The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia

THE PRICE OF LIBERTY

THE PRICE OF LIBERTY

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE MAKING OF LIBERIA

CLAUDE A. CLEGG III

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL AND LONDON

© 2004 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

Set in Minion by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Publication of this work was aided by a generous grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clegg, Claude Andrew.

The price of liberty: African Americans and the making of Liberia

/ Claude A. Clegg III.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2845-9 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-5516-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. African Americans—Colonization—Liberia. 2. African Americans—North Carolina—History—19th century. 3. Liberia—History—To 1847. 4. Liberia—History—1847–1944. I. Title.

DT633.C58 2004 966.62′01—dc22 2003019659

cloth 08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1

paper 08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1

TO THE ENDING OF

MAN’S INHUMANITY TO MAN

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

One. Origins

Two. Between Slavery and Freedom

Three. The First Wave

Four. Inventing Liberia

Five. The Price of Liberty

Six. Emigration Renaissance

Seven. To Live and Die in Liberia

Eight. The Last Wave

Epilogue: Everything Is Upside Down

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A section of illustrations follows page 112.

MAPS, FIGURES, AND TABLES

MAPS

1. North Carolina 11

2. Liberia, ca. 1828 81

3. Liberia, ca. 1906 205

4. Northeastern North Carolina, ca. 1880 255

FIGURES

1. Literacy Attainments among 2,030 North Carolina Emigrants, 1825–1893 206

2. Religious Affiliations of North Carolina Emigrants, 1825–1893 216

3. Age Distribution of 2,030 North Carolina Emigrants, 1825–1893 223

4. Malarial Mortality among North Carolina Emigrants, by Age and Gender 231

5. Malarial Mortality among North Carolina Emigrants, by Gender and Year 232

6. Recorded Causes of Death for North Carolina Emigrants, 1825–1893 234

7. The Migration of 2,030 North Carolina Emigrants to Liberia, by Year 267

TABLES

1. Counties of Origin and Prior Status of North Carolina Emigrants, 1825–1860 199

2. Gender and Places of Settlement of North Carolina Emigrants, 1825–1893 212

3. Known Occupations of North Carolina Emigrants, 1825–1893 220

4. Counties of Origin of North Carolina Emigrants, 1869–1893 266

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Space will not allow for an exhaustive listing of individuals who facilitated the completion of this project, but several warrant specific mention. I am grateful for the assistance of a number of colleagues in the history department of Indiana University, who shared their insights on various matters and supported this work in a number of ways. These individuals include John Bodnar, George Brooks, Ann Carmichael, Larry Friedman, and Steve Stowe. Graciously, Dave Cecelski and Amos Sawyer offered helpful suggestions for improving the first draft of this study. Special thanks to anthropologist and Africanist Svend Holsoe, who allowed me access to his voluminous collection on Liberia and provided useful comments on the manuscript. Marie Tyler-McGraw, Tom Parramore, and several others encouraged this project in various ways. I am most indebted to my wife, Alfreda, without whose patience and support this book would not have been possible. Finally, my mother and father have been lifelong inspirations to me, and their ongoing interest in my work and well-being are appreciated beyond words.

In addition to these individuals, this book project benefited from funding from several institutions, including the Munson Institute of Mystic Seaport, the North Caroliniana Society, the Arts & Humanities Institute of Indiana University, and the Office of International Programs, also at Indiana. Additionally, a number of libraries, archives, and other institutions were instrumental to the research and writing of this study. These include the Archives of Traditional Music and various libraries of Indiana University, the Southern Historical Collection and North Carolina Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Special Collections Library of Duke University, the Hege Library at Guilford College, the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, the National Archives II, the University of Virginia Library, the Tennessee State Archives, the Chicago Historical Society, the Pasquotank-Camden Library (in Elizabeth City, N.C.), the Lawrence Memorial Public Library (in Windsor, N.C.), and the Bertie County Courthouse. Many thanks to editor Sian Hunter and the staff of the University of North Carolina Press for their good work on this project. Of course, whatever mistakes this book may contain are my sole responsibility.

Bloomington, Indiana

November 2003

THE PRICE OF LIBERTY

INTRODUCTION

When Charity Hunter and her three children ventured from North Carolina to Norfolk, Virginia, during the winter of 1825, the port was a colonial-era town on the brink of dramatic changes. Well situated with deep harbors and natural shelter from Atlantic winds, Norfolk offered sites and experiences that would have fascinated the young mother and her small family. Though her place of origin in North Carolina is unknown, Charity likely would have marveled at the sheer size of Norfolk, which was more than twice as populous as the largest town of her home state. Over the next decade, the port would become even more distinctive in character with the opening of the United States naval dry dock at Gosport and the concomitant expansion of both residential and commercial sectors. Hotels, churches, taverns, banks, steam mills, and tanyards would line its paved streets, and timber and naval stores from North Carolina would supply its burgeoning shipbuilding industry. Characteristic of its modernizing tendencies, a railway would eventually connect Norfolk to Wilmington and Raleigh in the south, and regular steamboat circuits increasingly integrated the port into the commercial worlds of Baltimore, New York, and Boston to the north. In many ways, Norfolk in the 1820s was more progressive and urban than anything that Charity would have been used to, assuming she had lived her twenty-two years solely in North Carolina. Her young children—ages six, four, and two—would have been even more intrigued by the bustling port and the restless waters flowing through its veins.¹

For all its structural maturation and maritime energies, the Norfolk that the Hunters encountered in 1825 was still very much a southern town, configured with institutions, demographics, and mores typical of other urban areas of the region. The family of four had recently been freed from bondage by a Mr. Hunter of North Carolina, and thus Charity was almost certainly cognizant of how the worlds of slavery and freedom intersected and diverged in the ebb and flow of life in Norfolk. As passengers bound for the young colony of Liberia in West Africa, aboard a brig ironically named the Hunter, she and her children unavoidably caught a glimpse of how white mastery interfaced with black servitude in the port town. In a population of approximately nine thousand, whites accounted for half of the town’s residents, with slaves comprising fully a third of the inhabitants. Free African Americans, most of whom lived their lives within the narrow interstices between bondage and liberty, made up less than 10 percent of the total.

During their brief stay in Norfolk, Charity and her small companions, along with the other sixty-four emigrants of the Hunter, were treated generously by the free black community of Norfolk, which was becoming accustomed to witnessing Africa-bound ships, chartered by the American Colonization Society, leaving Chesapeake waters. By way of the Hunter, local African Americans donated sundry small presents to the Liberian colony, including seventy yards of cloth for the Sunday African School there. In years to come, prospective immigrants to Liberia would continue to rely upon the good will of black Norfolk for everything from lodging and subsistence to companionship and moral support. Although the Hunters were the first black North Carolinians to emigrate, they would merely be the first of a stream of over two thousand African Americans from the state, who would over the course of the nineteenth century seek refuge in Liberia. Norfolk, because of its navigability and geographical superiority to North Carolina ports, would be their primary port of embarkation, thus allowing for a continuous cross-fertilization of African American cultures and interests between Virginia and its southern neighbor.²

If the hospitality of free blacks was refreshing, Charity likely found the banality of Norfolk slavery and slave trafficking extremely repulsive. By the 1820s, the town was an exporting emporium for the domestic slave trade. As cotton monoculture spread westward and the frontier demand for slaves increased, Upper South states with an abundance of bondpeople, such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, sold slaves by the shiploads and coffles to the insatiable markets of the Lower South. Perhaps as many as eight hundred thousand slaves were part of these interregional migrations between 1820 and 1860. Although it is unknown what features of this system were witnessed by the Hunters, they scarcely could have avoided seeing some aspect of this trade in people.

As it turned out, the young family was in Norfolk during the slave-exporting season, when planters in the New Orleans market and elsewhere had enhanced purchasing power due to the sale of the previous year’s crop. Given this unfortunate coincidence in timing, the Hunters could have easily passed within earshot of a slave depot, where hapless captives wailed for mercy from a plenitude of tortures. Similarly, they could have observed whole families manacled and marched through the streets of Norfolk, with a small cavalry of drivers inflicting a coarse discipline with each serpentine lash of the bull-whip. It is even probable that the last memory the Hunters had of America was the riveting stench of slave ships anchored alongside their own transport in Norfolk harbor. Whatever the case, the modernizing impulses of the port town were intertwined with routinized spectacles of brutality and inhumanity, which were moored in the culture—were, indeed, the raison d’être—of Norfolk. It was perhaps not so much that Charity and her children were exposed to man’s capacity for cruelty and unbounded avarice; they had surely been privy to this in North Carolina, where many of the slaves in Norfolk’s market originated. What was different was the scale and ordinariness of the dehumanization, as well as the occasion. These were the closing images, the last feelings, that they would take away from the land of their birth.³

As the Hunter sailed through Hampton Roads on February 2, Charity Hunter and her North Carolinian shipmates had, in the mere act of embarking for Liberia, decisively injected themselves into an intensifying and critically important debate over the future of southern slavery, African Americans, and national unity. Although their eyes were now turned eastward toward the possibilities of Africa, their migration facilitated a shift in many North Carolinians’ perceptions of who they were and what they were destined to become. Conventional paradigms of race, freedom, slavery, citizenship, and progress were losing their constancy under the weight of a complexity of forces, ranging from demographic trends and the maturation of capitalism to political expediency and evolving moral sensibilities. Charity Hunter and her emigrating cohort were squarely at the center of these transformations.

Perhaps Unbeknownst to Charity Hunter and many of her fellow sojourners, the idea of black Americans emigrating from the United States, voluntarily or otherwise, as a solution to racial conflict was as old as the republic itself. As early as the Revolutionary period, Thomas Jefferson proposed relocating African Americans beyond the boundaries of the new nation. Similarly, as late as the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln still envisioned a great black exodus that would purge the country of African Americans once and for all. Colonization, as this idea became known, rested upon the contention that blacks and whites—due to innate racial differences, polarized societal statuses, and pervasive racism—could not live together in social harmony and political equality within the same country. To many of its advocates, colonization was an ideological middle ground between the immediate, nationwide abolition of slavery, which seemed an ever remote possibility, and perpetual black bondage, a proposition that even some southern slaveholders found discomforting. During the nineteenth century, the colonization movement was largely spearheaded by the American Colonization Society (ACS). A self-styled philanthropic enterprise, this organization labored to relocate African Americans to the West African colony of Liberia, which the U.S. government had helped establish in 1822 as a settlement for Africans recaptured from transatlantic slave ships. The ACS and its colonizing mission were part of the outburst of social reformism that characterized the Era of Good Feelings and the Second Great Awakening. Most pertinently, it was a product of the failure of abolitionism—even of the most gradual sort—in the South following the American Revolution.

In spreading their message, colonizationists appealed to a range of groups with often contradictory interests. For example, they packaged their program as a temperate form of abolitionism to attract antislavery activists, or to at least deflect their criticism. Some ACS spokespersons argued that removing free (and freed) blacks from the United States would make slavery more secure, since many whites believed that free African Americans instigated slave unrest. In appealing to free blacks themselves, colonizationists portrayed immigration to Liberia as an opportunity to experience unbounded liberty in a country of their own. Despite such enticements, African American spokespersons, including Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, and Martin R. Delany, typically rebuffed ACS gestures. Many free blacks were quick to point out the number of slaveholders among the founders of the group, as well as the patronizing, even racist bent of its publications and pronouncements. Before audiences of white northerners and southerners, the colonizationists often passionately asserted that black removal was the only way to resolve growing sectional tensions over slavery. Significantly, they held that the government was obligated to have a hand in sending blacks to Africa for both their own good and the well-being of the country. In line with this rationale, colonization advocates counseled private citizens that it was their patriotic, humanitarian duty to support the relocation of this despised, degraded people to the land of their ancestors.

With their large African American populations and deepening commitment to slavery, southern states were the primary sources of Liberia-bound emigrants during the antebellum period and beyond. Of all the states involved in this black exodus, North Carolina best exemplified the diversity of opinions, motives, activities, and expectations within the colonization movement. Interestingly, the colonization enterprise in the Tar Heel State gained its first adherents among an insular religious sect, the Society of Friends, which hoped to send nominally free blacks in their custody abroad where they could supposedly enjoy a fuller measure of freedom. Eventually, individuals ranging from desperate governors to even more desperate slaves would find black immigration to Liberia an attractive, if fantastical, strategy for addressing the ongoing crisis of race and slavery in the state. By the eve of the Civil War, the ACS’s vision would inspire some of the state’s wealthiest slaveholders to send hundreds of liberated bondpeople to Liberia, thus spawning a historical drama upon African shores that reverberates to this day. Notably, no state more consistently supplied the colonization movement with emigrants, funding, and ideological support throughout the nineteenth century than North Carolina. Yet, as it turned out, the Tar Heel State was perhaps most representative of how slavery and abolitionist impulses tore the social fabric of the South in ways that colonization ultimately could not mend.

The North Carolina colonization movement, as elsewhere, was tied to economic conditions, tending to peter out during hard times due to declining donations. It was also attuned to the tenor of race relations, surging during periods of notable slave resistance and white repression. The movement affected almost every part of the state in some fashion but found its most fertile ground in the eastern agricultural counties with their high concentrations of blacks, both enslaved and free, and proximity to the Atlantic. Although the Civil War precipitated a temporary decline in Liberian emigration, the failure of Reconstruction to substantially reconfigure power relations between African Americans and whites revived the appeal of the ACS. By the 1870s, Liberia had to compete with increasingly popular midwestern states as destinations of disaffected black North Carolinians. Nonetheless, hundreds of black Tar Heels continued to cross the ocean in search of freedom in Africa until the turn of the century. Ultimately 2,030 blacks left the state between 1825 and 1893 to take up residence in Liberia.

For almost a century, Liberian emigration connected black North Carolinians and others to the broader cultures, commerce, communication networks, epidemiological patterns, and historical evolution of the Atlantic world. Their relocation to Liberia challenged conventional notions of race, citizenship, nationality, gender, and, above all, the very meaning of freedom. Additionally, this migration revealed the protean nature of the emigrants’ identities and self-consciousness as they sought to invent and reinvent communities on two very different continents. The ways in which they reimagined themselves as Liberians, as free people, and as settlers once they left the United States remained informed by their black American past. Along with Virginians, Marylanders, Georgians, and others, black North Carolinians created culturally rich, hybrid communities in Liberia, consisting of an often politically unstable mix of American newcomers, indigenous people, and Africans recaptured from westward-bound slave ships. In the process of forging the world’s second black-ruled republic, they also constructed a settler society marred by many of the same exclusionary, oppressive characteristics common to modern colonial regimes.

The very idea of immigrating to Africa encouraged a diasporic consciousness among black North Carolinians, embroidered with romantic imaginings of a pristine ancestral homeland and a global, transcendent black kinship between people of African descent everywhere. For many, dreams of a Pan-African utopia in Liberia were instantly shattered when they arrived in the country only to be confounded by their utter unfamiliarity with Africa and Africans. Their evolving political and material interests as Christian, civilized settlers complicated their troubled relationship with the Africans whom they dispossessed of vast territories. Likewise, widespread penury, disease, and death made their adjustment to their new environment all the more difficult. Colonization saved over two thousand black North Carolinians—along with fourteen thousand other African Americans—from U.S. slavery and racial oppression over the course of the nineteenth century. Still, it doomed many to lives of misery along an unforgiving tropical frontier, lives too often shortened by a virulent, endemic strain of malaria. Prepared or not, this was the price that thousands paid in their quest for liberty in Liberia.

This book is the first to probe deeply into both the American background and postmigration experiences of a significant number of Liberian emigrants. Of several themes germane to this study, identity construction (and malleability) is among the most central. This book posits that African American immigration to Liberia—and the fluid, ever-changing identities of the emigrants themselves—must be understood as being enmeshed in the constantly evolving meanings of slavery, freedom, colonialism, race, citizenship, and migratory patterns that characterized the development of nineteenth-century Atlantic cultures. The manners in which black North Carolinians experienced bondage and liberty in particular are focal points, along with the historical conditions and variables that made immigration to Liberia a feasible option for over two thousand of them. Conceptually, this study is located at an intersection of United States and West African history. While it focuses on the experiences of black North Carolinians as a representative case study, this work is also concerned with the broader, national debate over colonization, slavery, and abolition, and the voice and place of African Americans in that discourse. Just as important, this study illuminates the dynamics of community-building in Liberia, which even today—in its architecture, educational institutions, and political ethos—bears the unmistakable imprint of a black American past. Thus, based upon extensive archival research, government documents, emigrant rolls, ethnographic sources, genealogical records, period newspapers, and many other materials, The Price of Liberty aims to advance the current state of knowledge regarding black life and culture in the Atlantic world.

ONE. ORIGINS

New Garden, Guilford County, N.C. (Photograph by author)

Like much of the North Carolina Piedmont, Guilford County was a rolling, picturesque plateau during the eighteenth century, adorned with deciduous forests and a matrix of winding streams and natural clearings. The soils were rich enough for a variety of purposes, and indigenous peoples, namely the Saura and the Keyauwee, found it possible to subsist without substantially altering the ecology. European settlers who entered the area by midcentury found the pastoral ambiance of the area alluring, as well as the possibility of hewing a life from this terrain. Gradually, the region, having been designated a county and named after Lord Francis North, the first Earl of Guilford, was adapted to the new rhythms of white immigrant cultures. By the 1770s, a frontier studded with oak cabins, water-powered gristmills, cultivated fields, and a courthouse was etched into the land, and yeoman communities emerged among the toiling newcomers.¹

Of the German Lutherans, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and other groups who settled in what became Guilford County, the Society of Friends (or Quakers) would eventually become the most influential. These largely English immigrants came in steady waves between 1750 and 1775, hailing from several places, including Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Nantucket Island. Accompanied by trains of cattle, sheep, and hogs, they brought farm implements and housewares in their canvas-covered wagons, cultural markers of an agrarian past. Significantly, they also carried ideas about family, worship, education, and civic life, which would inform their efforts to create a viable community in the Piedmont. Similar to other European immigrants, they named their settlements after existing places, thus inventing a sort of imagined familiarity that perhaps added meaning to their migration. The New Garden settlement, established in 1750 and named after Quaker enclaves in Pennsylvania and Ireland, was the first and principal town, hosting the Friends’ monthly meetings as early as 1754. As the Quaker presence in Guilford County grew, their Piedmont villages displaced the older communities of Friends in the eastern counties of Pasquotank and Perquimans as the primary centers of the faith. By 1790, New Garden regularly sponsored the North Carolina Yearly Meeting of the Quakers, setting the tone for the continuing evolution of the group’s views and practices.²

Immigration and natural growth necessitated the founding of other settlements in Guilford County, which had assumed a distinctively Quaker character by the Revolutionary period. The Jamestown community on Deep River emerged as one of the more substantial villages by the 1790s, taking full advantage of its proximity to water to power sawmills, gristmills, and other enterprises. Much labor was, of course, expended on the necessary daily regimens of clearing land, planting crops, building houses, and spinning cloth. Nonetheless, Jamestown did develop a small retail and service sector, which produced guns, hats, and other goods. Additionally, a social life unfolded outside of the meetinghouse, which led to the establishment of fraternal orders, a temperance society, and a literary club. By the turn of the century, Jamestown boasted a number of brick structures, and a federal road coursed through the settlement. Only the county seat of Greensborough (later Greensboro), created in 1809, seemed to eclipse the Quaker village in civic importance, the former becoming a self-governing town in 1824.³

On the surface, there appears to have been a methodical simplicity to Quaker life in Guilford County. From the founding of small farming villages in New Garden and Jamestown to their ascetic social life, Friends embraced an ethos that stressed restraint and reflection in public and private matters. This observation is especially pertinent regarding the group’s mode of worship. The architecture of their meetinghouses lacked the ornate pretensions of other Protestant sects. There was no stained glass or church bell, benches were without backs, and musical instruments had no place in services. Worship itself was wholly meditative, with no pastor leading prayer or choir offering song. It was not unusual for a meeting to commence and adjourn with not a word spoken by anyone. Even in their most sacrosanct of collective rituals, each worshiper remained an individual capable of experiencing a transcendent connection with God that required no audible expression. Those moved to speak were always free to, though economy of language and forbearance were highly regarded. Typically, silence prevailed during most Quaker services, compromised only by the irrepressible sounds of nature that occasionally echoed through their sylvan sanctuaries.⁴

If the Friends’ manner of worship appeared sedate, even uninspired, to observers, the issues addressed in their business meetings certainly revealed a rigorous engagement with communal concerns that could sometimes be contentious. Generally held on Saturdays, these sessions were occasionally segregated by sex, with men and women deliberating on matters that were supposedly best resolved along gender lines. Important issues that affected numerous persons or required an evocation of communal values and authority were often open to discussion by both sexes. Consistent with their moderate, deliberative approach to most matters, the Friends countenanced a range of questions and concerns in their business meetings. Illustratively, marriage proposals were routinely scrutinized to discern the clearness of prospective spouses as a precaution against bigamy. Moreover, itinerant Quakers were frequently required to submit to investigations to determine whether they were reputable enough to represent the group in other communities. Potentially scandalous reports of bastardy probably always gained some attention, though no New Garden man was censured for siring a baseborn child until 1805. Although other, more serious topics certainly preoccupied Guilford County Quakers during the late eighteenth century, no issue more consistently embroiled North Carolina Friends during this period than slavery. In a singular way, African American bondage challenged the essence of what the Quakers believed about themselves and the structured, insular worlds that they had struggled to erect in New Garden and elsewhere. Unlike the marriage or bastardy cases they handled, often with some difficulty, man’s ownership of man was a problem, a grating dilemma, that rented the fabric of Quaker life and faith for not only years, but generations.⁵

By the late eighteenth century, when slavery became a common topic of discussion in Quaker meetings, the institution was over a century old in North Carolina. Geography and natural resources substantially determined both the nature and diffusion of slavery across the state. The lack of readily accessible seaports resulted in African slaves entering the area largely through Norfolk and Charleston. Attitudes toward slavery, ranging from advocacy and indifference to abhorrence of the institution, were also imported from adjacent states by white immigrants who introduced the first slaves to North Carolina in the seventeenth century. Notably, the state often patterned its laws regulating black bondage after the statutes of Virginia, South Carolina, and other states. While eastern agricultural counties, such as Bertie, Northampton, Halifax, New Hanover, and Warren, became heavily dependent upon slave labor for producing tobacco, rice, naval stores, and later cotton, North Carolina never developed a plantation economy comparable to its neighbors’ in size and overall importance to the state’s economy. In 1790, only 25 percent of the state’s population was composed of African American slaves, compared to 43 percent in South Carolina, 39 percent in Virginia, and 32 percent in Maryland.⁶

As in other colonies, African bondage in North Carolina was socially articulated and legally codified over time, affected by variables such as geography, economic conditions, migratory patterns, slave resistance, and evolving cultural concepts of racial difference. In 1669, the Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolinas recognized the right of a master to exercise absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever. Statutes passed by the colonial government in 1715 and 1741 further elaborated on the shape and texture of chattel slavery in North Carolina by prohibiting unauthorized commercial exchanges between enslaved and free people, establishing slave courts to punish a variety of offenses, and mandating that manumissions be approved by county officials. The constitutional guarantee of masters’ absolute power and authority over their bond servants in practice allowed slaveholders much latitude over their property. Prior to 1774, even the willful killing of a slave by his or her master was legally permissible. Furthermore, individuals who murdered the slaves of others could only be sued for damages based on the bondperson’s market value as determined by the courts. As the number of black slaves in North Carolina increased from approximately 800 in 1712 to 100,783 in 1790, notions of race and the realities of African American bondage were becoming reified in the developing character of the state’s culture and politics, as well as its long-term economic trajectory. Shaped by a myriad of forces that resulted in a highly uneven distribution of bondpeople throughout the state, slavery, and its profits and perils, fostered an array of correspondingly uneven interests and ideals that both strengthened and contested the institution’s growing presence.⁷

During the eighteenth century, the Quakers of North Carolina and the larger Atlantic world came to envision slavery as an aberrant relationship between human beings, void of socially redeeming value. Although they would eventually become known as the Christian group most inalterably opposed to black bondage in the United States, their early experiences with slavery betrayed little that was suggestive of any natural antipathy toward the institution. For instance, in seventeenth-century Barbados, where Quaker influence blossomed amidst thriving sugar plantations, slaveholding Friends offered few moral critiques of their investment in African thralldom. Similarly, Pennsylvania, a Quaker stronghold, passed numerous acts regarding bonded and free blacks, such as a 1725–26 law that rivaled the draconian slave codes of southern colonies. Friends were deeply involved in the slave trade out of Philadelphia and Providence as late as the 1760s, and slaveholding among members of the North Carolina group lasted well into the nineteenth century. Prior to the 1750s, most Quakers accepted or at least tolerated the existence of slavery, even when they were not directly complicit in its perpetuation. There were, of course, Friends, like William Edmundson, who were appalled by the treatment of slaves by Quakers in Barbados and elsewhere. These radical humanists forthrightly proclaimed the ways in which African bondage contradicted core values of the Society, such as pacifism, the brotherhood of man, and the primacy of the salvational Inner Light. Nonetheless, few were listening to the likes of Edmundson in the seventeenth century, and such compunctions about slavery guided the activities and lifestyles of few Friends of that period.⁸

MAP 1. North Carolina

Much of the Quakers’ accumulating discomfort with slavery during the eighteenth century was a matter of degree and was not distinguished by any sudden turn toward abolitionism. It was an evolutionary phenomenon and by necessity had to be, given the slow, consensus-building style of decision-making that characterized the group’s contemplation of any major change of policy. Since the most important reforms required the sanction of the Yearly Meetings, issues facing the group sometimes went unresolved, or even candidly discussed, for long periods of time. This inertia had the effect of diminishing, at least symbolically, the urgency of the matter at hand and precluding a rash, hastily derived conclusion. Still, a decisive tilt occurred in Quaker views of slavery, which allowed for the advancement of a new logic that recast the institution in a way that made it less morally digestible.

From firsthand experience and observation, Friends—master and nonslaveholder alike—had witnessed the ways in which African bondage had corrupted their faith. Slavery violated the precepts of marriage, denying legally recognized marital unions between slaves and the legitimacy of their offspring. It allowed, indeed, encouraged violence borne of fear, retribution, and sadistic whims since every slave code included provisions for the corporal punishment of slaves and offered owners power over life and death. In most colonies, the slave was refused access to intellectual improvement through literacy. Further, Christian instruction, where such religious teachings were allowed, was emphatically uncoupled from the notion that the slave, as a Christian, might be entitled to the legal status of person. As a people who had experienced religious persecution and who self-consciously attempted to level social distinctions among themselves, the ill fit of slavery with the Christian ethics of brotherhood, equality before God, and the possibility of redemption from sin was glaringly apparent to many Quakers by the 1750s. If black slaves were ignorant, savage, degraded, and immoral as many observers believed them to be, slavery had allowed, even forced them to be so. If the bondman was mired in sin because slavery, through law, custom, or practice, reduced him to such, then slavery, some began to reason, must be a sin in itself. This moral equation, not wholly an invention of eighteenth-century Quakers, informed the gradual shift of the Society away from slave trafficking and slaveholding. A century in the making, this formula for stigmatizing slavery itself—and not just the refusal of certain masters to become kinder managers of their property—became the framework for the most potent philosophical attacks on the institution during the next one hundred years.⁹

While the Friends’ moral bearings regarding slavery were in adjustment, the materialist, secular context of these changes both spurred and made possible this reimagining and assertion of Quaker religious convictions. It was perhaps easier to think about the feasibility of disassociating oneself from owning and trading Africans once the economics of continuing slave importation made less fiscal sense. Pennsylvania, the North Carolina Piedmont, and other Quaker bastions had limited uses for slave labor by the 1750s, for no pervasive plantation cultures existed in these areas that required huge concentrations of bonded agricultural labor. Nonslaveholding Friends who found themselves competing with the slaves of their neighbors in farming endeavors and trades had fewer qualms about entertaining opposition to slavery. However, their objections to the institution were as reflective of economic self-interest as they were of humanitarian concern. Further, given that the cost of servile insurrection, such as those that tore through New York City in 1712 and Stono, South Carolina, in 1739, could be appallingly steep, the need to limit the importation of Africans into their communities was a rational decision for a people whose pacifist doctrines disavowed the kind of armed vigilance and systematic terror that controlling unfree laborers required. Thus, it should not be surprising that the Friends chose to assail the buying and selling of slaves, which enhanced the numbers of Africans in their possession, before seriously considering the emancipation of those whom they already held in bondage. These were two separate issues for the Quakers, the dichotomy relating directly to their financial dependence on slaveholding and their countervailing desire for physical and psychological security against a profitable trade that might have demographic and social consequences that could lead to their utter undoing.¹⁰

Under the collective, conflicted pressures of their Christian ideals, economic interests, psychic needs, and corporate identity, the Quakers began to incrementally repudiate slave trafficking and holding over the course of the eighteenth century. To be sure, there had been early criticism of slavery by dissenters such as William Edmundson during the previous century. Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, stated unequivocally in 1688 that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are. However, the most significant official changes came in the 1750s when the Yearly Meetings in Philadelphia and London issued strong denunciations of slave trading. By the 1770s, when many Quakers found it morally imperative, and economically feasible, to distance themselves from complicity in the enslavement of Africans, the policy of the Friends had become overtly emancipationist, certainly in no small way influenced by the liberative rhetoric of the American Revolution. Now, slaveholding was a disownable offense, warranting the excommunication of recalcitrant masters from the Quaker fold. Unlike the Methodists and the Baptists, the new sensibilities of the Friends were not fleeting and subject to sectional compromises. The group had officially turned its back on slavery, deeming it an insufferable sin that its members should no longer inflict upon others.¹¹

In addition to their tendencies toward internal conformity and deliberated joint action, the Society’s communication networks and commercial connections throughout the Atlantic world facilitated both its collective shift away from slave trading and slavery and the creation of an international antislavery ideology. Thus, just as Philadelphia, London, and Nova Scotia Friends were arriving at their conclusions about the inconsistency of African bondage with their beliefs and interests, Quakers in North Carolina were involved in the same dialogue and moving toward similar positions. In 1768, Piedmont Quakers resolved to avoid trading in slaves in any case that can be reasonably avoided. After the 1772 Yearly Meeting, only endogenous trafficking in bondpeople was allowed, guaranteeing that the number of enslaved Africans among North Carolina Quakers would not increase artificially, at least not due to foreign importation. Three years later, Friends were required to obtain the consent of their local monthly meeting before purchasing or selling slaves, and in the following year members were encouraged to manumit their remaining bonded Africans. Given the synchronism of Quaker ideological transitions and policy changes regarding slavery, it is probably not coincidental that North Carolina Friends made slaveholding a disownable transgression in 1780, the same year that Pennsylvania passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.¹²

Despite their own harmonized actions, Quakers of the Tar Heel State undoubtedly understood that North Carolina was not Pennsylvania, especially regarding the issue of slavery. Too many had invested too much in the institution for too long for it to be so emphatically, if gradually, legislated away. Absent laws that positively provided for a sweeping emancipation of enslaved African Americans, Quakers were left with moral suasion as their primary weapon against ongoing bondage in Revolutionary North Carolina. Accordingly, in 1787, the year that the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in territories beyond the Ohio River, the Quakers appointed committees to labor with such Friends as remain in the practice of holding their fellow men in a state of slavery. Over the next several decades, this nudging approach would become their preferred method for convincing coreligionists to relinquish their ownership of slaves.

In an effort to add momentum to the emancipation process, members of the Society petitioned the newly formed North Carolina legislature for approval to manumit their remaining bondpeople under certain rules and restrictions. After being read in the House of Commons, however, the petition was summarily rejected. Starting with this plea, every subsequent Quaker entreaty for the liberalization of emancipation laws was ignored, and an acrimonious atmosphere pervaded the relationship between the Friends and the government in Raleigh. Although perhaps partially due to Quaker insularity and their refusal to take up arms during the struggle against England, this hostility was most closely linked to both slaveholding interests in the state government and legally questionable manumissions that Friends had recently performed. Additionally, news of the massive, protracted slave rebellion that began convulsing the French colony of St. Domingue in 1791 did nothing to make state officials more receptive of Quaker petitions. In fact, though North Carolina temporarily banned the importation of slaves by land or water in 1794 as a security precaution, the Friends and other advocates of black liberty would have few allies in the capital at the turn of the century.¹³

In addition to the philosophical strife between Friends and the state legislature, the Society’s antislavery activism aroused the ire and suspicion of local governmental bodies. In 1776, Quakers in the northeastern counties of Pasquotank and Perquimans freed forty slaves, apparently without following the established legal procedure requiring that manumitters prove before county courts that meritorious service had been performed by the bond-people in question. To the horror of the Friends, the freed blacks were later apprehended by authorities and resold under a statute passed the following year. The Quakers sued for relief, but the capture and sale of the emancipated slaves were upheld by the legislature in 1779. After these events, conflict between local officials and the Quakers became notably more commonplace and acerbic. In 1795, a Pasquotank County grand jury lambasted the Society for publicly discussing the subject of emancipation. Not only were enslaved African Americans greatly corrupted and allienated from the Service of Their Master by Quaker agitation, Friends also allegedly encouraged and even sheltered fugitive bondmen. Raising the specter of a slave revolution on North Carolina soil, the jurors pointed out that unsolved arsons had become a problem and that the Friends’ actions had placed the state in great peril. Moreover, they charged the Quakers with a recklessness oblivious to the miserable havock and massacres which have taken place in the West Indies, in consequence of emancipation.¹⁴

In a 1796 effort to stir the conscience of the legislature with yet another petition, Quakers excoriated state officials for allowing freed blacks to be sold back into bondage. For a legislative body of men professing christianity, to be so partial, as thus to refuse any particular people the enjoyment of their liberty, the petitioners asserted, is incompatible with the nature of a free republican government, and repugnant to the spirit of the christian religion. The Friends’ appeal went on to call for an act that would allow conscientiously scrupulous masters to free their slaves, who would in turn be protected from seizure. A similar petition submitted the following year was more measured in tone and seemed designed to mollify whatever apprehension legislators harbored regarding the motives and objectives of the Society. "It