USA > North Carolina > Toward freedom for all : North Carolina Quakers and slavery > Part 8
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Quakers in Court
North Carolina Quakers had a steady interest in manumitting slaves from 1777 onward. The release of forty of their own slaves in that year brought them into conflict with the courts and the legislature, and this conflict continued until the Civil War. The decision in 1808, which converted the North Carolina Yearly Meeting into an owner of slaves, was quite transparently an effort to circumvent laws which were continually becoming more stringent, and it is not surprising that the arrangement involved the Society in a great deal of litigation. It was stated openly that slaves were to be kept until such time as they might be manumitted in North Carolina, or, failing that, to be removed from the state.
The hoped-for legislation seemed very slow in coming, and this was why Quakers organized the North Carolina Manumission Society. They hoped to muster enough support for more lenient manumission laws so that such laws might be forthcoming, but in this they failed. The Quaker-held Negroes remained in an uncertain position, and many others who might have been manumitted remained in bondage. However, for Quakers and their neighbors, assignment to the North Carolina Yearly Meeting continued to be one of the simplest and least expensive ways to give one's slaves virtual freedom. The year 1822 saw a surge of such assignments, perhaps spurred by the activities of the Manumission Society. Indeed, so many non-Quakers were assigning their slaves to the yearly meeting at the time that that body decided at its annual session in November of 1822 that it could no longer accept assignments from persons who were not members of the Society of Friends.1 The care of slaves already assigned was becoming a heavy burden.
The minutes of the standing committee, and after 1824 of the meeting for sufferings, reflect the extraordinary amount of time and effort devoted to slave matters during the 1820s. From James Griffin of Perquimans County came a modest assignment in 1822: A woman named Zilpah and her son Theophilus.2 The Thomas Outland Estate gave fifty-nine slaves that year, and John Kennedy thirty-six.3 Jacob White assigned thirty, and Joseph Borden eighteen, to the
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care of the yearly meeting.4 The already heavy burden of the yearly meeting was further increased by continuing assignments in the ensuing years. Among those of which we have record are five who were left to the New Garden Monthly Meeting by Thomas Wright in 1816, but which entered litigation with the yearly meeting as plaintiff in 1824.5 In 1826, Samuel Retman (Redman?) assigned "about fifteen" slaves to the yearly meeting, possession to come at his death.6 In the same year, additional assignments came from the estate of Ira Symons,7 and more from the Dickenson Estate.8 From the latter there were six whose transfer was accomplished, but ten others who were involved in litigation.
DEFENDERS OF THE BLACKS
Although the assignment of slaves to the yearly meeting was earnestly sought after, it brought with it a train of lawsuits. For nearly a century, North Carolina Quakers were almost continuously suing or being sued for slaves whose freedom they either wished to establish or protect. After 1808, it usually involved blacks who had been assigned to the yearly meeting, but not always so, for Quakers came to be looked upon as champions of the black. If we are to credit one witness, unscrupulous persons who tried to take advantage of black persons feared the lawyers of the yearly meeting. Below are eleven major and minor cases about which some information remains:
Owen Stanton. Owen Stanton wrote to the standing committee from Beau- fort, North Carolina, in 1810 explaining his plight with regard to two black children whom he had saved from being sold into slavery. The mother of the children was a free black person who had been bound out to a woman Friend who had been disowned for marrying a non-Friend. An unidentified man was threatening to turn the children over to the court for sale, a prospect which quite naturally terrified the children and the mother. They appealed to Stanton as a Quaker. He wrote that he was much moved by the tears of the children, and that he threatened the man with having "the yearly meeting take it in hand ... " This caused the man to agree to settle out of court, but at a cost of $160. Owen Stanton and a few friends made up the money, in the belief that the standing committee would reimburse them. Compensation was not immediately forthcoming, however, for Stanton wrote a second letter inquiring about it, but there the correspondence stops, and the minutes of the standing committee provide no further information.9
Benjamin Benson. In Greensboro, in 1817-1820, Quakers undertook the defense of Benjamin Benson. Benson was a free black person who had been kidnapped in Delaware and sold as a slave in Guilford County, North Carolina, by one John Thompson. There the matter came to the attention of Vestal Coffin, George Swaim and Enoch Macy, who had the owner brought to court in the name of the State of Delaware. The trial is said to have caused much excite- ment in Greensboro, because such cases were extremely rare and the slave- holding element was strongly opposed to seeing the black man set free. Never-
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theless, the State of Delaware won the case, and Benjamin Benson was again a free man. 10
Penny. In 1818, the yearly meeting recorded the following minute concern- ing a girl named Penny:
The Eastern Standing Committee ... also report that a proposition has been made to the committee that they interfere in the defense of a mullattoe girl by the name of Penny, supposed to be freeborn, but is sought after in order to reduced to a State of Slavery, which is agreed to & Thomas White & David White are appointed to assist Exum Newby in whose care She now is in her defence, - of which the meeting approves.11
But after this laconic entry, both the yearly meeting minutes and those of the standing committee fall silent on the fate of Penny.
Redman vs. Thomas Wright. (Betsy Redman against Bethuel Coffin and others, and the agents of New Garden Monthly Meeting.) In Guilford County the will of Thomas Wright was probated in 1816, and it contained an assignment of slaves to Friends. By its terms, Wright left all his property to his wife, except his slaves: Peg, Lot, Sam, Hannah and Daniel.12 These he willed to "the Society of Friends of New Garden Monthly Meeting or their agents and successors."
The Wright slaves were duly delivered to the agents of the New Garden Monthly Meeting by the executor of the estate at that time. However, in 1817, Willie Wright presented the agents with a claim on the estate, and displayed a power of attorney which had been executed by "the next of kin of the testator," presumably Betsy Redman. Although it appeared in court later that Willie Wright's power of attorney had been revoked before that time, he so intimi- dated the agents that they agreed to a compromise settlement.13
In 1819, it was reported that four of the slaves in the Wright case had left the state at a time when the case was pending in Guilford County Court. When the court reprimanded Friends agents for allowing, or causing, the slaves to leave, the latter explained their belief that the Society of Friends was legally authoriz- ed to own slaves and dispose of them as it wished, although they admitted that the slaves were of no economic benefit to the Society, but rather worked for their own benefit.14
In 1824, the Wright Estate not being settled, the New Garden Monthly Meeting appealed to the North Carolina Yearly Meeting to sue for possession of the black persons left them by the will of Thomas "Right" (Wright). 15 The yearly meeting agreed to do this and instructed the meeting for sufferings to proceed with the case. The latter body appointed a committee which engaged Thomas Ruffin to press the Quaker claims in court.16 On November 4, 1825, the com- mittee reported to the meeting for sufferings that it had hired out the blacks by order of the court.17
The Wright case was a very lengthy one. In 1827, it appears in the minutes of the meeting for sufferings as the case of Betsy Redman vs. Executors of
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Thomas Wright and agents of New Garden Monthly Meeting.18 In 1828, it was tried in Guilford County, North Carolina, and depositions were taken from per- sons at Lexington, Kentucky, where Betsy Redman had taken up residence. George C. Mendenhall was then attorney for the estate of Thomas Wright.19 In 1830, the meeting for sufferings received a report that the case had been referred from the Guilford court of Equity to the State Supreme Court,20 but in 1831 the case of Betsy Redman against Bethuel Coffin and others, and the agents of New Garden Monthly Meeting, was said to have been ordered continued to the next term of Guilford Superior Court for lack of copies of the New Garden Meeting records.21
Finally, at the June 1831 session of the State Supreme Court, the case of Red- man vs. Coffin did reach that body. Justice Ruffin, speaking for the court, held that "qualified emancipation" was tantamount to real emancipation, which a court of law could not support in North Carolina, due to considerations of "the safety of the commonwealth." Since Quaker possession of slaves was tanta- mount to emancipation, an act allowed only for legally certified meritorious service, Quakers were not legally qualified to hold slaves. In consequence, the court ordered that the Quaker agents must give up "to the next of kin the net residue ... $416.93, and interest thereon; with the value of four slaves, which have been carried to distant States, and interest thereon - together with all the annual value of all the other slaves and interest thereon - amounting in the whole to 3,621.74 dollars."22
The case of Redman vs. Coffin finally came to rest when it was heard for a second time by the State Supreme Court in 1833. The court again ruled in favor of Betsy Redman. Chief Justice Ruffin accused the Society of Friends of bad faith, and "a willing resistance to the cause of justice, and the claims of property." Accordingly, he ordered them to "account upon the most rigorous principles for the value of four slaves sent away and the hires of all others, and interest on those sums."23 By that time, Betsy Redman was an extremely old woman, for when the depositions were taken in 1828 at Lexington, Kentucky, Joseph Fishkin, George C. Mendenhall's agent at that place, described her as in "very low circumstances" and "75-80 years old."24
Joe. One of the most exasperating cases North Carolina Quakers had to deal with was that of a man named Joe - often spelled Jo. Joe was kidnapped in Kentucky from a group of Quaker-held Negroes being taken to Indiana by Asa Folger in 1825. Folger sent back an urgent message for Joe's papers so he could go to court in Grant County, Kentucky, and free him.25 George C. Mendenhall, in behalf of the meeting for sufferings, took the matter up with his friend, Con- gressman Romulous M. Saunders, of North Carolina, who in turn took it up with Col. Richard M. Johnson, a congressman from Kentucky. An authenticated bill of sale sufficed to get Joe out of the clutches of the extortioner who was holding him, and into the safety of a jail.26 As soon as Asa Folger got word that he could free Joe, he went back to Kentucky from Indiana and conducted him in best Underground Railroad fashion to Ohio, but no sooner had they arrived on free
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soil than the ex-slave longed to be back in Kentucky. He had married a wife while there and wanted to go back and work out her redemption, for she was a slave. Since Folger discouraged this, being sure that Joe would be apprehended and sold into slavery, the latter asked for a loan to buy his wife. Poor Asa Folger wrote to Nathan Mendenhall back in North Carolina for advice. Should he advance the money to Joe? Mendenhall, in obvious despair, wrote Folger that "it seems to me he is out of the reach and direction of our meeting."27
Hagar. Another interesting case was that of Hagar, the girl manumitted by Reston Lamb in 1786 before she was eighteen years old.28 In 1825, she had made up her mind to emigrate with her husband, but she had no papers to prove that she was free, and without them she ran the risk of being picked up and sold. On May 12, 1825, David White wrote to the meeting for sufferings that he found the manumission paper, but that the signature was missing. Nevertheless, he was satisfied that Phineas Albertson and Phineas Nixon could tes- tify to the authenticity of Reston Lamb's handwriting.29 The presumption is that she went either to Liberia or Indiana with her husband, but nothing more appears in the Quaker records.
Samuel R. Nixon. Aaron White wrote to the meeting for sufferings in 1826 that the late Samuel R. Nixon had left "about 15 people of color" to the trustees of Symon's Creek Monthly Meeting in Perquimans County. However, the free- dom of those persons had been threatened with a suit by the executor of the Nixon estate and by the heirs of Samuel R. Nixon.30 The agents of the yearly meeting in Eastern Quarterly Meeting were instructed by the meeting for sufferings to attend to the case, but in 1831 it was decided to drop the matter. By that time, the executor of the estate had died, and the slaves were in the effective possession of the Nixon heirs.31
Samuel Retman (or Redman). In the Retman case, Samuel Retman directed that his adult slaves go to "the Society of Friends of Symon's Creek" two years after his death, which occurred in 1824. The services of the minors were to be equally divided between his mother, "Sarah Perry, Polly Clay and Margaret Swaim." When the children reached the age of twenty-one they would become the property of the Friends.32 Trouble arose when the executors ended up five hundred dollars short in settling the estate. In search of liquid assets, they sued the trustees of the yearly meeting in the hope of getting possession of, and selling, the slaves. The suit was filed in 1826 in Pasquotank County. Aaron White wrote to the meeting for sufferings that he had retained two counselors to represent the trustees, and that both had agreed to make no charge if they lost the case and would rely on the generosity of the trustees if they won.33 The outcome of the case is not clear.
Shadrack. In 1821, the yearly meeting sued for the freedom of a slave named Shadrack. Shadrack had been transferred to the yearly meeting "except for ten years service," which ten years had then expired. During the interim he he had been sold and resold several times. When the yearly meeting tried to make good its claim, the court ruled that "an absolute sale for a valuable
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consideration and possession accompanying it, was preferable to a gift."34 In other words, the party then in possession of Shadrack, having paid money for him, retained possession and ownership.
Jim Sampan. John C. Stanly, a free black man of Newbern, wrote to Nathan Mendenhall in 1832 about five black persons who were being held in the Newbern jail and were claimed by a Captain Marshall in the right of his wife. Stanly had a power of attorney for the prisoners, but he was unable to release them. He feared they would soon be sent south by a slave speculator. Stanly appealed to the meeting for sufferings to undertake their defense.35 The story ended happily. Ten days later, Stanly wrote to Mendenhall that the prisoners had been released, thanks to the intervention of William E. Gaston. Since Gaston sometimes was employed by the meeting for sufferings, he may have acted for them at Newbern.36
Contentnea vs. Dickenson. The case of Contentnea vs. Dickenson shares with the Betsy Redman vs. Bethuel Coffin and others case the distinction of being the lengthiest and most widely known of the Quaker slave cases. In his will, probated in Wayne County in 1817, Dickenson left a total of sixteen black persons to the agents of the yearly meeting in Contentnea Quarterly Meeting - or at least he intended to do so. However, at his death, non-Quaker heirs "took up" six of them and claimed them as their property.37 This was the situation which the agents of the yearly meeting found when they made claim for their rights under the will of Dickenson. Accordingly, the agents entered suit in Wayne County Superior Court for possession of the three blacks who had been sold. The case was docketed as "The Quaker Society of Contentnea vs. Dicken- son," commonly referred to simply as Contentnea vs. Dickenson. During the year 1826, the yearly meeting agents reported having spent $250 in legal fees on the case.
In 1827, the case of Contentnea vs. Dickenson was tried in Wayne Superior Court before Judge Ruffin; William E. Gaston, by then an old friend of the Quakers, served as their counsel. Nevertheless, the Quakers lost, and Judge Ruffin ruled that Joseph Borden and fourteen other trustees of "the Religious Society or Congregation of Christians, called Friends or Quakers of Contentnea Quarterly Meeting. . . could not recover a slave because their religious scruples forbade them to hold slaves . . . " Since this was the case, Ruffin reasoned:
. .. It was the intent of Dickenson, Cox, Borden and Mace, parties of the deed, as well as the society, that neither the trustees nor the society should have any profitable or beneficial use of the slaves, but that the trustees, as a sort of guardian of the slaves, should hold them in the name of the society for the benefit of the slaves themselves, they working under the direction of the trustees and entitled to receive the profits of their labor, after defraying the ex- penses attending their comfortable maintenance, and to be ulti- mately emancipated by the society or trustees, whenever it could be effected according to the laws of this State. The witness being
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asked if it was not intended that the slaves might be sent out of the State to be emancipated, answered that nothing was said by the parties of such a disposition of them, but he understood it to be the intention that they should remain in North Carolina until emancipated, and then choose their own places of residence.38
The case was appealed to the State Supreme Court where it was tried in the July term of 1827. The court sustained the decision of the Superior Court. Speaking for the court, Chief Justice John L. Taylor declared that "When Quakers hold slaves, nothing but the name is wanting to render it at once a complete emancipation." Commenting on the intent of the Quakers to emancipate their slaves by law sometime in the future, he styled it as "Quite Quimerical" to sup- pose that "a collection of them" might all perform meritorious services. On the one hand, Quakers as a religious society had a perfect right to hold slave property. Other churches also did. Nevertheless, Quakers violated the laws prohibiting manumission when they gave the slaves virtual freedom and allow- ed them to earn money for themselves. Such a policy nullified their right to own slaves. Taylor was preoccupied, furthermore, by the thought of free blacks working for their own benefit in plain view of genuine slaves who toiled for their masters. It would naturally "excite in the latter discontent ... and possibly lead to the most calamitous of all contests, a bellum servile."39
Associate Justice John Hall wrote a dissent to the decision of the State Supreme Court in the case of Contentnea vs. Dickenson. Commenting on "our unfortunate connection with slavery," he wrote appreciatively of the "sentiments of humanity" entertained by the Quakers, and in effect called on the legislature to provide legislation which would at once assure "self-preserva- tion" and not force Quakers to break the law.40
Nevertheless, the highest court of the state ruled against the plan recom- mended by Judge William E. Gaston in 1808 and defended by him in the case of Contentnea vs. Dickenson. This would seem to have been the end of the long sophistry, however noble, that the yearly meeting was a bona fide owner of slaves. Yet the meeting for sufferings managed to continue its labors almost without interruption. The practice from that date forward seems to have been that the trustees took assignments of slaves as individuals, with the private understanding that they were merely holding them in trust to be manumitted or sent out of the state as soon as possible.
Newlin vs. Freeman. The case of Newlin vs. Freeman was not settled until 1849. It arose from the will of Sarah Freeman, a widow who was not a Quaker, who died in Iredell County in 1839. Mrs. Freeman declared that it had always been the intention of herself and her husband to free their slaves and send them to some free state, that after her husband's death she found that "she could not do that." Witnesses quoted her as saying that since she could not manumit her slaves legally (except for meritorious service) "she intended to give them to some steady old Quaker, who would not own slaves." Accordingly,
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in her will she left her slaves to "Newlin," apparently John Newlin of Saxapahaw in Alamance County. John Newlin was an active member of the meeting for sufferings. The heirs sued John Newlin for possession of the slaves. Neverthe- less, Newlin managed to keep possession of the slaves until the case was finally settled in his favor in 1849, the court then instructing him that he must emanci- pate them within one year "in accordance with the statute of 1830."41
All this created an awkward situation for John Newlin. He was an active member of Spring Friends Meeting and apparently retained his good standing by paying the blacks wages and allowing them the nominal freedom permitted to all such persons under the care of Friends. They worked in Newlin's cotton mill in Saxapahaw. Non-Quaker neighbors found it peculiar that John Newlin should have "slaves," and even within the Newlin family down to the present generation his name has been clouded by the suspicion of slaveholding.42
Stringer vs. Burcham. In 1846, a semi-literate man named James Davis wrote to the meeting for sufferings concerning his servant Hannah and her daughter Mary. Mary was apprenticed to one John Burcham of Guilford County, who claimed that both mother and daughter belonged to him because he was the grandson of Joseph Phisiac, their former owner. But the elder Phisiac, still living, denied this, saying he had received them in trust from John Howard when the latter moved to Indiana, and they were free. Since Burcham had actual possession of Mary, suit was brought against him in the name of Hannah (Stringer) for her own freedom and that of her daughter. Davis appealed to the meeting for sufferings for help.43 In 1851, Thomas Kennedy reported to the meeting for sufferings that Carteret Superior Court had ruled in favor of Mary. James Davis wrote again, saying that the legal firm of Donnel and Hubbard had exerted themselves greatly in the case because "the slaveholders were afraid I would gain her freedom and the cry of abolitionism was in the streets."44
Actually, Mary was the granddaughter of one Dinah (Sinah, Cena), who was one of the several slaves freed by William Jessup in 1807 before he moved to Indiana. Craven County had granted them freedom for meritorious service. Judge Nash, speaking for Cartaret Superior Court in 1851, ruled that Mary was free because she was born of a free mother. As for the mother, whose freedom was also threatened, he said: "after a period of thirty years, the defendant, with- out any pretence of right, as far as we are informed, seized upon the plaintiff and questions her right to freedom ... After so long an acquiescence by the public in her enjoyment of her freedom, every presumption is to be made in favor of her actual emancipation, especially against a trespasser and wrong- doer . . . "45
William Burcham was a persistent man, however. He appeared in the next session of court with Mary and "she choosed him as her master and the court bound her to him until she should come of age 21 years and she is now 18," to use James Davis's quaint language. Quaker counsel Hubbard, however, objected that she should not be bound, "as they did not know when friends might call for her to convey her to a free country." The court went ahead and
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bound her anyway, but Hubbard "had it inserted in the bond that she should be given up when called for by friends." Fees in this case were given as $49.95.46
The heavy legal expenses, added to the very high cost of colonizing their black charges in Haiti, Liberia and western states, made Friends work with free blacks a heavy financial burden. Nathan Mendenhall concluded his final letter to Asa Folger on the case of Joe with the comment that, "It is an expensive, Troublesome and hard thing to move 95 of our coloured people across the Ohio this year, 58 across the Atlantic to Liberia and 119 to Haiti, leaving 617 yet on hand ... " One hundred of these, he revealed, were at that time involved in law- suits. The total expense of the work with free blacks in 1826 was estimated at $4,000.47
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