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RPQS 001 04 Innerwork.Indb Quaker Studies 1.4 (2018) 1–115 brill.com/brp “To Renew the Covenant” Religious Themes in Eighteenth-Century Quaker Abolitionism Jon R. Kershner Abstract In “To Renew the Covenant”: Religious Themes in Eighteenth-Century Quaker Abolitionism, Jon R. Kershner argues that Quakers adhered to a providential view of history, which motivated their desire to take a corporate position against slavery. Antislavery Quakers believed God’s dealings with them, for good or ill, were contingent on their faithful- ness. Their history of deliverance from persecution, the liberty of conscience they experienced in the British colonies, and the ethics of the Golden Rule formed a cov- enantal relationship with God that challenged notions of human bondage. Kershner traces the history of abolitionist theologies from George Fox and William Edmundson in the late seventeenth century to Paul Cuffe and Benjamin Banneker in the early nineteenth century. It covers the Germantown Protest, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, William Dillwyn, Warner Mifflin, and others who offered religious arguments against slavery. It also surveys recent developments in Quaker antislavery studies. Keywords Quakers – Golden Rule – covenant – antislavery – abolition – providence – Benjamin Lay – John Woolman – Anthony Benezet – Paul Cuffe Acknowledgements I am especially grateful to Stephen Angell for his comments on the manuscript of this book. Those comments were invaluable, and improved the final product dramatically. And, as always, I owe everything to the inspiration and grace of Jessica and Lucy. © Jon R. Kershner, 2018 | doi:10.1163/2542498X-12340008 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:03:54PM via free access 2 Kershner 1 Introduction: The Everlasting Covenant in Religion and Politics therefore all you called Christians, that profes[s] him, who are Elders and Masters of Families, are you not to see that your Wives, your Children and Strangers that are within your Camps … that they come all into the new Covenant, Christ Jesus, which in God is established forever, an everlasting Covenant … George Fox (1676, p. 7) In the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries, many Europeans viewed forms of involuntary bondage, such as perpetual African slavery, as a ready answer to the labor shortages in the British colonies (Nash & Soderlund, 1991, pp. 64–65). Like other European migrants, Quaker immigrants to the British colonies in the late seventeenth century, and Quaker missionary efforts in the colonies, successfully established many Quaker communities in these areas and, like their neighbors, Quaker colonists sometimes used slave labor on their planta- tions, in their shops, and in their homes (Cazden, 2013, pp. 347–348; James, 1963, p. 103). Jack Marietta has shown that in 1760s Philadelphia, Friends were 9.9% of the population while accounting for 10.4% of slave owners in the city (Marietta, 1984, pp. 115–116). However, there was always a persistent strain of antislavery foment, even as some leading Quakers increased their involvement in slavery for economic gain. There was no group consensus on the morality of slavery for the first 100 years of the Quaker movement. In their first half-century, Quaker views of per- petual African slavery ranged from acceptance of slavery to ameliorationism to abstention. However, over time, the arguments levied against slavery, be- ginning in the late seventeenth century, were entrenched, enhanced, and elaborated within the Quaker tradition until abolitionism became the official Quaker position in Europe and America. By the end of the eighteenth century many Quaker groups had drafted antislavery statements and disowned those refusing to manumit their slaves (Drake, 1944, pp. 79–81). The efforts of Quaker antislavery reformers to, first, discipline and, then, to completely eliminate slave holding within the Society continued well into the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Cazden contends that disowning mem- bers who owned slaves depended on the moral will and organizational ca- pacity of the local meetings charged with overseeing the effort, and some slaveholders remained for some time after the official antislavery position was adopted. Moreover, while some disowned Quaker slave owners joined other churches, others continued to attend Quaker worship and maintained Quaker habits of dress and speech and were considered to be Quakers by the QuakerDownloaded Studies from 1.4 Brill.com09/25/2021 (2018) 1–115 11:03:54PM via free access “To Renew the Covenant” 3 public (Cazden, 2013, p. 352). Likewise, some Quakers may have never man- umitted all their slaves when Quaker official bodies required them to do so. In other cases, slave owners may have joined the Quakers after the surge of Quaker antislavery efforts at the end of the eighteenth century and brought their slaves with them. And in still other cases, lax Quakers became slave own- ers after the prohibition on slave owning took effect (Mangus, 1999, p. 47). In short, despite its significant efforts against slavery, Quakers continued to struggle with the issue long after they had declared themselves free of the practice. “To Renew the Covenant”: Religious Themes in Eighteenth-Century Quaker Abolitionism examines the religious and theological themes in eighteenth- century Quaker antislavery views. Scholars have argued for economic, rhe- torical, and philosophical reasons for the emergence of antislavery sentiment as a dominant view among Quakers (Carey, 2012; Jackson, 2009; James, 1963; Soderlund, 1985). This book augments the existing literature by contending that the religious reasons for Quaker antislavery views provide a consistent thread across the eighteenth century. J. William Frost has argued that religious ideas and the Quaker tradition were not necessarily determinant of Quaker antislavery thought. After all, Quakers participated in slavery. Moreover, an- tislavery sentiment grew in many quarters of Western society between 1700 and 1800, so the Quaker embrace of abolitionism could have been the result of external influences. However, the consistency of Quaker originated statements against slavery suggests that there were religious ideas in Quaker theology, in- fluenced and bolstered by intellectual and religious trends in European and American society at large, such as the growth in popularity of sentimentalism and philosophical arguments for natural rights, which combined to make slav- ery an uneasy fit among Quakers and ultimately unsustainable (Frost, 1980c, pp. 13, 19). Scholars of antislavery have pondered the question of “why the Quakers?” This book argues that the answer to that question must address Quaker views of God and the Quaker understanding of their place in history as a religious community. To varying degrees, theological themes of sin, spiritual revelation, biblicism, perfection, judgement, corporate witness, and church authority were essential to Quaker interpretations of faithfulness in their public and per- sonal lives, and, so, were invoked and intensified by antislavery reformers. This theological explanation helps scholars understand how a body of religious and moral thought could develop and become dominant in a religious community that eschewed formal creeds. Moreover, the Quaker experience of persecution and deliverance in the seventeenth century led Quakers of the eighteenth century to believe that God Quaker Studies 1.4 (2018) 1–115 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:03:54PM via free access 4 Kershner demanded more from them if they were to live up to the exacting standards of divine providence. Thus, Quaker abolitionists looked backward in history to the early Church and to the suffering and persecution of the early Quakers to recount the history of God’s gracious and unmerited favor in delivering them from their persecutors. Recounting the story of God’s providence to previous generations of faithful Christians in the midst of sufferings and persecutions set the bar for Quaker moral purity in the eighteenth century, and reestab- lished a belief that suffering for a good cause could be redemptive. All of these rationales supported a strain of Quaker antislavery protest. This exploration of religious motivations for eighteenth-century Quaker antislavery critiques is combined with another goal of this book: to provide an overview and review of the important research on Quaker antislavery top- ics. To Renew the Covenant, then, is both a study of religious themes in Quaker antislavery arguments and a study of the historiography of Quaker antislavery. It also pays attention to theological tropes and how they developed in culture and context, interacting with parallel intellectual trends in Euro-American society. While this book traces the important institutional and ecclesial devel- opments among Quakers that contributed to the eventual corporate Quaker condemnation of slavery in all of its forms, the emphasis of this book is on the religious ideas espoused by individual antislavery advocates and how these contributions derived from the Quaker tradition. 1.1 Quaker Beginnings In 1647 a spiritual seeker named George Fox (1624–1691) wandered through a field in the English mid-lands. He had sought answers to his spiritual ques- tions in many churches, but could find no relief for his spiritual unrest. As he walked, he heard a voice offer him what he understood to be a message from God: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition” (Fox, 1986, p. 11). Fox interpreted this message to mean that the answers to his spiritual questions
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