Quakers & Abolition

Synopsis

This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. Contributors from a range of disciplines, nations, and faith backgrounds show how Quakers often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about slavery itself and the best path to emancipation. Far from having monolithic beliefs, Quakers embraced such diverse approaches as benevolent slave-holding, both gradual and comprehensive abolition, and consumer boycotts of slave-produced products.--From book jacket. Introduction / Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank -- Part I. Freedom within Quaker discipline: arguments among friends -- Liberation is coming soon: the radical reformation of Joshua Evans (1731-1798) / Ellen M. Ross -- Why Quakers and slavery? Why not more Quakers? / J. William Frost -- George F. White and Hicksite opposition to the abolitionist movement / Thomas D. Hamm -- Without the consumers of slave produce there would be no slaves: Quaker women, antislavery activism and free-labor cotton dress in the 1850s / Anna Vaughan Kett -- The spiritual journeys of an abolitionist: Amy Kirby Post, 1802-1889 / Nancy A. Hewitt -- Part II. The scarcity of African Americans in the meetinghouse: racial issues among the Quakers -- Quaker evangelization in early Barbados: forging a path toward the unknowable / Kristen Block -- Anthony Benezet: working the antislavery cause inside and outside of the society / Maurice Jackson -- Aim for a free state and settle among Quakers: African-American and Quaker parallel communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey / Christopher Densmore -- The Quaker and the colonist: Moses Sheppard, Samuel Ford McGill, and transatlantic antislavery across the color line / Andrew Diemer -- Friend on the American frontier: Charles Pancoast's A Quaker forty-niner and the problem of slavery / James Emmett Ryan -- Part III. Did the rest of the world notice? The Quakers' reputation -- The slave trade, Quakers, and the early days of British abolition / James Walvin -- The Quaker antislavery commitment and how it revolutionized French antislavery through the Crèvecoeur-Brissot friendship, 1782-1789 / Marie-Jeanne Rossignol -- Thomas Clarkson's Quaker trilogy: abolitionist narrative as transformative history / Dee E. Andrews and Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner -- The hidden story of Quakers and slavery / Gary B. Nash. edited by Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank. Includes bibliographical references and index.