Jonathan Sassi 2013 Gest Fellow sits at 18th-century abolitionist Anthony Benezet’s writing desk

Gest Fellow Jonathan D. Sassi is Professor of History at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His project is entitled “Toward Gradual Emancipation in New Jersey.”

I am studying the political struggle that eventuated in New Jersey’s gradual emancipation act of 1804. New Jersey was the last state to pass such a law during the period of “the first emancipation” that followed the American Revolution, with Pennsylvania having been the first in 1780. New Jersey’s gradual emancipation statute was the result of a decades-long campaign by antislavery activists, many of whom were Quakers. I have been trying to learn how the eighteenth-century antislavery movement functioned: how it fashioned winning arguments and rebutted the opposition’s; mobilized supporters and built coalitions; went to court and won legislative victories; all with the ultimate goal of uprooting an entrenched institution and liberating people held in bondage.

The Quaker Collection holds a rich variety of primary source materials that illuminate various facets of the struggle against slavery. To cite a few examples, the correspondence of several key individuals along with the records of abolition societies reveal the inner workings of the movement. The minutes of various Quaker meetings also provide insight into the drive to eliminate slavery, both within the Society of Friends and in society at large. Manumission certificates and legal depositions open up fascinating stories about how particular men, women, and children escaped the snares of enslavement. Moreover, I discovered that the Quaker Collection also contains unexpected finds. For example, a wedding certificate or business receipt — documents that on the surface seemingly have nothing to do with the antislavery movement — can lay bare the personal ties that connected several of the major historical actors and bring their eighteenth-century world into focus.

My research will require me to visit a number of other archives in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. The full tapestry of New Jersey’s antislavery campaign will only become visible as I reconnect the scattered strands of evidence. My time at the Quaker Collection has been enormously productive and provided me with an abundance of findings and leads for further investigation. I am grateful to have been awarded a Gest Fellowship and to the library’s expert staff for their manifold assistance.

Gest Fellow Ben Wright is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History at Rice University. His research is on “American Clergy and the Problem of Slavery, 1750-1830: Form the Politics of Conversion to the Conversion to Politics.”

Ben Wright 2012 Gest Fellow

My research explores the connections between religious conversion and antislavery activism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Cutting off at 1830, when antislavery hardened into immediate abolitionism, I argue that the Americans and Britons who attacked slavery in this early period, did so primarily out of broader motives than simply a hatred of human bondage.  The push to convert the colonies, the new American republic, and eventually the world trumped nearly every other ambition for the growing population of evangelical Protestants in the Anglo-Atlantic world.  Quakers, however, offer a powerful counter-example.  My study argues that Quakers demonstrated an unrivaled commitment to antislavery because of their inward quest for communal purity.  It is no coincidence that the Quaker antislavery crusade coincided with what Jack Marietta has called the Quaker Reformation, a mid-eighteenth century renewal movement among Friends to refocus religious life around the principles of modesty, anti-materialism, and communal discipline.

While working in the Quaker Collection, I have investigated the letters, diaries, and other private writings of dozens of Quaker reformers, the minutes of numerous monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings, and the antislavery publications of numerous Quaker societies.  My research has confirmed many of my suspicions, while also revealing several surprising new insights.  The writings of early to mid-eighteenth century Quakers like John Fothergill, George Churchman, John Pemberton and others illustrate my arguments regarding Quaker anxieties by revealing a great preoccupation with internal purity and a fear that moral failures among Friends will lead a winnowing of the faithful.  I was surprised, however, to find seeds of dissention among mid-to-late eighteenth-century Quakers that would later sprout into the antebellum schisms.  I found that reformers were very much aware of these dissentions and used antislavery as a tool to maintain unity.  The private letters of several Quaker reformers reveal their relief at the refreshing unity among Friends in the antislavery cause.  Another surprise came from a close reading of Quaker conversion narratives.  Conversion in the early eighteenth century was a deeply fraught process that often took months if not years, whereas by the end of the century, conversion was a quicker process.  In the early nineteenth century, the language of conversion almost completely drops out of Quaker memorials.

It will take more time to integrate these findings within my larger analysis, yet I am grateful to say that the remarkably helpful staff and impressive holdings of the Quaker Collection have given me a treasure trove of evidence to inform my project.

2011 Gest Fellow Matthew Reilly posts on the University of Texas Viz. blog about the anti-Quakeriana materials he encountered at Haverford this past summer. An excerpt and link to the full post follows:

Over the past summer, I spent a month as a Gest Fellow at Haverford College’s Quaker & Special Collections, where I was researching an eighteenth-century female preacher. The most entertaining and unexpected find over that month pertained to an image archive classified as “Anti-Quakeriana.” One of the more interesting aspects of Quaker history (in my opinion) is their retention of documents released by rivals and detractors. Hence the origin of the classification, “Anti-Quakeriana.” As a result of such practices, scholars and historians now have an archive rich in cultural contexts and historical negotiations that mark the transitions from a seventeenth-century “schism” to an eighteenth-century “sect.” Below, I briefly discuss a series of paintings and engravings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century female ministers.

Continue reading on Matthew’s blog at Viz.

From time to time, we will be posting profiles of our Gest Fellows.  Susan Hanket Brandt is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Temple University.  Her dissertation is entitled “Gifted Women and Skilled Practitioners:  Gender and Healing Authority in the Mid-Atlantic Region, 1740-1830.”

2011 Gest Fellow Susan Hanket Brandt

My dissertation complicates the current declension model that narrates women healers’ prominence in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and their subsequent loss of authority in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries due to the rise of enlightened science, male-authored medical texts, man-midwifery, and clinical-anatomical education in the increasingly numerous medical schools.  Instead, I argue that some women found new sources of healing authority in female education, manuscript authorship, the culture of sensibility, access to print media, and the antiauthoritarianism of dissenting religious groups like the Society of Friends.  The dearth of female practitioners’ medical recipe books and papers has contributed to their misleading invisibility. A goal of my dissertation is to uncover women healers’ hidden practices and their vital role in the American healthcare marketplace.

The Gest Fellowship allowed me to analyze the recipe book, garden book, diaries, business papers, and thousands of family letters penned by healer Margaret Hill Morris (1737-1816) and her family. The letters are a particularly rich source, as they chronicle Morris’ day-to-day healing practice as it changed over the course of her adult life, from a benevolent ministry to a profitable medical/apothecary business. Morris’ writings demonstrate how she constructed her healing authority as she participated in therapeutic social networks, examined medical books, and cared for extended family members and patients in her community. Morris’ profound Quaker beliefs were a source of spiritual comfort for patients and family members as they faced frequent illnesses and the deaths of loved ones. The letters chart an Atlantic exchange of healing information and medicinal plants between Quakers in Philadelphia, Madeira, and the British Isles.  In addition, the papers of traveling ministers Rebecca Jones and Mary Swet include medicinal recipes, raising the question of healing practice as part of their transatlantic ministry.

The Special Collections staff’s assistance was invaluable in my research. Professors Emma Jones Lapsansky and Susan Mosher Stuard also offered helpful suggestions. My Gest Fellowship research will help me to analyze the scope of Quaker women’s healing practices and authority in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century Delaware Valley.

–Susan Hanket Brandt

From time to time, we will be posting profiles of our Gest Fellows.  Matthew Reilly ’06  is a Ph.D. candidate in English at University of Texas, Austin.  His research is on “The Literary Life of May Drummond, Female Preacher.”

2011 Gest Fellow Matthew Reilly '06

My research in Haverford’s Special Collections focused on an eighteenth-century female preacher, whose conversion to (and later expulsion from) the Society of Friends caused a sensation among both Quakers and non-Quakers. Although May Drummond has fallen out of the purview of scholarship on eighteenth-century British history, she achieved a remarkable degree of celebrity and infamy during her lifetime. Her passionate and eloquent oratory drew crowds en masse, and London periodicals often published her whereabouts along with invitations goading eminent clergymen to public disputation. As a result, she earned a private audience with Queen Caroline and sympathetic citations from some of the pre-eminent authors of her day. Not only was Drummond noteworthy for her spoken ministry, but also for her status as a literary heroine and a cultural icon.

Drummond’s broad-based popularity distinguishes her from a Quaker establishment that was increasingly formalizing norms of doctrinal stability and communal exclusivity. Her touring presence foreshadowed the revivals that would soon sweep Britain, Ireland, and America, but she actually drew inspiration from late seventeenth-century Quakers, who had adopted tactics of combining scriptural precedents with more eclectic, interfaith, and cosmopolitan appeals. In her mission as a public Friend and an occasional combatant against England’s religious elite, Drummond stands apart from the sort of sentimental heroine that pervades the literature of mid-eighteenth century Britain. Her sermons were printed, and she indirectly moved others to write about her exploits. The height of Drummond’s literary fame, I argue, is in her role as the protagonist (if not the author) of a pseudonymous castaway tale by Unca Eliza Winkfield, entitled The Female American.

While working with Haverford’s extensive collections of Quaker documents, I charted Drummond’s social networks and rivalries, tracked controversies following in the wake of her travels, and recorded the reception of her life and ideas. Although Drummond’s certificate to preach was revoked just prior to her expected departure for America, the library’s holdings of Philadelphia journals and letters of emigrated British Friends show the blight of subsequent generations, which were unfriendly to her legacy. The expertise of Haverford’s librarians and specialists helped me re-frame my research on Drummond in relation to a transatlantic Quaker community in transition during the years prior to the American Revolution. I look forward to writing “The Literary Life of May Drummond” alongside my dissertation, “False Learning: Alexander Pope and the Afterlive(s) of Scriblerian Satire,” as a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

–Matthew Reilly ’06

From time to time, we will be posting profiles of our Gest Fellows. Aaron Jerviss is a Ph.D. candidate in History at University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  His research is on “Testimony through Sufferings: The Civil War in Pacifist Memory, 1865-1914.”

2011 Gest Fellow Aaron Jerviss

My dissertation focuses on how Friends, Mennonites, and Brethren (the three “historic peace churches”) remembered their Civil War experiences throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For me, the great research question has been: How does a group document the role it played during a war when its members refused to fight or contribute directly to the military effort? I argue that these religious bodies did so by seeking to redefine the concepts of “suffering” and “heroism” in distinctly non-militaristic terms.

During my months’ stay as a Gest fellow, I have primarily been diving into Haverford’s rich collection of Quaker serials. Two topics have jumped out at me after reviewing these periodicals. First, I am interested in how Quakers explicitly linked the perceived social, economic and moral evils of the last three decades of the nineteenth century back to the Civil War. National “sins” as diverse as increased intemperance, the “militarization” of school textbooks, and the corporate corruption of the Gilded Age all found their roots in the great American internal conflict, according to Quaker authors and thinkers. Second, I am fascinated by the way peace churches memorialized Abraham Lincoln. The Quakers contributed to the construction of an image of Lincoln as “Pacifist Friend,” even though he took unprecedented actions in the areas of conscription and military mobilization.

My time spent at Haverford Quaker and Special Collections has been highly profitable. The wealth of source material and the helpful suggestions of the knowledgeable staff have given my dissertation structure and opened up exiting new fields of inquiry. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to spend part of my summer as a Gest fellow and would strongly encourage anyone interested in researching Quaker-related topics to come investigate the extensive holdings at Haverford.

–Aaron Jerviss

Margaret Abruzzo’s book, Polemical Pain : Slavery, Cruelty and the Rise of Humanism, has just been released by Johns Hopkins University Press. The author discusses the development of humanitarianism and how the slavery issue helped to shape modern concepts of human responsibility for the suffering of others.

Abruzzo was a Haverford Gest Scholar in 2003 and spent four weeks in Special Collections conducting research on this topic. She graciously acknowledges the help of Haverford and the staff of Special Collection in this, her latest, publication.

In 2003 Abruzzo was just starting her research for her dissertation at the University of Notre Dame in History. At the time of her residency at Special Collections she focused her work on examining the place of pain in the rhetoric of slavery, public and private and was interested in comparing Quaker anti-slavery writings to proslavery proponents. Her time was well spent at Haverford and later she wrote, “I had an extremely productive time at Haverford, in large part because of your expertise.”

In 2004 Margaret Abruzzo won a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship awarded to doctoral students whose study will advance scholarship related to ethics and religion. This honor allowed her to continue her research full time and to complete her dissertation in 2005. Today Abruzzo is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.

Gest Fellow Katharine Gerbner is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. Her research is on Protestantism and Slavery in the early Atlantic World.

Katharine Gerbner 2010 Gest Fellow

During my month at Haverford, I have examined the early Quaker stance on slavery. Quakers—renowned abolitionists by the late eighteenth-century—were deeply conflicted about the significance of slavery in the seventeenth-century. Hundreds of slave-owning Friends lived on Barbados, the sugar-rich British island in the Caribbean, and most found no contradiction between owning slaves and preaching equality. In Pennsylvania, Quaker merchants were active participants in the slave trade and a number of Quaker families held slaves.

Using the resources at the Haverford Quaker Collection, I have sought to understand and contextualize seventeenth-century Quaker views on slavery. My primary sources include Meeting Minutes from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, as well as epistles and books of discipline. In these documents, I have examined not only Quaker slavery and antislavery, but also other contemporaneous debates and controversies within the Quaker community. By comparing debates on slavery to debates on other topics, I have developed a better sense of the cultural and political context that accompanied seventeenth-century Quaker slave owning.

Having the opportunity to spend a month studying Quakers and slavery at Haverford has been both productive and fascinating. I am very grateful to the staff at the Quaker Collection for welcoming me so warmly and offering such excellent advice about how to proceed with my research!

Gest Fellow Hayley Glaholt is a Doctoral candidate in Religion, Ethics, and Public Life (Department of Religion) at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Her research is on late-nineteenth century British and American Quakers’ debates on the morality of animal vivisection, virtue, gender, and medicine.

Hayley Glaholt 2010 Gest Fellow

My interest in using Haverford’s Quaker Collections stems from their extensive holdings concerning Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Orthodox) and their complete set of nineteenth-century Quaker periodicals, both British and American. While the majority of my research on British Friends was carried out at Friends House and Woodbrooke in England, I managed to miss one key journal—The British Friend. Haverford possesses the entire set of this periodical, and I have since found key primary source material that supports my claim that Quaker debates concerning vivisection overlapped with discussions of the parameters of their testimony for peace. The British Friend, in comparison to The Friend (London), has slightly more radical pieces describing the virtues of those engaged in war, vivisection, and other forms of cruelty, and particularly outlines women’s roles in establishing and maintaining a pacific ethic within the Quaker community.

Haverford’s holdings on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Orthodox) have been significant for my research in that they proved the absence of a debate about vivisection among American Friends. While The Friend (Philadelphia) mentions the British Quaker community’s agitation against the practice of vivisection (or experimenting upon live animals), Philadelphia Friends consistently fail to engage with the issue in any meaningful way. I could not have substantiated my ‘hunch’ had I not accessed these important records from the late-nineteenth century. Further, side trips around Haverford to the American Anti-Vivisection Society and the Women’s Humane Society, both founded by Philadelphia Quaker Caroline Earle White in the late-nineteenth century, have allowed me to flush out the Philadelphia Quaker response (or lack thereof) to the problem of vivisection in medical education.

Lastly, Haverford has bits and pieces of material related to the contemporary incarnation of the Friends’ Anti-Vivisection Association, which is now called Quaker Concern for Animals. These modern discussions of vivisection, which draw upon Victorian Friends’ arguments, are extremely useful for contextualizing this long-running debate on violence towards animals within a religious community founded on pacifism.

This month has been a luxury, allowing me the time and resources to delve into a crucial aspect of my dissertation research. I would like to thank John Anderies and Ann Upton in particular, and the Gest Fellowship Committee more broadly, for providing me with this wonderful and inspiring opportunity to use Haverford’s Special Collections.

Gest Fellow Catherine Baylin is a MA student in Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo. Her research is on Quaker missionaries in the Middle East before World War II.

Catherine Baylin 2009 Gest Fellow

I first came to Haverford to research Quaker missionaries in Ramallah, Palestine and am delighted to be back to expand my research to include Quakers in Brumana, Lebanon. I am particularly interested in Quaker activity in the Middle East as a case study of Arab-American relations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I hope to challenge the common perception that American missions were unambiguously colonial during this time period and explore the ways in which local residents shaped mission activity.

The collections at Haverford provide unparalleled insight into the schools, Meetings, and medical missions that Quakers established in the late 19th century. The Jones papers contain hundreds of letters and records detailing the activities and finances of the Lebanon mission. The Quaker Collection also contain early writings of Theophilus Waldmeier, the founder of the Brumana mission, as well as the collection of Daniel and Emily Oliver, who opened an orphanage nearby. No study of the Quakers in Lebanon could be complete without examining this original source material. The Quaker Collection also contains numerous published sources which are proving central to my research, including biographies, yearbooks, and memoirs.

Having the time to comb these collections at this state of my academic career is incredibly rewarding, and I would like to thank the staff and the Gest Fellowship Committee for providing me with this opportunity.