USA > North Carolina > Toward freedom for all : North Carolina Quakers and slavery > Part 6
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The Manumission Society had provided one more channel for Friends to work against slavery. It also served as a standard around which non-Quakers could rally in opposing slavery. Through its contacts with national organiza- tions and publications, it helped dramatize, for a southern audience, the grow- ing opposition to slavery in the nation and in the world. Obviously, the society was not equal to the task of ending slavery.
Undaunted, the Quaker remnant continued to labor at the task of "doing to others as (they) would be done by." They got no help from the legislature, which, instead, strengthened the meritorious clause and demanded ever higher bond for the manumissions that were permitted. Every Quaker effort seemed to be matched by a more powerful counter effort. There was to be no rest for those who sought to make freedom a reality for all.
Colonization in Haiti and Africa
The dilemma of North Carolina Friends grew more and more serious. Con- vinced that it was a grievous sin for them to own slaves, yet finding themselves prevented by law from freeing them, they experienced increasing anguish of soul. Especially in the eastern counties, they began to think seriously of leaving the state, and, in fact, large numbers of them did so. Yet, even those who left had difficulty satisfying their consciences on the matter of the proper care of the slaves whom they sought to free. Sometimes they simply became a burden on some other Friend, or if they were commended to a non-Friend, were in danger of falling back into slavery. The time was ripe for a drastic decision, and in 1808 North Carolina Friends made one.
YEARLY MEETING OWNERSHIP OF SLAVES
A state law of 1796 authorized societies to hold and dispose of property,1 and the course of the law in North Carolina had established the rule that a slave was property, not a legal person.2 Little as they agreed with this thesis, Friends nevertheless took advantage of it in 1808 when North Carolina Yearly Meeting authorized certain of its members to receive slaves in its name.3 The standing committee of the yearly meeting was entrusted with this heavy responsibility, and its members were given legal powers to act in the name of the yearly meeting. By this device, Friends as individuals would cease to own slaves, but the yearly meeting, as a slave-owner, could supervise their quasi-freedom, protect them from the county courts and any heirs of Friends who might seek to get control of them, and finally remove them to free governments.
The legality of this procedure was questionable, so Friends engaged the eminent jurist William S. Gaston as their counsel in the transfer of titles for slaves to the Yearly Meeting.4 Judge Gaston had a keen personal interest in this question. As a Catholic, he was also a member of a religious minority in North Carolina and was sensitive to the peculiar problems which such persons faced. But more than that, he was a man of broad humanitarian sympathies and a
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declared foe of slavery. In a famous address at the University of North Carolina, he said to the young men of the Dialectic and Philanthropic societies at Chapel Hill in 1832:
On you too, will devolve the duty which has long been neglected, but which cannot with impunity be neglected much longer, of providing for the mitigation, and (is it too much to hope for in North Carolina?) for the ultimate extirpation of the worst evil that afflicts the southern part of our confederacy. Full well do you know to what I refer, for on this subject there is, with all of us, a morbid sensitiveness which gives warning of an approach to it. Disguise the truth as we may, and throw the blame where we will, it is slavery which, more than any other cause, keeps us back in the career of improvement. It stifles industry and represses enter- prise - it is fatal to economy and providence, it discourages skill, impairs our strength as a community, and poisons morals at the fountain-head.5
Judge Gaston, at the request of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting, drew up a formula by which persons might transfer their slaves to that body. Bowing to the fiction that slaves were merely "property," it declared:
Know all men by these presents that A.B. of the County of X and state aforesaid and in the consideration of my personal regard and attachment to the welfare of the religious society and congregation of Existing in the County and State aforesaid and usual- ly known and distinguished by the name of and from a sincere desire to promote the worship of god as practiced in the aforesaid religious society and congregation, and to advance the temporal and eternal interest of those who now or hereafter may become members thereof, have given, granted alined confirmed and conveyed unto C.D.E.F. and G.H. trustees of the said society and congregation duly appointed and to their successors in office, for the use and benefit of and in trust for said society and congre- gation, the following real Estate (or personal property as the case may be) that is to say (here it should be particularly specified) To have and to hold the said lands and tenements (or goods and Chat- tels as the case may be) unto them and the said C.D.E.F. and G.H. trustees as aforesaid and their successors in office duly to be appointed for the use and benefit of and in trust for the said religious society and Congregation forever.
In witness, etc.6
Judge Gaston went on to explain in his covering letter that the owners of slave "property" might be held liable for them if they were caught in possession of firearms (except when explicitly authorized by the master), and were subject
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to suit if their slaves were not adequately clothed, were allowed less than one quart of corn a day for food, or stole from someone other than the master. The wording of this instrument became familiar to Friends, and they later always spoke of conveying their slaves to the yearly meeting.
Since most Quaker slaveholders had already either freed their slaves and were merely holding them as guardians, or had expressed a willingness to set them free, the process proceeded apace. The agents7 worked diligently in all the quarterly meetings, and in 1814, after six years of labor, they reported to the yearly meeting that most of the slaves still technically owned by Friends were then "on assignment to the committee of the yearly meeting."8 Since there was no immediate way to settle them elsewhere, the committee began to hire out its black charges and impound a part of their wages against future expenses of travel and resettlement. In the meantime, the effort to persuade the legislature to soften the laws on manumission continued.
But the mood of the legislature continued to be unfavorable. An anonymous message of 1840, apparently addressed to Friends at large (only a fragment survives), stated the dilemma which North Carolina Friends faced at the time the yearly meeting authorized itself to own slaves. At that time, says the paper, there were still several hundred former slaves whose legal title was held by members of the Society of Friends. The law prevented them from setting them free, and they could not hold them in bondage because they were prohibited from doing so "not only by the dictates of conscience but by an order of society." The yearly meeting "remonstrated and petitioned the legislature almost continuously for the liberty to set their people free and for them to be corrected and protected by law as freeborn persons are, The Government instead of granting relief have manifested a disposition unfriendly to our memorials."9
COLONIZATION AUTHORIZED
It was such circumstances which led to the decision of 1808, and the continu- ing rigidity of the legislature drew the Society to another important decision in 1824. At the yearly meeting of that year a committee was appointed to consult "the Haitian Agent in this Country" and proceed "as wisely and prudently as the nature of things will admit and remove as many of them (i.e., black persons held by the yearly meeting) as are willing to go to that place or elsewhere." The committee was given an appropriation of two hundred dollars to get started. Reluctant though they may have been, North Carolina Quakers were embarking on a colonization venture.
Apparently it was the abolitionist Benjamin Lundy who encouraged North Carolina Friends to make this decision. At least, he took credit for it. He had given lectures in North Carolina during 1824 and had himself sent eleven slaves to Haiti when a Baptist named David Patterson gave them to him to be freed. He claimed to have persuaded North Carolina Friends to send their slaves to Haiti.10
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In 1824, the meeting for sufferings replaced the standing committee, and on January 4, 1826, that body reiterated the devotion of North Carolina Friends to colonization and emigration by recording the following minute:
It is therefore the United judgment of the Meeting that they (the slaves) must be removed to another government, which they may choose; and they be informed that they make a choice of place, and that we will assist in bearing the expense of their emigration, and if they will not comply, that they must abide by the conse- quences.11
On July 10, another minute explained that the "people of colour" were to be removed to places outside the United States to better their condition. However, in the case of those "entangled by marriage or otherwise, with those held by agents and members of the yearly meeting, the meeting deems it best to be sent to Free States."12
Perhaps it is due to the fact that colonization was later discredited by friends of the slave that Friends' vigorous espousal of the cause has been little emphasized. Actually, the response to the colonization decision was immediate and favorable. In November of 1825, the agents of the Eastern Quarterly Meet- ing reported that 506 "people of colour" had already been removed to Haiti.13 Just how they got there does not emerge from the Quaker records, but eastern North Carolina Friends were near the ports of Newbern, Beaufort and Elizabeth City, and it was possible to book passage to the Caribbean occasionally. Perhaps it was done in this informal way.
In 1826, however, a formal expedition sailed from Beaufort aboard the Sally Ann. It was a carefully planned undertaking, with "Quaker Free Negroes," as black persons held by Quakers were then being called, coming from as far away as Deep River, near present High Point. Phineas Nixon and John Fellow were appointed to go along and see to the proper reception of their charges in Haiti. There was a total of 119 blacks aboard this ship. The breakdown of the passenger list, as it appears in the report of the meeting for sufferings, was as follows:
54 - emigrants assigned by Friends to yearly meeting agents
55 - Negroes under the care of Friends who had not previously assigned them to the yearly meeting
8 - free persons intermarried with Negroes held by the Society
2 - persons held by a non-Friend14
The non-Friend contributed twenty dollars toward the expenses of his two freed slaves, and the Manumission Society promised the balance.15
In the report that Nixon and Fellow submitted on their return, they stated that the Sally Ann had docked at Aux Cayes, Haiti, on July 6, 1826, and that her passengers received a hearty welcome from the "citizens of the place." The
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government undertook to look after them for four months free of charge. Several people came up to request immigrants for employment, but most of them chose to go on "the farms of a few principal men of the place" where they were to become tenants, with small plots to cultivate for themselves.
President Jean Pierre Boyer had previously circulated an offer of a gratuity of land to each immigrant, but the military authorities informed the newcomers that the land grants had been discontinued due to the instability of previous immigrants.16 However, land was offered as a reward to those who proved to be industrious and reliable, and the agents believed that at least some of the new immigrants would try to erase the poor reputation established by their predecessors. At worst, they concluded, freedom in Haiti would still be better than slavery in North Carolina. 17
Phineas Nixon's account of the reception in Haiti reflects the labor shortage in the island which had been brought on by the devastating wars and massacres which had wracked Haiti for years. This is further confirmed by a letter from one B. Bayar18 on May 8, 1827, to Phineas Nixon. In it he requested twenty husbandmen by profession to come with their families to work his sugar planta- tion near Jacmel. He offered to advance passage money, which could be deducted from the first crop, or he could give them a sharecrop arrangement.19
The labor shortage is reflected again in the aggressive attitude of Benjamin Lundy, the great abolitionist propagandist and promoter. In repeated letters to Phineas Nixon, clerk of the meeting for sufferings of North Carolina Yearly Meeting, he urged Friends to send unlimited numbers of black people to Haiti on his own plan. This would involve no cost to Friends and was to be handled through the Philanthropic Society of Haiti. The Society offered contracts which, in effect, made the immigrants indentured servants for three years. There are frequent expressions of dislike for the Lundy arrangement in the correspond- ence of the meeting for sufferings, possibly because of the indenture feature. The records indicate that the usual procedure followed by Friends involved direct contracts with the shipowners, with passage prepaid. This was the arrange- ment with the Sally Ann.
INTEREST OF THE PHILADELPHIA YEARLY MEETING
The colonization venture was not undertaken in the dark. In view of the heavy expense involved, North Carolina Friends early appealed to their co- religionists in other places for help. On January 24, 1826, Thomas Wistar responded on behalf of the Philadephia Yearly Meeting to such an appeal. Indicating a feeling of brotherly sympathy toward North Carolina Friends, he nevertheless wanted some hard facts before Philadelphia committed itself to substantial aid. This led to a comprehensive inquiry into the state of Quaker- held Negroes in North Carolina.20
In his reply to Thomas Wistar, Nathan Mendenhall reported that 734 black persons were under the care of the yearly meeting in 1825, with one quarterly meeting not reporting. From among these, out of 150 held in the Contentnea
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Quarterly Meeting, about thirty were disposed to go to Haiti. In July, Menden- hall again wrote to Wistar reporting on the 119 who had sailed for Haiti and indicating the preferences of those remaining. Liberia was the favorite choice of a destination, with the West next; ninety-nine preferred to stay where they were; seventy-eight were entangled in lawsuits, and thirty or forty were in an unclear legal position.
The response of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to the survey made by North Carolina Friends was a contribution of five hundred dollars in September of 1826,21 which was followed the next year by a three thousand dollar contribu- tion.22 The stipulation with the contribution of 1826 was that it should be used "in the removal of those who are disposed to go to Ohio, Indiana or other free states." Very early in the Haitian venture, opposition began to be voiced by some Friends in North Carolina as well as elsewhere. By 1827, Aaron White, of the Eastern Quarterly Meeting, wrote to Nathan Mendenhall that he considered Haiti out of the question since he found the "French Government" unsuitable.23 Yet, Quaker-held Negroes continued to go to Haiti. In 1828, Nathan Mendenhall requested passage for eight to ten blacks on the Captain Douglas.24 Thomas Kennedy went there in 1828 under instructions from the meeting for sufferings to negotiate with the government for the refunding of port charges on the emigrants who had gone out on the Sally Ann, and to visit those and other immigrants on the island. He claimed to have visited them all and found some of them "unpleasantly situated."25
Samuel Radcliff, an ex-slave, was with Thomas Kennedy on the voyage to Haiti in 1828. In a letter to Nathan Mendenhall from Haiti, he reported a highly unpleasant trip of thirty-eight days. But, however "unpleasantly situated" he and Kennedy may have found some of the emigrants to Haiti, Radcliff was making plans to save his money and go back to North Carolina in a few years to buy his two children and take them back to Haiti with him. He seems to have been convinced that freedom in Haiti was, indeed, preferable to slavery in North Carolina.26
The yearly meeting records have little to say about Haiti for a number of years following 1828, except to reflect, occasionally, uneasiness with the venture. A family tradition repeated by Hugh Moore, a descendant of those early Eastern families, has Quaker Free Negroes on one plantation in virtual revolt against their Quaker guardian. According to the story, a very large black man threw his Quaker patron to the ground and held him there until he would promise not to send him to Haiti.27
It is clear, however, that Haitian colonization continued. In 1832, Benjamin Mace reported to the meeting for sufferings from New Bern about his success in shipping forty-three Quaker-held Negroes to Haiti the day before. His letter is jubilant. He said he felt "better than I was before they sailed." With this contingent gone and four more persons to go the next day, he found "a balance of Quaker Negroes very few in Newbern, or none that I know of .. . "28 Mace's elation reflected not only the difficulty of assembling these people and arrang-
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ing their passage, but also their frequent reluctance to go.
THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY AND LIBERIA
Concurrently with colonization in Haiti was colonization in Liberia. Haiti was, of course, much closer, and transportation was more easily arranged, but rumors of poor conditions in Haiti created pause in the minds of some. There had been a rumor that a shipload of ex-slaves bound for Haiti actually landed in New Orleans instead, where they were resold into slavery.29 But the attitude toward both Haiti and Liberia fluctuated from time to time.
The Liberian project was the child of the American Colonization Society, and it was conceived on a grand scale. It grew out of a resolution of the Virginia Legislature of December 23, 1816, requesting the governor to correspond with the President of the United States "for the purpose of obtaining a territory on the coast of Africa," or some other place, to settle "free people of color." A few days later a group of "southern gentlemen" met in Washington and organized the American Colonization Society for that general purpose. Resettlement was to be with the consent of those to be removed, of course. The society was con- ceived as a national undertaking, but leadership remained largely in southern hands; in the nature of the case, most of the repatriated blacks would be from the South.30 Bushrod Washington, nephew and heir of George Washington, served as its president, as did James Madison in advanced age. In North Carolina, supporters included James Iredell, who was elected governor of the state in 1827 while serving as president of the Edenton Auxiliary of the Ameri- can Colonization Society.31
In Greensboro, North Carolina, the postmaster, David Lindsay, was treasurer of the local auxiliary.32 Quakers in North Carolina were among the most loyal supporters. Although Philadelphia Quakers at first opposed the movement, the depth of the commitment of their North Carolina co-religionists caused them to become heavy supporters of the movement financially, although always with certain reservations. In Pasquotank County, North Carolina, Isaac Overman, a Quaker, was president of the local auxiliary.33 Frequent correspondents with the Washington office of the Colonization Society were Jeremiah Hubbard, an ardent defender of colonization, Richard, Mary and Nathan Mendenhall, Phineas Albertson, Caleb and Miles White, Jonas Mace and George Swaim, all Quakers.
The policy of the American Colonization Society was to send out salaried agents into any communities that would receieve them and organize local auxiliaries. Usually, the place of meeting was a church, and the object was to promote the colonization scheme and raise money. But from its inception, the American Colonization Society tried to get the federal government to under- write the expense of the project. While it never met with complete success, the Liberian colony could never have been established without the help of the United States Navy, which secured a beachhead on the west coast of Africa and fended off slaving ships. In 1819, Congress appropriated one hundred thousand
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dollars for the American Colonization Society after intense lobbying and over the objection of John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State.34 Of far greater value than this sum of money was the semi-official status of the colony, which in many ways placed the prestige and resources of the United States govern- ment behind it.
After a false start on Sherbo Island, where the original eighty settlers all perished of disease and the strange climate, a viable community was finally established on the mainland after further privation and loss of life. It was to this fledgling colony that North Carolina Friends sent some of their ex-slaves between 1827 and 1831.
Liberia appealed to many Friends for a time as the homeland of the black man to which he was returning - even though none had ever been there before. Relations with the American Colonization Society were so intimate that Stephen B. Weeks said that North Carolina Yearly Meeting became something of a collection agency for it.35 It is true that some of the substantial sums that North Carolina Friends received from Friends groups elsewhere were channeled to the Colonization Society, though North Carolina Friends themselves contributed heavily to it. So strongly did North Carolina Friends believe in the colonization venture that when the Colonization Society found itself short of funds in 1826, the meeting for sufferings authorized its finance committee to borrow five hundred dollars to pay its pledge to that group.36 When the preparation of an expedition to Liberia faltered later in the year, Nathan Mendenhall, acting for the meeting for sufferings, wrote to the secretary of the Colonization Society in Washington informing him that the five hundred dollars was available to accel- erate the work.37 In 1827, the treasurer of the Colonization Society drew on Nathan Mendenhall for the five hundred dollars and an additional two hundred fifty dollars.38 He confided to Nathan Mendenhall that the Colonization Society owed him heavily for the voyage of the ship Nautilus to Liberia and that it was in debt in the amount of six thousand dollars.39 The only liquid assets it had on hand at the time were the five hundred dollars from the North Carolina Yearly Meeting.40
The gratitude of the Colonization Society was expressed with profusion by R.R. Gurley, executive secretary, to Richard Mendenhall, as early as 1825. In the name of the Board of Managers of the American Colonization Society, he declared that they would "ever aim to secure the important aid of your very responsible Christian Body, which it is no more than justice to say, have contributed more than any other sect to the relief and improvement of the African race and persevered in efforts for its benefit with a degree of consistency and human zeal, of which no other denomination of Christendom can boast."41
With its national organization and romantic appeal, the American Coloniza- tion Society managed to get much more public attention for Liberia than ever attended the Haitian venture. The Greensborough Patriot reprinted an article from the African Repository and Colonial Journal for its readers in 1826. Featur- ed on the front page, it was entitled "Memorial of the American Colonization
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Society to the Several States," and called for the aid of the "General Govern- ment" and the state governments to the Liberian colony, which it described in glowing terms. It restated the policy of the Colonization Society, which was to "remove, with their own consent, to the Coast of Africa, the free coloured population now existing in the United States, and such as hereafter may become free." 42
Some supporters of the cause were more specific and spoke in terms of trans- porting the entire black population back to Africa. The Greensborough Auxil- iary of the Society passed a resolution in 1826 calling on the North Carolina General Assembly to request the General Government to employ a part of the navy to help the Society "to remove free people of colour to its colony in Africa."43 The African Repository and Colonial Journal carried an article in 1825 with a neat formula for a subtle kind of genocide, by which only people of childbearing age would be removed, leaving the American black population to dwindle gradually to zero.44
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