USA > North Carolina > Toward freedom for all : North Carolina Quakers and slavery > Part 3
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John Woolman reacted sharply to the variation in the wording of the Phila- delphia Query on his visit to Virginia in 1757. He argued that since the slaves in question were "captives of war taken by stealth" it was not permissible for
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FRIENDS MEETINGS IN NORTH CAROLINA
Norfolk
Virginia
+
NEW GARDEN QUARTER WESTERN QUARTER
. .
.
Tennessee
Guilford Co.
·New Garden
Rich Square
Perquimans Co. Edenton
+"Newbegun Creek Symons Creek Albemarle S
Greensboro
Center
Spring
Springfield
-- Cane Creek .
+
· Raleigh
· Contentnea
+ Trent River +
New Bern
North Carolina
Core Sound -
+
+ +
South Carolina
+
Active in 1896
Suspended before 1861
Following Stephen B. Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery
EASTERN QUARTER
Pasquotank Co. +Perquimans
CONTENTNEA QUARTER
Piney Woods
. Elizabeth City
. Deep River
+
. .
Beaufort
TOWARD FREEDOM FOR ALL
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QUAKERS/SLAVERY IN COLONIAL NORTH CAROLINA
Quakers to buy them on those grounds, and "their being our fellow creatures and sold as slaves, added greatly to the iniquity."18 Although Virginia Friends had ignored Woolman's argument, the Pennsylvania immigrants in North Carolina had reacted to the altered query in the same way he did.
The arrival of the Pennsylvania Quakers in the Piedmont was part of a much larger population movement which altered the entire colony of North Carolina, as well as the Society of Friends. In 1752, the total population of the colony was only fifty thousand, concentrated heavily in the coastal area where Friends had their beginnings and where they flourished. By 1775, however, the population had risen to the astonishing figure of 254 thousand whites and eighty thousand blacks.19 This was due to a heavy stream of immigration from overseas, principally from Scotland and Northern Ireland. These people entered at New Bern, Wilmington, and other North Carolina ports, settling in considerable numbers at a place which they called Campbelltown, later renamed Fayette- ville, for the Marquis de Lafayette of Revolutionary War fame. Other thousands streamed farther west, forming the basic population of many communities from Fayetteville and other points on the fringe of the coastal plain westward to the mountains. Largely self-reliant Presbyterians, they were not familiar with slavery and had come to this continent lured by the undeveloped lands on the western frontier, lands which they would subdue with their own hands. They thus became pioneers of the region known as piedmont North Carolina.
In the Piedmont, this group merged with another stream which was then descending from Pennsylvania and Virginia, representing the overflow of communities in which land had become scarce. In this group came the Mora- vians and the Quakers. Supplementing them a little later were many Quakers from Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, an area suffering from overpopulation and the decline of the whaling industry. Not only was the Piedmont numerically enriched by this frenzy of immigration, but the newcomers represented sturdy stock. In the Quaker stream were the ancestors of Jonathan Worth, a governor of North Carolina; William Swaim, editor of the influential antislavery newspaper The Greensboro Patriot; William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, and Levi Coffin, "President" of the Underground Railroad.20
It appears that the concern about buying and selling slaves that came to the yearly meeting from the Western Quarterly Meeting in 1768 had its origin in the New Garden Monthly Meeting, a meeting made up largely of former Pennsylvanians at that time. A minute recorded at New Garden on July 25, 1767, concerns one Obadiah Harris who moved from Virginia to New Garden in that year, bringing with him a certificate of membership from Cedar Creek Meeting. There was the objection to receiving him into the New Garden Monthly Meeting because 1) ... "Of late, being overtaken with strong Drink;" and 2) "the other (reason) selling a poor Negro slave, and parting him distant from his Espoused Wife, and near connexions; sorely against his will, for which conduct this meeting appointed John Hiatt and Richard Williams, to visit, and labor with him in love, and endeavor to inform his mind, the exceeding
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TOWARD FREEDOM FOR ALL
pernicious evils they are of. .. " After long delay, Obadiah Harris satisfied the committee and the meeting and was received into membership. Indeed, Friend Harris became a highly valued member of New Garden and, in 1778, was appointed an elder.21
There was another case in the New Garden Meeting: that of Jesse Henley. Like Obadiah Harris, Jesse Henley was not a native of the Western Quarterly Meeting. He brought a certificate of membership from the Pasquotank Monthly Meeting in the Eastern Quarterly Meeting, an area where slaveholding was more widely practiced among Friends. His misdeeds were several, including fighting in 1767, but he was accused in 1768 of "having been concerned in the unchristian Trade of slave buying." Again, a committee was appointed, and on March 26, 1768, a paper was read in the monthly meeting in which Jesse Henley condemned his conduct.22 It was in the course of these troubles at the New Garden Monthly Meeting that its superior body, the Western Quarterly Meeting, recommended to the yearly meeting that Quakers refrain altogether from buying and selling slaves. It seems clear that it was the long disciplinary struggles at New Garden that prompted this action.
With these troubles on their minds, the Friends from the Western Quarterly Meeting resumed their attack on slavery at the yearly meeting of 1770. The New Garden Monthly Meeting had expressed a continuing uneasiness about the form of Query Seven, and now the Western Quarter wanted an absolute prohi- bition of the purchasing of slaves. The yearly meeting considered the matter, but politely rejected the proposal by postponing action until the ensuing year.23 The following year it came up again, and that time it was rejected "after consi- dering the consequences that might arise."24 Instead, the Slave Query was revised to read:
Are all friends careful to bear a faithful testimony against the Iniquitous Practice of Importing Negroes; Or do they refuse to Purchase of those that make a trade or Merchandise in them; and do they use them which they have by Inheritance or otherwise well Indeavouring to discourage them from Evil and Incouraging them in that which is good?25
Any gain in this query is hard to find. It appears to be mere rhetoric to mollify the petitioners.
LOYALTY TO THE KING
While tracing the course of the relationship of Friends to slavery, it must be remarked again that slavery was only one of the concerns of North Carolina Friends. They had always refused military service on religious grounds, and as the tensions heightened between colonists and the British government, they were eager to maintain their testimony against war. For a century they had been paying fines rather than attend muster, so from the British government's
21
QUAKERS/SLAVERY IN COLONIAL NORTH CAROLINA
point of view there was little to be lost in acceding to a Quaker request that their consciences be respected in this matter. Accordingly, the House of Burgesses passed a special act in 1770 exempting Friends from military service.26 The following year, a special committee of the yearly meeting presented an address of gratitute for this exemption to Governor Josiah Martin, his council and the Burgesses, then met in General Assembly. It was graciously acknowledged and protection assured, "so long as you shall continue to deserve it."27 Later in the same year, a committee of the yearly meeting delivered to the Governor a declaration of loyalty to himself and King George III, explaining that their refusal to bear arms was purely on conscien- tious principles and ought not to be regarded as opposition to good govern- ment. They wished success to the Governor in restoring good order and peace to "This Distressed Province." The Governor again sent a gracious acknow- ledgment.28
DISOWN REGULATORS
Warlike activity was no mere academic question in Friends communities at that time. In North Carolina the Regulator Movement was disturbing the peace of the colony and causing anxiety for the colonial authorities. The movement was strong in the Cane Creek area, and the Battle of Alamance, involving two thousand Regulators, was fought only a few miles from the Cane Creek Friends Meetinghouse in 1771.29 One of the leaders of this movement was a man named Herman Husband(s), who was at one time a member of the Cane Creek Meeting. Husband's independent spirit had collided with the strict code of the Cane Creek Meeting during an internal quarrel in 1764. As a result, he was disowned, as was Emy Allen when she married him in 1767. Nevertheless, what appears to be a second disownment occurred on 1796 when "Hermon Husbands" and his companion Herman Cox were reported in the Cane Creek minutes as disowned for being active members of the Regulators, a movement already involved in violent acts.30 At the New Garden Meeting also there was political unrest. There, a member named Edward Thornbrough appeared at the monthly meeting in 1771 and "offered a paper condemning (his) misconduct in assisting those called Regulators with a Gun."31 William Norton was disowned by the same meeting in 1768 for having "joined with them that stile themselves regulators of Public Affairs."32
MORE OPPOSITION TO SLAVE TRAFFIC
But not even the commotion caused by the Regulator Movement could deflect the Western Quarterly Meeting from its uneasiness about slavery. At the yearly meeting of 1772 it returned to the subject when it demanded that a committee be named to look into the matter of compliance with Query Seven and that the yearly meeting send down a clear interpretation of the query to the monthly meetings.33 The committee was duly appointed, and after appropriate delibera- tion, declared:
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It is our judgment that no friend in unity shall buy a Negro or any other slave of any other person than a friend in unity, Excepting it be to prevent the parting of man and wife or parent and Child, or for good reasons as shall be approved by the Monthly Meeting, and it Earnestly advises that all friends who are possessed of Slaves by inheritance or Otherwise, use them well in Every Respect, Endeavoring to discourage them from Evil and encourag- ing them in that which is good, and that they not sell a Slave to any Person who makes a Practice of Buying and Selling for the sake of Gain, without regarding how the Poor Slave may be used or the great Evil of Separating man and wife or Parent and Child.34
This statement fell far short of rejecting slavery, but it did make an effort to eliminate the profit motive from buying and selling slaves. It permitted shifting titles to take account of fluctuating family relationships, such as occurred when Friend A's slave Joe married Friend B's slave Mary. The monthly meeting, having control over all transactions, was charged with preventing involuntary separation of families. Since Friends were not to buy from non-Friends, there would be no more than the natural increase in the number of slaves held by Friends. Friends' slaves were to be spared the fate of an Uncle Tom by being sold to unscrupulous persons who would abuse them. Probably the most important thing to note in this report is a growing recognition of the slave as a person to be treated with respect and consideration.
The report was approved by the yearly meeting and sent down to the sub- ordinate meetings. Evidently it was not received as mere rhetoric, for a minute of the Wells-Perquimans Monthly Meeting seven months later states that one Jonathan Moore of that meeting was accused of "breaking through the yearly meeting's order in purchasing a slave of one not of our society and condemned his disorderly proceeding to the satisfaction of Friends."35
During the year 1772, the standing committee36 of the yearly meeting prepared a memorial on the importation of slaves for the House of Burgesses, which was approved by the yearly meeting in session in October. It had been prompted by a similar action of the Virginia Yearly Meeting, and declared:
Being fully convinced in our minds and judgments beyond a Doubt or Scruple of the Great Evil and abomination of the Importation of Negroes from Africa by which Iniquitous Practice Great Numbers of our Fellow Creatures with their Posterity are doomed to Perpetual and Cruel Bondage without regard being had to their having forfeited their Natural Right to Liberty and Freedom by any Act of their own, or consent thereto, otherwise than by Force and Cruelty. Impresses our minds with Such abhorrence and Detestation against such Practices in a Christian Community where Experience fully makes it manifest that instead of their Embracing True Religion, Piety and Virtue in Exchange for their Native Liberty, That they become nurseries to (illegible) and Idle-
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QUAKERS/SLAVERY IN COLONIAL NORTH CAROLINA
ness to our Youth in Such a manner that Morality and True Piety and Virtue is much wounded where slave keeping abounds to the Great Grief of true Christian minds.37
The memorial then proceeded to invite the "Representatives of the People of North Carolina" to join the Virginia House of Burgesses in "presenting addresses to the Throne of Great Britain in order to be Eyes to the Blind and Mouths to the Dumb - whether it succeeds or not we shall have the Secret Satisfaction in our own minds of having used our Best Endeavors to have so Great a Torrant of Evil Effectively Stopped at the place where it unhappily had the permission to begin."
IN SEARCH OF A POLICY ON SLAVERY
The standing committee brought another problem to the yearly meeting in 1772: How were they to counsel Friends who decided to manumit their slaves in spite of the law which prohibited manumission except for "meritorious service," as defined by the county courts? To a people accustomed to be law- abiding, this presented a serious dilemma. The yearly meeting could not give a satisfactory answer in 1772, and for nearly a century it searched for a solution without success. 38
In 1773, Query Seven was again strengthened by a revision which incorpo- rated the recommendations of the committee appointed the previous year. Friends were not to buy slaves from non-Friends under any circumstances, and every transaction of any kind had to have the approval of the monthly meeting.39 The previous query had authorized monthly meetings to allow purchases "for good reasons."
The new form of Query Seven, while only slightly improved, did apparently reflect genuine evolution of thought among the members. Since 1768 the anxiety about slavery in the Western Quarterly meeting had come to be felt in the East as well. The first recorded challenge to slavery itself was launched precisely in the heart of the slave country at Perquimans Monthly Meeting near Albemarle Sound. In that meeting there was a slaveholder named Thomas Newby whose conscience troubled him because he held men in bondage. On April 6, 1774, Newby appeared before his monthly meeting to express his "uneasiness" about keeping black persons in slavery, and asked for advice on how he might proceed to set them free.40 This proved to be too serious a matter for the monthly meeting to decide, so it was referred to the yearly meeting. Having failed previously to answer this question, the yearly meeting took the counsel of the standing committee and gave instructions at its next sitting that any Friend who wished to free a slave should first apply to his monthly meet- ing for permission. It might seem strange that it would be necessary to ask permission from a Friends meeting to free a slave, since slavery itself was increasingly viewed as an evil thing by the Society, but Friends had great respect for the law and were genuinely concerned about what would become
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of the slaves after they were freed. Accordingly, the monthly meetings were asked to appoint qualified persons to draw up manumission papers and find out if the freed blacks would be able to make a living as free men.41 This latter point was always an important consideration in the freeing of Friends slaves. The slave was oriented toward dependence on a white master, and Friends were not eager to see their former slaves exchange a paternalistic security for a destitute freedom.
Thomas Newby's case came up again in the Perquimans Monthly Meeting on August 9, 1774, but the committee appointed to counsel with him hedged on the matter. In fact, the committee had not even met and explained that in its judgment it was best not to be too hasty in such an important matter. It was consequently postponed to the next meeting. 42 The Newby affair then dropped out of the records to re-emerge in the midst of the Revolution.
The yearly meeting again took up the slave question in 1775, and after due : deliberation, declared: "(We) order that no Friend in unity shall buy or sell a Negro without the consent of the Monthly Meeting to which they belong ... " - that is, even exchanges between Friends had to have the approval of the monthly meeting. 43 Query Seven was revised accordingly. It was still assumed that some Friends would own slaves, and progress since 1773 was slight indeed. But in 1776, the yearly meeting took a major step when it decided to take a direct hand in manumissions and appointed a committee to help any Friends who wanted to free their slaves. At the same time, in a new show of firmness and resolution, it instructed the monthly meetings to protect freed slaves from recapture. If it should be necessary to hire a lawyer or incur other legal expenses in connection with manumissions or the protection of freed slaves, the yearly meeting declared its readiness to underwrite the costs.
Evidently this was the kind of encouragement that Thomas Newby had been waiting for. In 1777, he joined with ten other Friends from Perquimans Monthly Meeting to free a total of "some forty" slaves.44 It had been four years since Newby first expressed his desire to free his slaves. In the interim, the law had not changed: the act of 1741 still forbade the manumission of slaves except for meritorious service.45 No such claim was made by the eleven Friends. Instead, they had simply acted out of a religious conviction that human bondage itself was unjust and evil; the act was one of defiance and challenged the very basis on which slavery rested.
There was probably rejoicing among the freed slaves that day around Albe- marle Sound, but freedom always bears a price tag. There were some in that first group of forty who were so terrified at the prospect of going it alone that they returned to their former masters and begged them to "bind themselves for life" to them. The confused former owners turned to the yearly meeting for advice at the annual session in 1777 and were told flatly that this should not be permitted. Although recognizing the possibility that the binding might be done out of compassion so as to provide a living for the former slaves, it warned that to do so would endanger the former slave at his master's death. When a
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QUAKERS/SLAVERY IN COLONIAL NORTH CAROLINA
deceased man's estate was settled, the former slaves might well be regarded as property by the executor, which would involve "their posterity in the same Difficulties that we have endeavoured to remove by such Manumissions."46 These words from the yearly meeting proved to be prophetic, for in later years there were indeed many cases in which this very thing happened.
The years of the Revolutionary War brought some evolution in the official Friends position on slavery; indeed, the Quaker records make little mention of the war itself. The yearly meeting of 1777 recorded the fact that no Friends were then engaged in buying and selling slaves.47 In 1778, the yearly meeting revised the Slave Query to deny monthly meetings the power to allow members to buy and sell slaves under any circumstances whatsoever.48 Thus, the last loophole for traffic in slaves was closed to any Friend who wished to remain in good standing. A year later, in 1779, the Slave Query (then number six) was read in yearly meeting, and the response from all the quarterly meetings was that "no Friends Import, Buy or Sell Slaves, except one instance of a Friend's Selling which is under care."49
During these years, the focus of the manumission movement was fixed strongly on the Perquimans Monthly Meeting and other Friends groups in the eastern area. The year 1777, when the manumissions occurred, was, of course, a year of great excitement in the colonies, and the action of the Quakers at Perquimans in freeing their slaves ought not to be seen as unrelated to the brave words about freedom and equality which were then stirring up many Americans in the war with the British. The implications for freedom for blacks were too clear to be ignored. Yet, it was well known that the Quakers in North Carolina were not revolutionaries, much as they might have agreed with the concepts of freedom and equality. Although they were certainly not active Tories and renounced violence against the revolutionaries as they renounced its use against the King, it is also true that they declared their loyalty to King George Ill and had disowned the Regulators. It is small wonder that the state legislature suspected that the Quakers had really freed their slaves in order to embarrass the Revolution.
RESPONSE TO NEW LAWS
Given the circumstances in the colonies at the time, it is hardly surprising that the North Carolina Legislature soon took action to meet what it regarded as the "challenge of the Quakers." Unquestionably, there was fear of a black insurrec- tion, and warnings of that danger had gone out across the state. As early as 1775, at the Moravian village of Salem, the Collegium decided to store twenty pounds of gunpowder to have ready in case the blacks took advantage of the troubled times to rebel.50 The legislature of 1777, to cope with the Quaker prob- lem, decided to reaffirm and strengthen the colonial law of 1741, which, as we have seen, prohibited the manumission of slaves except for meritorious service as established by the county courts. That law, however, specified that freed slaves were to leave the colony within six months or face seizure and sale by
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the county courts.51 The new law of 1777, on the other hand, prescribed that "illegally" manumitted slaves were to be picked up immediately after liberation and sold at the next session of the county court. It was entitled "An Act to prevent domestic insurrection."
The busy yearly meeting of 1777 took up the matter of the new law. In the discussion it emerged that all the slaves manumitted by Friends had either been picked up and resold by the county courts or were in imminent danger of it. Although the freeing of the slaves might be regarded as illegal in the strict sense of the term, the immediate recapture was a violation of the 1741 law which was in force at the time of the manumissions. It would have been possible for the courts to have adjudged the Friends' desire to free their slaves as cases of "meritorious service," for the county courts were the final arbiters of what constituted such service, and they had a history of being notoriously lenient. Even infants were sometimes freed with their mothers on such grounds.52 It appears, then, that the Friends were deliberately singled out for harsh treatment. The discrimination they suffered was partly due to the eager- ness of some citizens to collect the rewards offered for turning in freed slaves, 53 and the hard line of the legislators, who probably did fear insurrection. Perhaps even more, the legislature resented the Tory sympathies of the Quakers and sensed, correctly, that they were really in favor of universal emancipation.
Even if we were to concede the illegality of the emancipations of 1777, we should still have to charge the courts with illegal procedure in picking them up and reselling them into slavery at once, without proper court proceedings. Responding to instructions from the yearly meeting in 1776, Quakers already had challenged the legality of the sales in both Perquimans and Pasquotank counties. But the legislature was not to be outdone. In 1779, it passed a measure which specifically legalized the seizure and sale of the slaves that had been manumitted by Quakers in 1777. It went beyond that and authorized the courts to seize, at once, slaves illegally freed in the future. The six months of grace allowed under British rule was pointedly dropped. A joint committee of the legislature reported to the Commons on January 26, 1779, that "the conduct of the said Quakers in setting their slaves free when our open and declared enemies were endeavoring to bring about an Insurrection of the Slaves, was highly criminal and reprehensible . . . " The new bill became law on February 4, 1779.54
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