertained if his business affairs were in order.
Touching public life, two matters were of great moment to Friends in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: 1) the payment of the church tax, "so- called,"3 and military service, or as they usually put it, "attending muster." They flatly refused to comply with either, and year after year the yearly meeting received reports of "sufferings" from the subordinate meetings. These sufferings usually consisted of the forced payment of the tithe and the payment of fines for not attending muster. "Sufferings" were thus computed in pounds, shillings and pence, and the total appears in each yearly meeting report.4
How did Friends arrive at the rules and regulations by which they ordered their lives in North Carolina? George Fox, William Edmundson, and the other Quaker patriarchs were, of course, the prime source of their notions, and, after them, the living Quaker communities in the other colonies and in England. The colonies were dominions of the British Crown, a fact which North Carolina Quakers devoutly remembered, and, in similar fashion, North Carolina Yearly Meeting was a kind of subsidiary of the London Yearly Meeting. The distance was very great and transportation woefully slow, yet the London Epistles came every year, and British Friends were by no means infrequent visitors. The London Yearly Meeting was regarded as the mother yearly meeting, and great weight was attached to any precedent set by that body, or to any counsel it might give.
On the other hand, if North Carolina looked up to London, it is not surprising to find that British Friends sometimes regarded North Carolina Friends with some condescension and even dismay. Such a view was expressed by English Friend John Griffith when he visited North Carolina in 1765. In his Journal he described the Cane Creek Monthly Meeting as self-righteous and filled with a
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spirit of contention and Pharisaism. Although there were a few "living sensible members," they were "borne down and discouraged." Without knowing the history of the meeting, he was "persuaded that many of those under our name have removed from Pennsylvania and other places to those parts, in their own wills, having taken counsel of their own depraved hearts," instead of relying on the advice of their monthly meetings in such matters, as was Friends' custom. Such people, thought Griffith, were "unfit for spiritual building." In the meeting for worship on first day (Sunday) "there was much darkness and death over them."5
At no time in his Journal does John Griffith have anything to say about slavery in North Carolina. It was left to an American, John Woolman, to do that. Woolman was a native of Mount Holly, New Jersey, and a tailor by trade. As was the custom among Friends, he was also an active minister without relinquishing the trade by which he made his living. He was also a notary public, and on one occasion he was asked to draw up a will for a man who was passing on his slaves to his son. Woolman was so disturbed by the thought of helping anyone hold human beings in bondage for life that he found his hand paralyzed by his conscience. This was something he simply could not do. When he explained his predicament to the slaveholder, he found that he also had a troubled conscience, and, in the end, he decided to free his slaves at his death.
The slave question weighed on Woolman's mind so much that he began to devote more and more time to antislavery activity. At first he traveled among northern yearly meetings, and then in 1757 he turned his attention toward the South. Traveling on horseback, he visited Quakers in Virginia and then crossed the Dismal Swamp into North Carolina. There he visited the meetings at Wells, Simons (Symons) Creek, Newbegun Creek, Little River, Old Neck, and Piney Woods in Pasquotank and Perquimans counties. It is interesting to note that what most disturbed Woolman about slavery, as he observed it in North Carolina, was the effect it had on the Quakers who owned slaves. Being accustomed to earning his own living, he was struck by the indolence of the slaveholders, especially the young, whom he found callous in their attitudes toward the slaves. Unable to visit the "back settlements" at Cane Creek and New Garden, in Alamance and Guilford Counties, he addressed an epistle to them. It said in part:
When slaves are purchased to do our labour numerous difficulties attend it. To rational creatures bondage is uneasy, and frequently occasions sourness and discontent in them; which affects the family and such as claim mastery over them. Thus people and their children are many times encompassed with vexations, which arise from their applying wrong methods to get a living.
I have been informed that there is a large number of Friends in your parts who have no slaves; and in tender and most affection- ate love I beseech you that you keep clear of purchasing any.
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Look, my dear Friends, to Divine Providence, and follow in simplicity that exercise of the body, that plainness and frugality, which true wisdom leads to; so you may be preserved from those dangers which attend such as are aiming at outward ease and greatness.6
UNEASINESS ABOUT SLAVERY BEGINS TO EMERGE
While these words on slavery have been widely read by Quakers and others in Woolman's Journal, there is no record in the minutes of the meetings he visited that he even spoke there. Yet, the question of slavery was certainly on the minds of Friends in North Carolina long before Woolman's visit. Much as they relied on the London Yearly Meeting, they also kept in touch with other American yearly meetings, especially Philadelphia. The Germantown Protest against slavery reached Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1688,7 and the latter testified against slavery in 1696.8 The New England Yearly Meeting had made slaveholding grounds for expulsion (a disownable offence) in 1715.9 In the minutes of the Perquimans Monthly Meeting, in Perquimans County, North Carolina, there is an entry concerning the Sunday activities of slaves in 1738. "This meeting order," it reads,"that no frend or frends Shall Suffer ye Negroes to Labour on the first Day of the Weeke or Runn about Without Buseness for their Masters or Mistresses and the meeting adjourns."10 This appears to be the first mention of slavery in the Quaker records of North Carolina. But the first mention of slavery in the minutes of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting is a message received from the Virginia Yearly Meeting in 1740 "concerning bear- ing of arms or going to muster; and using Negroes well . . . "11
In 1755, the yearly meeting received an epistle from the Meeting of Ministers and Elders of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting which contained a "tender caution and advice against buying and keeping Negroes and other slaves all which was read and approved by this meeting."12 The yearly meeting revised Query Seven in 1758 to read: "Are all that have Negroes Careful to use them well and Encourage them to come to meetings as much as they can?"13 In the same year special religious meetings were appointed for blacks, with some white Friend in attendance to see that good order was maintained. These were held at Newbegun Creek, Head of Little River, Symons Creek and Old Neck. The meetings for blacks were kept up until 1763, or a period of five years.14 After that they disappear from the records with no explanation remaining for why they were given up.
Attention then turned to another aspect of slavery. In 1768, the Western Quarterly Meeting, gathered at New Garden on August 13, sent up a request to the yearly meeting for a clarification of Query Seven. It wanted to know how far it went in curbing accustomed practices with regard to slaves. Was it permissible for Quakers to buy and sell slaves at all? When the question came to the floor of the yearly meeting, it was ruled too "weighty" for immediate action and was referred to a committee for deliberation. The next day the
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committee came in with the following report:
After Solidly conferring on the affair (they) were unanimously of the opinion and gave it as their Judgment or sense that the discipline and Queries relating thereto ought to be understood as a prohibition of Buying Negroes to trade upon or of them that trade in them; and as the having of Negroes is become a Burthen to such as are in possession of them it might be well for the meeting to advise all friends to be careful not to buy or sell in any case that can be reasonably avoided, with which advice and Judgment this meeting concurs. 15
In approving the recommendation, the yearly meeting ordered that it be sent down and read in the quarterly meetings, and in each monthly and preparative meeting. Local monthly meeting records confirm that the order was carried out. 16
Why did this question come up in 1768, and why did it come from the West- ern Quarterly Meeting? The answer seems to lie in the composition of Friends communities in different parts of the state. As John Woolman observed in his letter to New Garden and Cane Creek meetings, many Quakers there did not own slaves. The heart of the slaveholding community of North Carolina was down on the coast where the Eastern Quarterly Meeting of Friends was located. John Griffith ventured the opinion in his journal that most of the Friends at Cane Creek had come from Pennsylvania, and indeed they had. So did most of those at New Garden and in the other local meetings of the Western Quarter. Quite a number of membership certificates to those meetings had also come from Virginia meetings, but further scrutiny reveals that most of these, too, were really Pennsylvanians who stopped in Virginia briefly in their southward migration.17
It is not surprising, then, that it should have been the former Pennsylvanians of the Western Quarter who developed a concern about slavery. The Philadel- phia Yearly Meeting had testified against slavery in 1696 - seventy years earlier. Also, the Philadelphia Query on slavery then in use prohibited both importing slaves and buying them after imported. Ownership was not prohibited, but perhaps it seemed less brutal to deal with American-born, English-speaking slaves who felt somewhat at home in their environment than with the cowed and fearful creatures who had only recently made the dreaded crossing from Africa. By comparison, the Virginia and North Carolina Query simply inquired if Friends were concerned in the importation of slaves, or "buying them to trade in." This left open the possibility of buying recently imported slaves for one's own use.
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