The Circulation of Early Quaker Antislavery Books: a Transatlantic Passage?
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Chapter 9 The Circulation of Early Quaker Antislavery Books: A Transatlantic Passage? Louisiane Ferlier Transatlantic exchanges structured the early modern Quaker community. They gave coherence to its intellectual, social, demographical, financial, and commercial networks. After 1760, the production and circulation of Quaker abolitionist writings illustrate the intensity of transatlantic exchanges and highlight the differences between colonial and metropolitan Quaker print cultures. Transatlantic collaborations are essential to understand the nature of Anthony Benezet’s abolitionism.1 Already his first antislavery publication— Observations on the Inslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes of 1759— was structured to mirror the transatlantic passage.2 The pamphlet joined in a single volume his reflections and observations on the effects of slavery in the American colonies to the directions given some ten years before by the London Yearly Meeting. It was published after six other Quaker treatises against slav- ery had been printed in colonial America. In contrast, by 1760, no document explicitly devoted to the abolitionist cause had been distributed publicly by English Quakers in England.3 This situation appears to be a reversal of the established scholarly view that “English Friends published much more than their American cousins.”4 This exceptional situation at a time when the Quaker 1 Maurice Jackson conclusively establishes this. See Maurice Jackson, Let this Voice be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. (Philadelphia, PA, 2009). 2 Anthony Benezet, Observations on the Inslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes, with Some Advice thereon Extracted Form [sic] the Yearly Meeting Epistle of London for the Present Year: also Some Remarks on the Absolute Necessity of Self-Denial, Renouncing the World, and True Charity for All such as Sincerely Desire to Be Our Blessed Saviour’s Disciples (Germantown, PA, printed for Christopher Sower, 1st edn, 1759). 3 This chapter focuses on the printed defenses of abolitionism as it questions how Quaker discourse shifted in the public sphere. Decisions by yearly meetings, and manuscript docu- ments such as the Germantown petition or Fox’s letter to “Friends beyond sea” and appeal in Barbados, indicate clearly that discussion within the community preceded printed appeals, but we will restrict ourselves to the discussion’s public and published form. 4 J. William Frost, “Quaker Books in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Quaker History 80:1 (1991): 1–23, at 3. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/97890043�566�_0�� 148 Ferlier community was truly an Atlantic one points at the problematic relation of Friends with public campaigns. This chapter presents Benezet’s pamphlet as the first to publicly call for a truly transatlantic abolitionism and shows how previous texts contributed to a slow progression of Quaker abolitionism from a marginalized colonial voice to a shared cause. Benezet’s publication acknowledged—at least implicitly—the importance of the six abolitionist pamphlets published previously in the American col- onies and it inscribed itself in a larger tradition of Quaker condemnation of slavery. The first abolitionist tract to be published on American soil had been An Exhortation & Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes, printed anonymously in 1693 on William Bradford’s press in New York. This provenance explains its attribution to either George Keith or a group of his supporters because it corresponds with the culminating point of the con- troversy that opposed Keith to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and by then Bradford only published defenses of Keith.5 In 1715 a New Jersey author, John Hepburn, published in New York, again on Bradford’s press, his The American Defence of the Christian Golden Rule, or an Essay to Prove the Unlawfulness of Making Slaves of Men.6 From the 1720s onwards, publications become more regular: in 1729, Ralph Sandiford published A Brief Examination of the Practices of the Times in Philadelphia;7 in 1733, Elihu Coleman of Nantucket published in Boston his Testimony against the Antichristian Practice of Making Slaves of Men;8 this was followed only three years later by Benjamin Lay’s warning to All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, published in Philadelphia;9 5 George Keith [attribution first formulated by Charles Evans in his American Bibliography], An Exhortation & Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes (New York, NY, printed by William Bradford, 1693). On the attribution of the pamphlet to Keith or on its collective authorship, see Katharine Gerbner, “Antislavery in Print: the Germantown Protest, the ‘Exhortation,’ and the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Debate on Slavery”, Early American Studies: an Interdisciplinary Journal, 9:3 (2011) 552–75, at 553. 6 John Hepburn, The American Defence of the Christian Golden Rule, or an Essay to Prove the Unlawfulness of Making Slaves of Men (New York NY, printed by William Bradford (attribu- tion by the author of this article), 1715). 7 Ralph Sandiford, A Brief Examination of the Practice of the Times (printed by Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Meredith for the author, Philadelphia, PA, 1729). 8 Elihu Coleman, A Testimony against that Antichristian Practice of Making Slaves of Men (Boston, MA, 1733). 9 Benjamin Lay, All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates Pretending to Lay Claim to the Pure & Holy Christian Religion (printed by Benjamin Franklin for the author, Philadelphia, PA, 1733)..