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.

Geoffrey Plank, author of the new book John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire, will be giving a series of talks in the Philadelphia area in early October.  His complete schedule follows:

October 4, 7:00 p.m., Swarthmore College Science Center 199: “The Other Woolmans: Family Life and the Ideals of an Eighteenth-century Abolitionist”

October 6, 2:00 p.m.,  Mount Holly Friends Meeting, 81 High Street, Mount Holly, New Jersey: “The Other Woolmans” (as above)

October 7, 3:00 p.m., The Barn at the Pendle Hill Conference Center, 338 Plush Mill Road, Wallingford, Pennsylvania: “John Woolman and the Utility or Futility of History”

October 8, 4:30 p.m., Special Collections, Magill Library, Haverford College: “The Other Family Living with the Woolmans: African-Americans and Quakers Living Together, and the Process of Gradual Emancipation”

For more information you may contact Geoff at g.plank@uea.ac.uk

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.

Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections and the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College announce the completion of the Quakers and Slavery Project, a publicly accessible database of primary source material on the topic of Quakers and Slavery, and an interactive website to accompany the online material.  Among the types of material included are photographs and lithographs, organization records, personal correspondence, and other publications. The interactive website includes commentary contributed by eminent scholars, Quaker researchers, and project staff.

Initial discussions about a joint digitizing project between the Quaker repositories at Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges began in 2007, when both were preparing for the 300th anniversary of the end of the slave trade in North America. Abolition was a cause whose beginnings and sustenance came largely from Quakers in northeastern America and England. The two colleges also began plans to join with the McNeil Center of Early American Studies at University of Pennsylvania to host an international conference on Quakers and Slavery in November 2010. This digitization project is timed to correspond with the conference, which will include material exhibitions by both Quaker repositories.

The materials selected for this project are available for research within the confines of our two Quaker repositories. However, these materials are unique or rare, and as such should receive limited physical handling in order to ensure their longevity. Digitization of these materials supports their long term preservation by reducing the amount they are handled, as well as providing greatly increased access to researchers who are not able to visit. Moreover, within each repository the documents span a range of material types and come from several collections, such that there is no easy way to bring them together physically. This project allows for the virtual reunification of these materials and collections.

The Religious Society of Friends was the first corporate body in Britain and North America to fully condemn slavery as both ethically and religiously wrong in all circumstances. It is in Quaker records that we have some of the earliest manifestations of anti-slavery sentiment, dating from the 1600s. After the 1750s, Quakers actively engaged in attempting to sway public opinion in Britain and America against the slave trade and slavery in general. At the same time, Quakers became actively involved in the economic, educational and political well being of the formerly enslaved.

The earliest anti-slavery organizations in America and Britain consisted primarily of members of the Society of Friends. Thus much of the record of the development of anti-slavery thought and actions is embedded in Quaker-produced records and documents. Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College and the Quaker Collection at Haverford College are jointly the custodians of Quaker meeting records of the Mid-Atlantic region, including Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, New York and Vermont and these records illuminate the origins of the anti-slavery movement as well as the continued Quaker involvement, often behind the scenes, in the leadership and direction of the abolitionist movement from the 1770s to the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, and beyond.

Funding for the Quakers and Slavery Project was provided by the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, through a program stipulated by the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA). This program is administered in Pennsylvania through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries for assisting libraries in providing all users access to information, developing partnerships, and increasing information access for persons who have difficulty gaining it.

Join the authors of Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848-1880, for a discussion and reception Friday, March 24, at 5:00 pm in the Philips Wing and Special Collections. Drawing heavily on the Benjamin Coates African Colonization Collection from Haverford Special Collections, Back to Africa has been called “essential reading for every student of black studies, abolitionism, Quaker history, and nineteenth-century reform in general.”

Professor of History and Curator of the Quaker Collection Emma Lapsansky-Werner will speak at the Haverford Township Free Library on Thursday, January 26, at 7:00 p.m. in the Community Room.  Her topic will be Benjamin Franklin and his relationships with Quakers and Abolitionists.  The program is made possible by a grant from the PHC One Book, One Philadelphia.

Emily Higgs, a student assistant in Special Collections, has completed an annotated index to the Robert Pleasants letterbook, a part of the records of Baltimore Yearly Meeting (item #168). Pleasants (1722-1801), a member of Curles Monthly Meeting, Virginia Yearly Meeting, is known for his work as an abolitionist. He freed his eighty slaves and urged the ratification of a law proposing gradual emancipation for the children of slaves. Pleasants established the Gravelly Hill School for the free children of slaves. The letterbook covers the period 1754-1797 and centers on matters of religion and abolition. We anticipate making the letterbook web-accessible in the near future.

Back to Africa : Benjamin Coates and the colonization movement in America, 1848-1880, edited by Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Professor of History and Curator of the Quaker Collection, and Margaret Hope Bacon, noted Quaker author and former Haverford Gest Fellow, has recently been published by Penn State University Press. Back to Africa, which draws on the papers of Benjamin Coates from Haverford Special Collections, has been called “essential reading for every student of black studies, abolitionism, Quaker history, and nineteenth-century reform in general.”