1.4..

t: : In
5 I4?...n$u
.2“ K
(a. ..

n .0
WK:
7 - in.
»

5&5;

”1...: a

.1.
diahtrt it.

#1 dAHAVAAJ.
I O r u u .164.

a; t .
5.3.9:. F. a
s

t

on .i. .1: J! 3

1;! u.- an“!

Path... ‘ a .
JV 52:3... .513»...
. .. ..‘$.3ar%lzuuaauu.:.
LE .

! tﬁi‘ A
a .vl'nlﬂ.‘

¢ 4.
if!

 

.t.‘v
vtl?‘|...3.1ul| v1
7)- .r.0a.1I.V'va. a

 

 

 

4.65. K

v ‘ . 53.7.1....r.._. VJ§Jn5Cl23J3£ :F.:th:..Fla...rr§...rr£,.N—f~lfsu.. A 4.} 1 . .e a .1; if 1.1-... . .. 3?: T. . .r

    
  

I I‘ 'I ’ ‘ bl
’Icv I‘ll:

”58" IlllllllllUlllllllllllllilﬂlllllllllllliHIIHIIMINIHHI

F" 31293015948114

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

SLAVE REVOLTS AND NORTH CAROLINA QUAKER MIGRATION

presented by

Daniel R. Kroupa

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for

M.A. degree in Hi story

Major professor

@448 13¢
DateaIDC- “fl V197 )

0-7639 MS U i: an Watt” Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

LIBRARY
Michigan State
Unlverelty

 

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove We checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

33222001 MAYzozooa A
W0, 1 '

      
  

 
  
   

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSU Ie An Afﬁrmative Action/Equal Opportunity Inetltwon
Wane-9.1

SLAVE REVOLTS AND NORTH CAROLINA QUAKER MIGRATION
By

Daniel R. Kroupa

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of History
1997

ABSTRACT
SLAVE REVOLTS AND NORTH CAROLINA QUAKER MIGRATION
By

Daniel R. Kroupa

This study will argue that the fear of slave revolts acted as the primary
motivation for the migration of many members of the Society of Friends (Quakers)
from North Carolina to the Old Northwest, especially Ohio and Indiana, during the
early nineteenth century. From around 1800 until the outbreak of the American
Civil War approximately 12,000 Quakers living in the states of Virginia, North
Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia migrated to Indiana and Ohio. More than
half of these migrants came from North Carolina. Historians studying the Quaker
”Great Migration" have generally agreed that economics and opposition to slavery
played major roles in motivating Southern Quakers to move to the Northwest.
However, the fear of slave revolts went beyond economics and general opposition

to slavery as an inducement for North Carolina Quakers to migrate.

To my mother (and her computer).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 1
Part One

THE GREAT MIGRATION ................................................................................ 10
The Quakers in Early North Carolina ................................................................... 10
North Carolina Quakers and the Great Migration ................................................. 13
Moving to the Northwest ..................................................................................... 18
Straying From the Flock ....................................................................................... 22
The Great Migration and the Big Picture .............................................................. 26
The Lure of the Old Northwest ............................................................................ 29
Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 35
Part Two

SLAVE REVOLTS AND NORTH CAROLINA QUAKER MIGRATION .......... 36
Introduction ......................................................................................................... 36
North Carolina Quakers and Slavery .................................................................... 41
The Steps Toward Freedom ................................................................................. 56
The Law of Slavery and North Carolina Quakers ................................................. 59
Quakers and Racism ............................................................................................ 67
A Climate of Fear ................................................................................................ 72
Slave Revolts and Quaker Migration .................................................................... 83
CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 87
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................ 90

INTRODUCTION

The migration of American Quakers to the area once designated as the
Northwest Territory began around 1800 and continued until the outbreak of the
Civil War.1 Although we will probably never know with certainty how many
members of the Society of Friends actually participated in this movement,
estimates indicate that tens of thousands of Quakers took part. And while
American and British Quakers had been involved previously in large-scale
migrations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the exodus to the
Northwest became known as the ”Great Miyation" in Quaker literature due to its
overall size and impact on the Society of Friends in America.2

The Quakers who participated in the Great Miyation came from all parts of
the eastern United States, but the Southern states of Virginia, North and South
Carolina, and Georgia provided the largest numbers (aroImd 12,000) of Quaker
migrants with most coming from North Carolina and Virginia.3 Indeed, more than

 

1The Northwest Territory was established in 1787. It comprised the area now containing
the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin as well as a portion of
northeastern Minnesota. The Northwest Territory will be discussed further In Part One.
2The term ”Great Miyation” has been used to describe several large-scale population
movements in American history. For example, the massive emiyations of African-
Americans from the South to new locations in the North during the twentieth century are
also referred to as the ”Great Miyation.”

3See Hugh J. Barbour and J. William Frost, Iheﬂuakers. (New York: Greenwood Press,
1988), p. 155; and Stephen B Weeks, SnuthcmﬂmkerundﬁlmASnIdxm
Wm (New York: Berynan Publishers, 1968. ,ﬁrst published In 1896)
pp. 69-70.

2
half of the Southern migrants came from North Carolina, especially between 1815
and 1835.4 Moving as individuals, families, youps of families, and occasionally
as entire communities, these miyating Quakers followed several routes but moved
primarily over the Blue Ridge Mountains in western Virginia and through the
Cumberland Gap in eastern Tennessee. The majority of miyant North Carolina-
Quakers eventually settled in eastern Indiana while most Virginia Quakers tended
to settle in southern Ohio.5 By establishing a stronghold for the Society of Friends
in the Midwest, the Great Miyation led to a major decline in membership among
the Quakers in the southeastern United States.

This study is primarily concerned with Imderstanding why Quakers left
their homes in North Carolina by the thousands in order to move to the Northwest
prior to the Civil War. A comprehensive study of the Great Miyation with its
many dimensions would require far more time and space to achieve.‘5 Focusing on

 

4The source most often cited by historians studying the numbers of Southern Quaker
rniyants is Stephen Weeks's WWW Weeks primarily researched
Quaker meeting minutes in order to determine the numbers of Southern Quaker nriyants.
He was quick to point out, however, that in spite of his intensive research, Quaker records
were not nearly complete enough to establish exact numbers (see p. 271). Weeks's
research remains the starting point for understanding the numerical dimensions of the
Great Miyation. See especially the charts on pp. 269-70. Weeks's charts indicate an
overwhelming movement of North Carolina Quakers moving to Indiana between 1815-

1 83 5.

5For a good general review of the miyation of Southern Quakers to Ohio as a study in
cultural geoyaphy see E. Leonard Brown, Quaker Migration to Miami Country," 1798-
1861, PhD. thesis, Michigan State University, 1974.

6Readers familiar with Quaker history will notice that the internal religious separations
beginning in 1827 are not covered. This is due to the fact that the separations, while
arguably a result of the Great Miyation, did not motivate North Carolina Quakers to
rniyate to the Northwest to any signiﬁcant extent. The North Carolina Yeariy Meeting
was virtually unaffected by the religious separations of the early to mid-nineteenth century.
Those interested In Quaker religious separations and realiyrments should read Rufus
Jones, Wm (hence cited as 101163, LEQ.) V01 1, (London
MacMillan and Co., 1921), especially chapter XII, ”The Great Separation,” pp. 435-87
and chapter XIII, ”The Second Separation,” pp. 488-540. For an excellent introduction to

3

the motivations of the Quakers who miyated from North Carolina to the
Northwest can be justiﬁed for several reasons. As mentioned above, North
Carolina provided more Quaker miyants to the Northwest than did any other
single region of the United States. It would therefore be diﬁcult to yasp the
importance of the Great Miyation without understanding the central role played
by the Quakers of North Carolina. By examining the motivations for this Quaker
miyation, it is possible to rmderstand better some of the larger issues confronting
not only the Society of Friends but also North Carolinians in general. Moreover,
the issues surrormding North Carolina Quakers and the Great Miyation were of
yeat importance to all Americans concerned with the meaning of freedom and the
destiny of the nation.

Historians studying the Great Miyation have analyzed and explained the
motivations of Southern Quaker emiyants in a number of diﬂ‘erent ways.
While most historians generally have agreed on what factors inﬂuenced the
miyation of Quakers from North Carolina, they have disayeed over the deyee of
importance of those factors in relation to each other. The main area of
disayeement has been concerned primarily with the inﬂuences of economic
conditions aﬂ'ecting the Quakers; and the problems of slavery in North Carolina.
The conﬂict surrounding slavery and the Society of Friends in North Carolina will
be treated in yeater detail later in this study. For now it is enough to know that
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Society of Friends took steps
toward eventually eliminating the practice of slavery among its members. It needs
to be emphasized, however, that economics and Quaker antislavery were by no

 

nineteenth-century Quaker religious change see Thomas D Harnm, Ihelmnsfonnationnf
- - - . , (Bloomington, Ind: Indiana

 

University Press, 1988).

4
means mutually exclusive. In fact, they were often interconnected. Historian
Ruth Anna Ketring explained this in 1937:

The real causes of this miyation have to be drawn from many factors. If a
westward bormd Friend had been asked his reason for leaving the South, he
would promptly have explained that his opposition to slavery was the sole
cause. In this he was undoubtedly sincere. But together with this reason
which was uppermost in the Quaker mind, were other less tangible
elements. When Quakers held slaves they had no quarrel with tidewater
society, but so soon as they renounced slaveholding their social status fell,
and economically they came into competition with slave labor. Land
hunger, the pioneer spirit, the lure of something better that lay beyond, and
the perennial conﬂict between backcormny and tidewater added a
complexity of subconscious motives (emphasis mine).7

That the participation of North Carolina Quakers in the Great Miyation
was ultimately a product of many factors should not be disputed. Miyations
rarely, if ever, result from one set of factors. It has been argued that the decision
to miyate is often the result of a combination of negative factors working to push
potential miyants from their homeland, and positive factors working to pull them
to a new homeland. Therefore, from an economics/slavery standpoint, the
economic problems involving the Society of Friends and slavery coupled with the
opportunities to be had in the Northwest worked to compel Quakers to miyate.8

But while keeping in mind individual Quaker circumstances, several
historians have pointed to general motivations that went beyond economic ”push-
pull" factors. For example, in 1921Quaker historian Rufus Jones concluded that

 

7See Ruth Anna Ketring, WWW (Columbus,
Ohio: The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1937), p. 5.

8F or a more thorough description of this ”push-pull” theory see Donald J. Bogue,
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 1,969) especially pp.

Principlmnfnemoyaphy,
753-57. See also Larry Dale Gregg, WWW
Emmott. (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI ResearchPress, 1980) especially pp. 47-82.

5

"Most of the Friends who left their old homes to create new ones in the free North-
west Territory had gone forth, in high faith and in obedience to what they believed
was the divine light, to escape the environment of slavery and to help make a yeat
area for ﬁ'eedom in the uncontaminated West."9 According to Jones, this Quaker
miyation was rooted primarily in the desire to leave North Carolina due to an
ideological opposition to slavery and its eﬂ‘ects. 10

More recently, in 1970, John Michael Shay ayeed with Jones with regards
to the primacy of antislavery ideology as an incentive for North Carolina Quakers
to miyate. Shay‘s study of The Antislavery Movement in North Carolina argued
that Quakers left in larger numbers than other North Carolinian miyants relative to
the general population of the state. "Obviously Quakers were considerably more
anxious to leave their native state than other North Carolinians,” Shay concluded.
”The explanation for this differential in tendency to emiyate, particularly in view
of their generally superior economic position, lies in their hatred of slavery.” Shay
pointed to the fact that Quaker miyants settled almost exclusively in the free
Northwest while four out of ﬁve non-Quaker miyants settled in other slaveholding
areas. The combination of choice of destination along with the well known
Quaker aversion to slavery, according to Shay, "provide a convincing argument for
the importance of antislavery principles in the Quaker miyation from North

Carolina." ‘1

 

9Quoted in Jones, LEO._vol. I, p. 430.

10 See Judith Shuval, ”The Role of Ideology as a Predisposing Frame of Reference for
Imrniyants," HumanRelations, XII (February, 1959), pp. 51-61. Shuval examined the
ideological inﬂuences of Zionism on irnrniyants arriving in Israel, and how those
inﬂuences, or lack of them, aﬁ‘ected cultural adaptation.

11See John Michael Shay, The Antislavery Movement in North Carolina, PhD. thesis,
Princeton University, 1970, especially pp. 311-315. Shay rejects the claim that antislavery
was yowing yadually in strength in North Carolina through organizations like the North
Carolina Manumission Society until radical abolitionism made antislavery unpopular. Shay

6

In an earlier study, Quaker historian Elbert Russell ayeed that the Great
Miyation was due to the desire among Southern Quakers ”to escape from the
inﬂuence of slavery.” But Russell also pointed strongly to the desire to obtain
better lands. He emphasized the economic effects of slavery on Quakers after they
had adopted an antislavery position. Those effects included difﬁculties in
adjusting to a Southern slaveholding society ”which put a social stigma on manual
labor.” The Northwest oﬂ‘ered a chance to escape that negative environment
without a yeat deal of sacriﬁce due to tremendous opportunities in terms of land
available to settlers. 12

Other historians have also emphasized the inﬂuence of economics and
slavery on North Carolina Quaker miyation. For example, John William Buys
stated in his study Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century that the
”existence of the institution of slavery was a primary reason for the Quaker ﬂight,
but the economic factors were equal to any others."13 Buys then immediately
explained how slavery and economics in North Carolina simultaneously affected
Quakers. He acknowledged that slavery played a role in motivating Quakers to
miyate but ultimately concluded that land and opportunity operated as the central
reasons for their move to Indiana. That the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had
banned slavery in the area was, to Buys, only one incentive among equals to
miyate.

Although all of the arglnnents presented above are valid in a number of
ways, they fail to appreciate the overarching reason as to why Quakers left North

 

claims that the effects of North Carolina antislavery eﬁ‘orts were more apparent than real,
and that slavery was not in a state of decline prior to the rise of radical abolitionism.
12See Elbert Russell, W (Richmond, Ind: Friends United Press,
1979), quotations on p. 271.

13See John William Buys, Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century, Ph. D. thesis,
University of Florida, 1973, p. 10-11.

7

Carolina and relocated in the Northwest. In short, this study will argue that
Quakers emiyated by the thousands from North Carolina to Ohio and Indiana
primarily due to fears generated by the threat of slave revolts in North Carolina
Historians, including the ones mentioned above, have usually listed the fear of
slave revolts as simply one reason out many for Quakers leaving North Carolina.
An important exception to this rule was historian Herbert Aptheker. In critiquing
the history of Quaker antislavery activity, Aptheker noted that while many
Quakers opposed slavery due to its immorality, they were also "keenly aware of
the violence, terrorism, and militarism which were necessary for the maintenance
of the institution and which were directly contrary to the paciﬁstic tenets of their
faith It is undoubtetﬂy for this reason, essentially, that mass exoduses of Quakers
from the South followed periods of serious slave unrest (emphasis mine). . ."14

Aptheker did not elaborate much at all on the above statement. That is
unfortunate as well as odd considering Aptheker spent much of his scholarly
career studying slave revolts in America. It should be pointed out that this present
study did not begin with Aptheker's statement in mind. In fact, it was not until
most of the research for this study had been completed that his statement came to
light. Though not the starting point, it did much to reinforce what the evidence
will demonstrate: The fear of slave revolts went beyond economics and general
opposition to slavery to act as the primary reason for Quaker migration from North
Carolina to Ohio and Indiana.

 

“See Herbert Aptheker, ”The Quaker's and Neyo Slavery," Iheloumalanesm
m xxv, 1940, p.341.

8

Part One of this study will provide a basic overview of North Carolina
Quaker miyation patterns. It will begin by brieﬂy describing the early history of
the Society of Friends in North Carolina. Next, some of important aspects of
earlier Quaker miyations will be outlined. The Great Miyation of the nineteenth
century was preceded by several Quaker miyations dming the eighteenth century.
Some of the primary reasons for those earlier migrations and their effects on the
Great Miyation will be described and analyzed. Part One will then examine some
of the methods of travel and routes taken during the Great Miyation. Quakers
spent a yeat deal of time and effort in perfecting their moving techniques while
also developing a chain of communications between the places of origin and the
points of destination.

These and other developments involved with the Great Miyation must be
understood along with the Imderlying Quaker motivations for leaving North
Carolina. While motivations are the main subject of this study, they need to be
seen as part of a larger miyatory process. In other words, miyation is more than
simply a matter of having a reason to leave and a place to go. F tn'thermore, like
thousands of other Americans during the early nineteenth century, Quakers were in
fact taking part in a much broader phase of American miyation. The similarities
and differences between Quaker and non-Quaker emiyants moving from North
Carolina will be reviewed. The similarities were many. The chief diﬂ‘erences lay
in Quaker motivations and their choice of destination. Analyzing their choice of
destination will add further to our understanding of how the fear of slave
insurrections inﬂuenced participation in the Great Miyation. Part One concludes
with an introduction to the problem of Quakers and slavery in North Carolina.

Part Two will examine the relationship between slave revolts and North
Carolina participation in the Great Miyation. It begins by discussing some of the

9
methodological problems involved with studying Quaker motivations for
miyating. With a few important exceptions, they did not leave a yeat deal of
written information revealing their reasons for moving. It is therefore necessary to
place Quaker movements within the context of their times in order to understand
why they miyated to the Northwest. To this end, Part Two reviews several of the
crucial elements in the historical context of Quakers and slavery.

After deﬁning the problem of slavery and Quakerisrn, Part Two will
describe and analyze steps taken by Quakers to end slavery within the Society of
Friends. That analysis will include an account of the social, religious, and legal
implications of slavery on the Quakers; and how their antislavery eﬁ‘orts led to
numerous confrontations with other North Carolinians, especially thecolonial and
state governments. However, Quaker antislavery efforts take on a paradoxical
appearance when their thoughts on race are considered. In spite of their
antislavery ideology and actions, as a youp, Quakers harbored many racial
prejudices which fueled their fears of slave insurrections. The climate of fear
created by actual and nnnored slave uprisings in and around North Carolina is the
ﬁnal topic of this study. By examining the nature, sources, and implications of
that fear, it will become clear that problems generated by the fear of slave revolts
served as the overarching reason for North Carolina Quaker miyation.

Part One

THE GREAT MIGRATION

I] Q] 'EIII 1C 1'
Before analyzing the primary motivations for the Quakers who chose to
emiyate from North Carolina to the Northwest, we need to review some of the
basic dynamics of their participation in the Great Miyation. To this end, a brief
outline of the Society of Friends in North Carolina and its organization followed
by an overview of the history of North Carolina Quaker miyation will help to
serve as an introduction for understanding the problems discussed later in this

study 15

The Society of Friends (Quakers) originated in England under the
leadership of George Fox during the mid-seventeenth centlny. Beginning around
1652, Fox began preaching among his fellow Englishmen that the presence of
God's "Inner Light" could be found in every human. According to Fox, this truth
made traditional religious organizations, with their ceremonies and professional
clergy, unnecessary. Quaker youp meetings of worship usually involved sitting
in silence, sometimes for hours, Imtil someone felt moved by the Inner Light to

 

15For good introductions to Quakerisrn and the history of the Society of Friends In North
Carolina see Barbour and Frost, Iheﬂmkers, Weeks, Snuthemﬂrakersnndﬂayem. and

~ -. - - . - ' e I (Richmond,
Ind: Friends United Press, 1984. ) For a more detailed study of Southern Quakerisrn see
Howard Beeth, Outside Agitators in Southern History. The Society of Friends 1 656-
1800, PhD. thesis, University of Houston, 1984.

 

10

1 1
oﬂ‘er a sermon, prayer, or song. The Society held to an idea of a basic spiritual
equality among all people, most outwardly visible in modes of plain dress and
speech.

In addition to the above, Quakers began a practice of non-cooperation with
the State. They refused to attend or pay tithes to churches in their parishes and
also refused to swear any oaths of allegiance due to the biblical command to
”swear not at all." Their belief that violence interfered with the Inner Light -
and therefore their salvation - led them to practice a strict form of paciﬁsm.
Although often severely persecuted for their anti-establishment views, the Society
of Friends yew in England dining the rest of the seventeenth centluy. Quaker
experiences as a persecuted people often inﬂuenced them in expressing concern
for others suffering mistreatment. “5

Quakers eventually carried their preaching activities beyond England and
inevitably found their way to the British colonies in North America. The Society
of Friends established major enclaves during the colonial period in Rhode Island,
western New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, as well as smaller
settlements in New York, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. Quakers
experienced a mixed reception in America. They were violently attacked by the
Puritans in New England. And while tolerated to a yeater extent in Virginia and
North Carolina, their refusal to pay chmch taxes or to support the militia made
them Impopular in many cases. On the other hand, as is well known,
Pennsylvania became known as the Quaker Colony. Founded by William Penn as

 

16See Ernst Troeltsch, "Sect-Type and Church-Type Contrasted,” Wand

WWW LouisSchneider, ed, (New York: John
Wiley& Sons, Inc. ,,1964) pp. 457-65.

12
a holy experiment, Pennsylvania came to be a haven and focal point for Quakers
living in America, although they lost most of their political power in the colony by
the time of the American Revolution. Some Quakers did become politically
prominent outside of Pennsylvania. Quakers served as governors in Rhode Island,
New Jersey, and North Carolina.

Quakers moving to North Carolina during the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centlnies tended to settle in the Albermarle Sound region of
northeastern North Carolina; the area originally planned for settlement by Walter
Raleigh in the 15805. The initial English failures in the Carolina region delayed its
formal establishment as a colony Imtil 1663. In that year, King Charles H issued a
proprietary charter to a youp of English lords for the land between Virginia and
Spanish held Florida. Signiﬁcantly, the constitution drawn up by the proprietors
called for religious toleration in the colony.

Quakerisrn in North Carolina began with the missionary visits of George
Fox and another Quaker leader, William Edmundson, in 1672. Their eﬂ‘orts at
gaining members proved to be successful. Furthermore, the appointment of
Quaker John Archdale to the govemorship of the colony in 1695 initiated a short
lived ”golden age” for Quakerisrn in North Carolina. The Society of Friends
continued to yow in the region to such an extent that North Carolina Yearly.
Meeting became formally established in 1698. ‘7 Quakers played important roles

 

1"’The Society of Friends was (and still is) structured by a pyramid style system of
meetings. At the bottom were the preparative meetings. These could best be described in
the sense of individual conyegations. One or more preparative meetings made up
monthly meetings, the basic unit of Quaker organization. The monthly meetings held the
power over individual standing and membership, the right to hold property, and the right
to recognize marriage. Two or more monthly meetings constituted a quarterly meeting.
Quarterly meetings dealt with whatever problems were deemed too diﬁcult for the
monthly meetings. The combination of several quarterly meetings made up a yearly
meeting. Theyearlymeetingsservedastheﬁnalarbiters onuakerdoctrineandsocial

13
in the development of colonial North Carolina, and like many other people living
in the British colonies, they sought religious freedom and economic
opportunities. 13 Their search for both sometimes entailed moving to new and
different areas. The history of North Carolina Quaker miyation provides

examples of that search.

IIICI'QI “ﬁll"
The story of the Quakers and their miyation from North Carolina to the

Northwest has generally been broken down into distinct phases. The ﬁrst phase to
have a direct inﬂuence on the Great Miyation of the nineteenth century took place
during the early to mid-1700s and actually involved Northern Quakers moving into
the western piedmont region of North Carolina. This coincided with a general ‘
miyation of Northern colonists to the South, especially dming and after the
French and Indian War which lasted from around 1756 to 1763. Many of these
miyants, including the Quakers, sought cheap land, while many others, especially
those from Pennsylvania and New York, were ﬂeeing the war-time violence in
those colonies. In many cases Quaker miyants often chose to move into western
North Carolina to escape the problems involved with black slavery in the Northern
colonies. Although slavery had been utilized in tidewater North Carolina since the
beginning of its colonization, the piedmont region held few slaves throughout most

 

discipline. Colonial America ultimately had Quaker yearly meetings for New England,
New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Maryland, Vlrginia, and North Carolina
Although theoretically autonomous, in practice the yearly meetings looked to each other
to establish continuity. The London Yearly Meeting served as the focal point for Quakers
worldwide, with Philadelphia having an analogous role in America.

18For a thorough analysis of Quakers and economics see Frederick Tolles, Meetingﬂonae
andemtingHuusc, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948). See also

David Brion Davis, WW (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), especially pp. 233-54.

14

of the colonial period. Much Quaker antislavery thought and activity in North
Carolina originated from these miyants and their descendants. 19

The yowth of settlements in piedmont North Carolina led to the western
portion of the state to overshadow the much older settlements in the Albermarle
Sound region of tidewater North Carolina. As historian Frederick Jackson Turner
wrote: ”Thus it happened that ﬁ'om about 1730 to 1760 a generation of settlers . . .
poured into the southern uplands . . . and built up a new Pennsylvania in contrast
with the old Quaker colonies, and a new South in contest with the tidewater
South."20 The arrival of Quakers in western North Carolina continued until the
outbreak of the American Revolution. They laid the population youndwork for
the Great Miyation of Southern Quakers to the Northwest druing the nineteenth

century.21

 

19See Hilty, pp. 17-20.

20See Frederick Jackson Turner, Watery. (Tucson, Arizona:
The University of Arizona Press, 1986 (originally published in1920)), pp. 100-01.
Although Turner's interpretations have been the object of considerable (and justiﬁable)
criticism, his emphasis on the importance of land in explaining the westward movement of
Americans still has merit. Turner's essay "The Signiﬁcance of the Frontier in American
History" is a most important historioyaphical starting point in studying American
miyation patterns.

Tumer‘s statement above points to some important socio-political developments in
colonial North Carolina. For example, although piedmont North Carolinians began to
outnumber those living in the tidewater region, the latter retained control of the colonial
legislature. Protesters, known as "Regulators," committed acts of violence in opposition
to high taxes and other alleged legislative abuses. In 1771, the colonial governor sent
around a thousand militia into western North Carolina to arrest the protesters. The militia
defeated a force of two thousand Regulators at the Battle of Almance thus ending the
insurrection. Most of the insurgent leaders were arrested and executed. Several Quakers
who took part in the Regulator movement were disowned (excommunicated) ﬁ'om the
Society of Friends for violating the Quaker peace testimony.

See Hilty, p. 21.
21For an excellent analysis of this Quaker miyation to North Carolina see Larry Dale

Whitest, especially the chapter entitled "Expansion in the Eighteenth
Century, pp. 70-125; and Rufus Jones, IheﬂuakersintheAmmicanﬁnlnnies. (New

 

15

Another important miyatory phase began around 1768 as many Quakers
moved westward ﬁ'om North Carolina into the area that eventually became
Tennessee. Quakers established ofﬁcial meetings there by 1787. Most historians
studying this migration have ayeed that economic problems and the desire for
adventure chieﬂy inﬂuenced the movement. The rugged conditions of the move
are described in several jomnal accormts. Stephen Grellet, a Quaker emigrant to
Tennessee, who later in life became a prominent Quaker leader and traveler,

described the move in his journal when he was twenty-six:

Providing ourselves with bread for some days, we set oﬂ‘ for Tennessee.
We met with many difﬁculties on that jornney through a mormtainous,
rmsettled country, having deep waters to ford, there being neither bridges
nor ferries over them. Ours was probably the ﬁrst carriage that had
traveled that road . . .

We traveled slowly on account of the diﬁculty of the roads;
sometimes they were so steep, that with our empty carriage, the horses
could only get a few steps forward at once. Frequently, we had to open a
road by cutting down the trees and removing them out of the way. But,
notwithstanding the fatigue, we were favored with good health, and enjoyed
the beauty of and yandeur of the scenery we often had before us. . .22

In establishing Quaker settlements west of the Appalachians, this phase set
important precedents for Quakers thinking of miyating during the nineteenth
century. But there were problems. First of all, many North Carolina monthly
meetings hesitated or refused permission to miyate due to concerns that such
moves would deplete the meetings. Quaker leaders also expressed concern that
religious standards would decline among Quakers if they became too far separated

from larger Quaker communities. The new western settlements often drew

 

York: Russell & Russell, .1962 (originally published in 1911)), especially the chapter
entitled "Quakers in the Southern Colonies,” pp. 265-301.

22Stephen Grellet, Memoirs, vol. I, p. 66-99, reprinted in Rufus Jones, 1m. vol. I, pp.
. 401-03;

16

criticism. "I thought this a poor place for F riends," complained one Quaker after
arriving in Tennessee in 1797. ”So much of the worldly spirit prevails that it
hinders the yowth of the Truth, and chokes the good seed . . . My condition was
the feeling of a heavy heart; for the general cry of the people seems to be for more
land, but content with little religion (emphasis mine)"23

The next phase of North Carolina Quaker miyation began during the 17905
and lasted until about 1830. This phase involved the movement of hundreds of
Quakers from the low-land tidewater eastern counties to the piedmont region in the
central part of the state. For example, between 1797 and 1811 at least forty-ﬁve
certiﬁcates of removal were yanted to families desiring to move from eastern
monthly meetings to meetings in the western part of North Carolina.“_

The phases of Quaker migration within and ﬁ'om North Carolina described
above occurred on a smaller scale than the two phases which followed them.
From around 1800 to 1815 hundreds of Quakers moved from North Carolina to
Ohio. The results of this miyation to Ohio were staggering for many monthly
meetings in North Carolina. For instance, by 1800 around 800 Quakers had left
the Trent Monthly Meeting in eastern North Carolina for Ohio, causing that
meeting to dissolve. Other meetings from arormd North Carolina experienced
dramatic decreases in membership, leading in many cases to their dissolution.

 

23Joshua Evans, quoted in Jones, LEQ. vol. I, pp. 400-01.

24See Weeks, pp. 269-271. Quakers desiring to leave their monthly meeting in order to
miyate had to ﬁrst get permission ﬁorn their monthly meeting. If permission were
yanted, the miyating Quakers were issued certiﬁcates with which to transfer their
meeting memberships upon arrival in their new homeland. It is important to note,
however, that the number of certiﬁcates of removal issued was not necessarily the number
of individuals asking to move. Certiﬁcates were issued to heads of families; the number
of individuals actually moving often greatly exceeded the numbers of certiﬁcates issued.
Furthermore, Quaker records available to historians are often problematic due to their
having been lost, incomplete, or destroyed. It was also not unusual for some Quakers to
ignore the process altogether and move without ﬁrst obtaining a certiﬁcate.

l7
Eventually the Quaker population in southwestern Ohio yew large enough to
establish a yearly meeting. The Ohio Yearly Meeting was established in 1813.25
Though hundreds of Quakers moved ﬁ'om North Carolina to Ohio prior to

1815, thousands began to miyate to eastern Indiana after that year. The reasons
for choosing Indiana as a destination will be discussed later. For now, it is
important to know that many meetings in North Carolina which had not been
aﬂ‘ected yeatly by the Ohio exodus were hit hard by the numbers leaving for
Indiana By 1860, North Carolina monthly meetings had issued at least 813
certiﬁcates of removal to Indiana with the vast majority yanted between 1815 and
1835. Out of 136 monthly meetings 83 were laid down (dissolved) prior to the
Civil War. While the western portion of the state provided the largest numbers of
Quakers moving to Indiana, Quakers from the northeastern counties of North
Carolina leﬁ in such large amounts that by 1860 only one monthly meeting still
operated in the area. 26

Wayne County, especially White Water (now Richmond), Indiana became
the hub of the miyations as Quakers poured into the settlements in that area.
According to historian Stephen Weeks, "No section in the West represents,
perhaps, more distinctly the effects of this Southern miyation than does Wayne
Cormty, Indiana, and White Water Monthly Meeting, which is within its limits.”27
At ﬁrst a part of the Baltimore and later the Ohio Yearly Meetings, Indiana

 

25Ibid., pp. 250-52. See also John Michael Shay, The Antislavery Movement in North
Carolina, pp. 299-3 03.

26Barbour, W. 163. See also Shay, pp. 303. Information used in
determining the origins of North Carolina Quaker miyants to Indiana can be misleading.
While the western part of the state provided the largest numbers of emiyants to Indiana,
many of them had originally moved to the western North Carolina from the eastern part of
the state.

2"See Weeks, p. 280.

18
Quakers established their own yearly meeting at White Water in 1821. By 1835
the 30,000 Quakers living in Indiana made that yearly meeting the largest in the
United States.28

MmdnglmheNnnhﬂcst

Unlike the Quakers who had emiyated to Tennessee during the mid-
eighteenth century, North Carolina Quakers moving to the Northwest mostly
followed well established routes used by Indians or by previous migrants.
Quakers moving from the western parts of North Carolina tended to move through
the Cumberland Gap into Tennessee, and from there they followed the Boone Trail
to Cincinnati. From Cincinnati, the miyants spread up the Great and Little
Miami Rivers either settling along the way or (in most cases) moving on to
Indiana. Quakers leaving the eastern part of North Carolina generally moved up
through Virginia and then traveled along the Kanawah Road into Ohio and then
Indiana. Most of the Quaker emiyants traveled on horseback or in covered
wagons. They brought provisions and cooking utensils as well as farm animals so
as to begin a farming lifestyle upon arrival in their new homeland. Having been
miyants before, or the oﬂ'spring of miyants, most of these Quakers rmderstood
how to plan for long journeys into wilderness areas. One participant even declared
that the Quakers had developed miyatory practices to the point of being a
science.29

David Hoover, a Quaker born in North Carolina in 1781, moved to Ohio
and then to Indiana with other members of his family. Excerpts from his account

 

28Although eclipsed in size, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting retained its status as the most
inﬂuential yearly meeting in the United States. See Barbour and Frost, p. 8.
29 Brown, pp. 77-78. See also Weeks, p. 247.

19
offer good examples of the diﬂ‘erent practices and phases of North Carolina
Quaker miyation. Hoover's yandparents were German immigrants who settled in
Pennsylvania and later in Maryland where Hoover's father was born. In 1754
Hoover's yandfether moved his family to North Carolina. "He left eight sons and
ﬁve daughters," David Hoover recalled, "all of whom had large families. Their
descendants are mostly scattered through what we call the Western country.”
Hoover then described the steps taken by his father in deciding to leave North
Carolina for the Northwest.

My father had a family of ten children, four sons and six daughters. In
order to better our circumstances he came to the conclusion of moving to a
new country, and sold his possessions accordingly. He was then worth
rising of two thousand dollars, which at that time, and in that cormtry, was
considered very considerably over an average point of wealth. On the 19th
of September, 1802, we loaded our wagon and wended our way toward that
portion of what was then called the Northwestern Territory.

The Hoovers traveled for ﬁve weeks rmtil they arrived in Cincinnati.
From there they moved to a point about twelve miles north of Dayton.
The Hoovers became dissatisﬁed with the opportunities for acquiring good land
containing spring water in that section of Ohio. Then in 1806, David Hoover
recounted, he and four others accidentally traced a path thirty miles west of
Dayton.
It was the last of February, or the ﬁrst of March, when I ﬁrst saw the White
Water. On my return to my father's I informed him that I thought I had
formd the country we had been searching of. Spring-water, timber, and
building rock appeared to be abundant, and the face of this country looked

delightful. In about three weeks after this, my father, with several others,
accompanied me to this "land of promise.”

20

Hoover's family moved into the White Water region along with other
Quakers from North Carolina. ”Their location here had a tendency to draw others,
and soon caused a yeat rush to White Water, and land that I thought would never
be settled was rapidly taken up and improved. "30

With this last statement in mind, it needs to be pointed out that the
successes or failures of miyations tend to encomage or discourage later
miyations.31 David Hoover's account serves as a strong example of what
scholars refer to as ”chain miyation.” Chain miyation is the movement of
socially related individuals or youps from one place to another by means of
various arrangements set up at the destination area geared toward providing aid,
information, and encouragement to new or potential miyants. The participants of
chain miyations tend to settle in the new destination among others from the same
or a similar origin. In cases involving yeat distances, new emiyants generally
rely on those already living at the place of destination to ease the way.32 Sune
Akerman has pointed to the ”multiplier eﬂ‘ects" produced by the interpersonal
relationships working within chain miyations. Akerman concludes that although
chain emiyations typically begin slowly, "After a while the process begins to
accelerate, and yows strongly, almost exponentially, until a saturation phase is
reached . . . It impossible to understand such dramatic responses to the possibility

 

30Quotations from David Hoover, WWW
Wchmond, Indiana: James Elder, Publisher, 1857), pp. 12-15.

31See Wilbur Zelinsky,1he..Cnltural.GcnsmpluLn£the.llnlted_Smtes, (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973). Zelinsky states that ”the speciﬁc characteristics of the ﬁrst
youp able to eﬁ‘ect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial siyliﬁcance for the
later social and cultural geoyaphy of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of
settlers may have been (p. 13).

”See Charles Tilly, ”Miyation In Modern European History,” Wm
WWllliam H. McNeil] and Ruth S. Adams, eds, (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1978), pp. 48-68. Tilly discusses chain nriyation in detail on pp. 53-57.

2 l

of emiyation without considering the multiplier effects that were released as a
consequence of the interpersonal relations. "33

Interpersonal communications, especially written correspondence, played a
major role in forging the chain between Quakers in North Carolina and those
already living the Northwest.34 For example, in 1819 Jeremiah Parker, a newly
arrived Indiana Quaker, wrote to family members still living in North Carolina.
He described the fertile Indiana soil as well as his ”log house cut 20 by 16. Plank
laid down for Imder ﬂoor & a log chimney with the back sides done up with
stone. " In order to reassure his readers of the continuity of Quakerisrn as well as
Quaker living patterns in Indiana, Parker mentioned the rapid yowth of the
monthly meetings in the area and that his family and their Quaker neighbors lived
”about the same distance apart as we did in Carolina" Parker expressed
satisfaction in his decision to miyate and encouraged others to do the same. ”I do
not know whether it would be Better for the rest of you to come to this country or
not," Parker wrote. "I am sure if you were to drink as I do it would be best."35

Parker's letter illustrates how the emiyation of Quakers to the Northwest
was more than a matter of conditions pushing and pulling people from one place to
another. The Great Miyation involved an entire process which included the
effects of human relations along with individual knowledge and perceptions of

 

33Sune Akerman, "Towards an Understanding of Emiyational Processes,” Human
WW pp. 287-303. Quotation from p. 294 and p.303.

34 In discussing general American miyation patterns during the time period of the Great
Miyation, geoyapher D. W. Mcinig notes that a familiarity with the new homeland and its
description In guidebooks, promotional tracts, and In "letters sent home ﬁ'om the vanguard

of pioneers was ﬁrndamental." See D. W. Mcinig, IheShapinganmericaiA

Lvtlitl ,: .dklvﬁl ‘Ol 01 92‘s '10‘ t ” tutu-m; sum; 1.1.
18.61,: (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 237-38.
35Jeremiah Parker, Wayne County, Indiana, to his brother, Josiah Parker. 4th month 9th
day, 1819. Josiah Par'ker Family Ptmers, Richmond, Indiana: Earlham College Archives.

22
moving to a new homeland. This combination of factors went far to link Quakers

in North Carolina to those who had already moved to Ohio and Indiana.36

Snardngﬂnmtheﬂock

Although Ohio and Indiana proved to be attractive to many North Carolina
Quakers, problems did arise. As was the case during earlier miyations, many
Quakers desiring to leave North Carolina for the Northwest were denied
permission due to fears among their religious leaders that moving away would
have negative effects not only on the vitality of the meetings, but on the miyating
Quakers themselves. When an individual or youp decided to leave a monthly
meeting, they were required to acquire the permission of that meeting Yet
Quakers sometimes did miyate in spite of the fact that their monthly meeting
denied them permission. Quakers were also required to relocate with membership
to another meeting. This presented a rather diﬁcult problem for the ﬁrst waves of
Quaker miyants living on the Northwest ﬁ'ontier because the nearest meeting site
could be many miles from the actual spot a pioneer Quaker chose to settle.

That many North Carolina monthly meetings were initially slow to permit
their members to move is not smprising given the potential dangers to preserving
cultrnal and religious ties.37 Since most Quaker leaders sought to maintain a
deﬁnite distinction between the Society of Friends and the rest of the world,
miyation appeared at ﬁrst to be only a potential disrupter of Quakerisrn. For this
reason, the early responses to those wishing to miyate tended to be negative.

 

36For a general introduction to diﬁ‘erent patterns of miyation and the importance of
human relations within these patterns see Leslie Page Moch, MmdngEnmpnana;
WWW (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992),
especially chapter 1, ”Putting Miyation into History,” pp. 1-21; see also Sune Akerman,
”Towards an Understanding of Emiyational Processes."

37Meinig, pp. 253-54.

23
However, conditions eventually developed which led North Carolina meetings to
yield to, and even encourage, the requests of those choosing to leave. Migration
began to serve the Society of Friends as a means of removing Quakers ﬁom
inﬂuences perceived as cultmally damaging.38

Changes in the social control wielded by the Society of Friends proved to
be crucial to the increase of the Great Migration. Part Two of this study will
demonstrate that the fear of slave revolts in North Carolina acted as the
overarching reason for Quakers leaving that state. The fear of slave revolts led the
Society of Friends to lessen its resistance as a barrier to migration largely because
Quakers increasingly regarded remaining in North Carolina as more dangerous to
themselves and their religion than moving to the Northwest.39 .

Although the Northwest came to appear safer than North Carolina to many
Quakers in many ways, the corrupting inﬂuences involved with migration did
begin to emerge according to various observers. As the number of Quaker settlers
in Indiana and Ohio soared, so did the number of Quaker disownments.
Disownments ﬁom the Society of Friends occurred when an individual disobeyed
the Society's Discipline, which gathered together the rules and regulations that
Quakers were expected to live by. Certain aspects of the Discipline pertained
directly to religious beliefs and practices, but most dealt with daily living
Historian Howard Beeth has noted that although Quakers professed to experience .
God on an individual level through the ”Inner Light," the body of the Society of
Friends practiced a communalistic program of group worship and cultural rmity.
The Discipline was designed to ensure the conformity of the Society's members to

 

38See Gragg, pp. 80-83.
39See Akermn, p. 300-01, foradiscussion oftheimportance ofsocial controlinthe
emigration process.

24

rather exacting standards as well as to ensure that individual Quaker activities did
not distract members from their relationship with God.40

Large numbers of Indiana Quakers were disowned during the early
nineteenth century for reasons such as "deviating from plainness of dress and
address,” administering oaths, divorce, excessive drinking, swearing, ﬁghting,
gambling, fornication, playing the ﬁddle (ﬁddling usually led to dancing), and
perhaps worst of all, marrying outside of the Society of Friends. As an example of
disownment for violating the Quaker testimony against war, Rufus Jones described
”one of the most remarkable cases of disownment" when ”a man, who during
border troubles, in the period of the 'war of 1812,' went into a fort for protection
and reﬂuxed to condemn his conduct. White Water Monthly Meeting disowned
him, 26th June 1813.”41

When a Quaker violated the Discipline, his or her monthly meeting usually
appointed a subcommittee to look into the matter. Through interviews and
personal testimony the committee determined whether the accused was genuinely
penitent. If the accused acknowledged his or her guilt and showed a desire to
repent, the meeting usually required a public confession and plea for forgiveness.
This normally settled the matter. But if the accused had indeed violated the
Discipline and did not indicate repentance, the monthly meeting could (and often
did) disown the person. That Quaker monthly meetings in Indiana disowned their
members by the hundreds indicates just how seriously most members of the
Society of Friends took their sense of responsibility to uphold their religion.42

 

40See Beeth, especially chapter 2, ”The Queries and Discipline.”

“See Rufus Jones, LEQ. vol. I, pp. 427-429.

42For a detailed quantitative analysis of Quaker disownments rn Indiana .during the
nineteenthcenturyseeThomasHamm, I.- : ~ . - w-
W202. pp 48-63

 

25

On a larger level, the Society of Friends also used the ”query system”
between various meetings in order to asses the success of the Discipline within
each meeting. Queries took the form of lists of questions concerned with the
practices of Quakers. A yearly meeting issued the queries down to its subordinate
quarterly and monthly meetings. These lower meetings then returned their
responses back up the chain to the yearly meeting. Although the yearly meetings
were all theoretically independent of one another, they often relied on each other
for guidance and continuity of thought. Therefore many of the queries in the
various yearly meetings were identical to each other or quite similar. For example,
the queries often asked, did Friends:

1. Attend meetings for worship and discipline regularly?

2. Guard against drowsiness and other inappropriate behavior during
meetings?

3. Observe Plainness?

4. Avoid gambling and lotteries?

5. Avoid frequenting taverns and places of diversion except when

necessary?"
6. Teach their children to read the Scriptures and train them in religion?
7. Avoid excessive use of spirituous liquors?

The list above gives just a few examples of the kinds of questions posed by
the query system. While they often reﬂected the common bonds among Quakers,
diﬁ‘erent yearly meetings did issue particular questions if applicable to particular
circumstances. For instance, yearly meetings oﬁen posed queries concerned with
the treatment, and later the ownership, of slaves if slavery was practiced within the
realm of that yearly meeting. The problem of slavery among the Quakers will be
discussed in Part Two. The point here is to show how concerned the Society of
Friends was over the behavioral and religious practices of its nrigrating members.
And yet in spite of problems involved with maintaining the Quaker Discipline, the

26
positive opportlmities for Quakers in Indiana and, even more importantly, the
growing dangers in North Carolina proved to be too much to resist for Quakers
considering migration to the Northwest. But the North Carolina Quakers (as well
as the migrating Quakers from other areas) who participated in the Great Migration

were in no way alone in their desire to move to new homelands.

I] G l I' . l l E' E'
As the previous examples demonstrate, Indiana and Ohio Quakers were

reassuring Quakers in North Carolina, and often encouraged them to migrate.
And migrate they did - by the thousands. However, it must be remembered that
Quaker migrants acted in much the same way as other Americans moving
westward at the same time. The Great Migration of Quakers to the Northwest
coincided with a broader more widespread American migratory period described
as "one of the great immigrations in the history of the western world.” In
assessing this period of American migration, geographer D.W. Mcinig has
explained:

This momentous geographic development was not a broad sweep westward
but an rmeven advance along several pathways, the direction and volume
responding to Indian cessions, land qualities and accessibilities, speculative
promotions and popular fervors, resulting in a continuous reshaping of the
outer edge of the frontier and of the relative position of every city and
subregion within this burgeoning half of the nation. It was, of course,
basically an expansion from the several regional societies of A tlantic
America. . . (emphasis mine).43

The economic incentives stemming from the often violent removal of the
Indians become apparent in Meinig's statement. Other factors also played essential

 

“See Mcinig, p. 224. See especially the part entitled Expansion: The Growth ofa
Continental Nation, pp. 220-428.

27
roles in drawing Americans westward. Besides an overwhehning craving for new
land, factors such as restlessness, fecundity, and a desire for adventrn'e describe
the general character of this period of migration. The same terms have been used
repeatedly to describe the character of Quakers migrating to the Northwest as well
as the earlier phases of American Quaker migration. For example, Rufus Jones
explained that the Great Migration "was due partly to the spirit of the times, the
desire to enlarge the borders, to possess new lands, to engage in adventure and to
enjoy the ﬁeedom and the opportunities that were possible in new settlements. ”4‘
Add to all of this the fact that non-Quakers also left North Carolina in droves
timing the time of the Great Migration and it may appear that Quaker migration
was not particularly distinct from the general ﬂow of many other North
Carolinians.

In several important ways, patterns of relocation by Americans dming the
early nineteenth century followed what some scholars call a value-added process.
This process begins with the experience and recognition of a structural stress
(reasons to leave) by potential migrants. Recognition of the situation, however,
cannot not lead to action until a migration oﬁlar occurs from a place to go. A
migration will still not happen unless individuals are of a personality type which is
willing to move; and the social control of the group is not strong enough to hinder
the decision. When these conditions of value are met, there is only a need for a
ﬁnal impulse, or trigger eﬁ'ect, to cause individuals to actually leave for a new
location.45

But the similarities in emigration processes shared by North Carolinians
should not cloud some important diﬁ‘erences which made the migration of Quakers

 

“Jones, mm. 1, p. 389.
45]. E. Ellemer's "value-added process” is outlined and diagranrrned in Akerman, p. 301.

28
to Ohio and Indiana distinct in its own right. For one thing, North Carolina
Quakers migrated almost exclusively to the Northwest Territory whereas the vast
majority (80%) of non-Quaker migrants moved to other Southern regions!“5 In
studying Southern expansionism, historian J arnes Oakes has argued that a basic
ideology promoting an overwhelming desire for material success in terms of land
and slaves drove many Southerners to start over in new areas. On the other hand,
Joan Ellen Cashin contends that planter migrants tended to be young men desiring
econorrric and emotional independence from their fathers.“ Whatever the case,
most of these emigrants left North Carolina and its worn out tobacco lands for the
ever growing cotton kingdom in places like Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
As one North Carolina planter remarked in dismay, "The Alabama Feaver (sic)
rages here with great violence and has carried of vast numbers of om citizens. "48
Thus when we consider the social and economic conditions in North Carolina; the
multiplier effects of interpersonal exchanges between individuals living among the
sending and receiving populations; and then plug those factors into the value-

 

46See Shay, p. 314. See also Gregory S. Rose, ”Upland Southerners. The County Origins
of Southern Migrants to Indiana by 1850,” WWW 82, (September,
1986), pp. 242-63. Southerners, non-Quaker North Carolinians included, did migrate to
Indiana in signiﬁcant numbers although most Southern nrigrants moved to other Southern
regions. Rose argues that Southerners arriving in Indiana played a crucial role in creating
a distinctive culture m that state. See also John C. Hudson, "North American Origins of
Middlewestern Frontier Populations," WWW

Geographers, (78), 1988,
p . 395-418.

4 See Jane Turner Censer, ”Southwestern Migration among North Carolina Planter
Fanrilies: The Disposition to Emigrate,” WWW LVII, No. 3,
(August, 1991), pp. 407-26. Censer herself concludes that ”Although these Carolinians
saw material advantages in the Southwest, for my the possibility of a lifestyle inferior to
that of one's parents was able to overcome doubts about leaving kin and moving to
unhealthful areas (p. 426).”

“Quoted in Mcinig, p. 232.

29
added process as a working model, the large numbers of out-migrants from North
Carolina during the early to mid-18008 become more readily explainable
But if Quakers acted like their migrating neighbors in so many ways, why

were they not generally moving to the same places?

munnitheﬂldﬂonhmest

Dming the nineteenth centlny, North Carolina Quakers migrated to the
region west of Pennsylvania between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, particularly
the area that became the states of Ohio and Indiana. On July 13, 1787 the
Continental Congress oﬁcially established this Northwest Territory which
comprised lands ceded to the federal government by different states during the
17805. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established a process by which
territorial and state governments could be formed, mandating that no less than
three but no more than ﬁve states were to be created from the region. The Old
Northwest, as it came to be known, was gradually divided into the states of Ohio
and Indiana as well as Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

The Northwest Territory held several incentives for potential immigrants
who desired land. The Land Ordinance of 1785 established guidelines for the
surveying and selling of land under federal control. Land designated for sale was
surveyed and arranged according to. what became known as the Township-and-
Range System. Under this system, different regions were laid out in townships six
miles square then divided into thirty-six sections of 640 acres each. These
sections were at ﬁrst the minimum size of a land available to settlers. Pressrn'es
from those desiring smaller minimum purchases led to several reductions of the
minimum purchase requirement until by 1832 it became possible to buy as little as
forty acres. Minimum prices on land fell as well. In 1800 federal land was sold at

30
two dollars per acre, but by 1820 the price of federal land had dropped to $1.25
per acre. In some instances an acre of land could be bought for as little as ten
cents. Cheap land created a strong incentive to settle in the Northwest, and a
growing scarcity of fertile soil in North Carolina made Ohio and Indiana appear all
the more attractive to prospective migrants.

But before whites could settle the Northwest in large numbers, the Indians
living in the area had to be removed. After 1795 land in Ohio became more
available and secure for settlement in the eyes of white Americans. In that year,
General Anthony Wayne defeated the Indians of Ohio at Fallen Timbers and
forced them to accept the terms of the Treaty of Greenville. Prior to Wayne's
taking command of military matters in the Northwest, Ohio Indians had been
frequently successful in ﬁghting American soldiers. Military strength for the
Indians meant some real leverage when they negotiated with American
governmental authorities. But the Battle of Fallen Timbers irreparably broke
Indian power in the region. The Treaty of Greenville, signed on August 3, 1795,
reduced Indian lands to only a small section of northeastern Ohio.49 Once the
Indians had been defeated, pioneers moved in quickly. Ohio became a state in
1803.

That large-scale Quaker migrations to Indiana did not commence until aﬁer
1815 doubtless had much to do with the fact that the Indian confederations in the .
area had not been adequately destroyed until the War of 1812. Prior to that war,

 

49For two excellent works on the Indian experience in the Old Northwest see Richard

 

m5. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and R. David Edmunds,
MSW (Lincoln, Neb: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). For a good
account of the relationship between Indians and whites during the colonial era see Wilbur

 

Emmet, (Norman :University of Oklahoma Press, 1985 (originally published rn 1972)).

31

the Territorial Governor of Indiana, William Henry Harrison, commonly acquired
Indian lands by playing neighboring tribes against each other. Tribal lands often
overlapped each other. By inducing at least one tribe to sell its lands, Harrison
pressured the other tribes to follow suit or risk not receiving anything for their
lands. 50 At other times, whites simply took Indian lands at gunpoint. Harrison
noted how one Shawnee chief had lamented to him about white Americans and
their attitudes toward private property. The chief explained to Harrison how the
French, unlike Americans, had been willing to compromise with the Indians.
"They (the French) never took from us our lands, indeed they were in common
with us," the chief told Harrison. ”But now if a poor Indian attempts to take a
little bark ﬁom a tree to cover him from the rain, up comes a white man and
threatens to shoot him, claiming the tree as his own."51

As white encroachments became more pronounced after 1800, many
Indians desired to reclaim their rapidly vanishing land and culture. A Shawnee
chief, Tecumseh, and his brother, Tenskwatawa, known as The Prophet, became
the most famous leaders of the Indian revival movement. By calling on Indians to
shed white inﬂuences and return to traditional ways, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa
attempted to form a confederation of Indian tribes capable of ending white
oppression.52 Their eﬂ‘orts failed. While Tecumseh was away in the process of
forging the confederation, Tenskwatawa led an Indian force against Governor
Harrison and a contingent of white soldiers and militia at Tippecanoe on
November 7, 1811. The Indian defeat at Tippecanoe severely disrupted eﬂ'orts to

 

”White, p. 474.

”Quoted in White, p. 502.

52W1riteandEdmundspoint outthat eﬁ‘ortsatforminganlndianconfederationbeganwell
before the rise of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. See White, p. 512. Edmunds claims that
times were such that had Tenskwatawa not stepped forward as a religious motivator,
another Indian leader surely would have. See Edmunds, p. 187.

32
form an intertribal confederacy. Tenskwatawa's inﬂuence as an Indian leader
shrank due in large part to the failure of his assurances that Shawnee warriors
would be protected in battle by spiritual powers. Tecumseh rebuilt an Indian
coalition which eventually forged an alliance with the British; himself serving as a
brigadier general during the War of 1812. Tecumseh died on October 5, 1813
while ﬁghting the Americans under Harrison at the Battle of the Thames in
Canada. Military defeat shattered the Indian coalition. The war's end in 1815
also meant the end of signiﬁcant Shawnee inﬂuence in Indiana.-"3 ‘

Once peace was relatively secure for white people after the War of 1812,
Indiana ﬁlled up rapidly and became a state in 1816.54 For Quakers, a peaceful
homeland was absolutely essential to their way of life and their strict observance
of non-violence.55 As mentioned earlier, this study argues that North Carolina
Quakers left that state due largely to their fears of potential slave uprisings. It
would have made little sense for large numbers of Quakers to move from one area
because of fears of violence only to move to another potentially violent area. This
point raises some important questions: How did the Quakers feel about Indian
removals in the Northwest? Did they care if their new homelands had been taken
ﬁ'om the Indians by use of violence? Quaker indifference to such matters seems
hard to imagine considering how their paciﬁst beliefs forbade proﬁteering ﬁ'om

 

53See White, p. 517. See also Edmunds, MW Most accounts of
Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa portray Tecumseh as the primary leader of the attempted
pan-Indian alliance from the beginning. Tenskwatawa is usually portrayed merely as
Tecumseh's mystical sidekick. Edmunds argues convincingly that this portrayal is wrong.
He claims that in providing a religious, and very Indian, foundation, ”it was Tenskwatawa
rather than Tecumseh who provided the basis of Indian resistance in the years before the
war (p. 190).”

“Although initially granted clemency from participating in the War of 1812 due to their
history of paciﬁsnr, war time pressures in Indiana did lead to some degree of persecution.
Sec Jones, LEQ, vol. I, pp. 422-23.

”The Quaker Peace Testimony and its importance will be dismissed in Part Two.

33
war. Their history of peaceful and philanthropic relations with Indians also
makes a lack of Quaker concern seem even more unlikely.56 However, as we
shall see in Part Two, Quaker work on behalf of non-whites was not always
motivated by a strict sense of altruism, and their actions oﬁen appeared
hypocritical. These problems concerning former Indian lands deserve far more
attention than can be oﬂered in this study. At any rate, the demise of the Indians
in Indiana by 1815 meant that a genuine haven at once existed for peace minded
Quakers wishing to ﬂee North Carolina.

Relative peace and cheap abrmdant land provided Quakers with incentives
to migrate to Ohio and Indiana. But beyond the problems and opportunities
involved with land was the problem of slavery in North Carolina. Part Two will
examine in more detail the problem of Quakers and slavery in North Carolina, and
how the fear of slave insurrections fueled Quaker desires to move to the
Northwest. For now it is enough to know that Quakers eventually opposed slavery
on moral and religious grounds and made efforts to manumit their own slaves.
These actions made Quakers rather unpopular with other white North Carolinians.
Added to this was the fact that opposition to slavery, for many Quakers, made for
tremendous diﬁculties in competing with non-Quakers operating within an
economy based, too a large extent, on slave labor. The growth of Quaker
antislavery beliefs and practices, and above all, the fear of slave revolts, became
key elements in inﬂuencing North Carolina Quakers to migrate to the Northwest.

 

5"SFor an often conﬂicting discussion of Quaker benevolence and philanthropy see Sydney

 

America. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963); Jack D. Marietta, The
RefonnmionanmcricanmakerimeIZSl. (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press 1984); and Richard Barnum, Eorihekepmtmnflntthmm

 

The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).

34

That region appeared particularly attractive to Quakers because the Northwest
Ordinance of 17 87 prohibited slavery in the region.57

For the most part, the Northwest provided a genuine solution for Quakers
wishing to ﬂee the effects of slavery in North Carolina. A good example of this
can be found in a letter written in 1802 by Border Stanton, a prosperous North
Carolina Quaker who migrated to Ohio. Stanton wrote to some Friends in Georgia
in order to tell them about his decision to emigrate to the Northwest. Sections of
Stanton's letter provide something of an introduction to the relationship between
Quaker feelings about slavery and the Great Migration:

I may begin thus, and say that for several years Friends had some distant
view of moving out of that oppressive part of the land, but did not know
where until 1799; when we had an acceptable visit from some traveling
Friends of the western part of Pennsylvania. They thought proper to
propose to Friends for consideration, whether it would not be agreeable
to remove to northwest of the Ohio river - to a place where there were no
slaves held, being a free country. This proposal made a deep impression
on our minds: and it seemed as if they were messengers sent to call us out,

 

57 See Paul Finkehnan, ”Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,"
lonmalnﬂhraEatlxRepnhlin, 6, (Wmter, 1986), pp. 343-370; and ”Evading the
Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” laumalnﬁthaﬁadx
Republic, 9, (Spring, 1989), pp. 21-49. Finkehnan points out, correctly, that Article VI of
the Ordinance of 1787 did not act as an emancipation proclamation for the slaves already
living in the Northwest Territory. As he states, ”Many of the settlers living in the territory
before the adoption of the ordinance were slaveowners and of course did not want to give
up the institution (”Evading the Ordinance”, p. 1.). " Slaveholders in Indiana and Illinois
legally kept slaves owned prior to the Ordinance until after their respective state
constitutions banned slavery outright. Even then, however, different methods of keeping
blacks in bondage persisted as in Illinois where ”apprenticeships" and ”indentures" for
blacks sometimes lasted lifetimes. F inkelnran estimates that between two to three
thousand blacks remained in at least a defacto state of slavery in the Northwest between
1787 and 1848. Census records of 1810 for Indiana listed 237 slaves and 393 free blacks,
many of whom, F mkelman asserts, were still legally held under some form of indenture
system. Towhatextent IndianaQuakers lmewofthispersistenceofbondageisuncertain.
See also Buys, Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century, p. 13.

35

as it were from the Egyptian darkness . . . into the marvelous light of the
glory of God ( emphasis mine)

Stanton went on to admit to feelings of apprehension over moving so far
away from home. But after coming to the realization that the slave Society in
which he lived would most likely prevent the growth of the Society of Friends in
the South, be determined that God had provided a clear path of escape for
Southern Quakers opposed to slavery.’8

Conclusion

In Part One we have seen how and, to a more limited extent, why Quakers
left North Carolina to live in Ohio and Indiana. The Great Migration was the
product of a number of factors operating simultaneously. Economic problems and
opportunities; land hunger and the spirit of adventure; overall patterns of American
migration; and ideological opposition to slavery, all played important roles in
inﬂuencing the move to the Northwest. But as Part Two will show, the primary
reason Quakers desired to emigrate lay in the problems invdlved with the potential
dangers of slave revolts in North Carolina.

 

58Reprinted in Jones, Lm. vol. 1, pp. 406-08.

Part Two
SLAVE REVOLTS AND NORTH CAROLINA QUAKER MIGRATION

Introduction
Border Stanton's letter in Part One illustrates how the structural stress
which existed between the Society of Friends and the slave society of North
Carolina served as an important factor in the decisions of many Quakers to leave
that state and migrate to the Northwest. Although other motives played important
roles, most scholars have agreed that slavery acted as a primary ingredient in
inﬂuencing the Great Migration. Quaker leader Addison Coﬂin, himself a
participant in the Great Migration, emphasized this point: ”If the question is asked,
Why did Friends emigrate from North Carolina? It can be answered in one dark,
fearful word SLAVERY . . ."59 Indeed, a crucial aspect of slavery and the
migration of North Carolina Quakers was the aspect of fear. For many Quakers
living in North Carolina during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the
fear of slave revolts acted as the primary motivation for moving to the Northwest.
It would be wrong to assume that fear of slave revolts acted one-
dimensionally within the Society of Friends. That is to say, fear among Quakers
as an inducement to migrate sprang not only from the possibility of physical
danger to themselves but also from the possibility that slave revolts would cause
Quakers to violate their testimony against violence if forced to help put down such

 

”Quoted in Charles Fitzgerald McKiever, SlaxenLandjheEmisraﬁonanonhCarolina
Edmds. (Murﬁ'eesboro, NC: Johnson Publishing Company, 1970), p.66.

36

37
uprisings. Moreover, even if neither one of the above problems were to occur
during a slave uprising, the inevitable violence and social chaos would have led to
an unfavorable living environment surrounding the Quakers. Addison Comn
stated this sentiment when he explained that ”though (the Quakers) did not fear
that they would be in danger, in case of a revolt among slaves, yet they shrank -
ﬁ'om the thought of living amid such possible scenes. This can be marked as one
of the deep seated causes of Friends leaving the south (emphasis mine)"60
Cofﬁn may have been justiﬁed in his remarks about the lack of fear among

Quakers concerning the physical dangers of slave insrnrections. For example, in
1800 testimony taken following Gabriel Prosser’s aborted slave rebellion in
Richmond, Virginia indicated "that Quakers, the Methodists, and all Frenchmen

. . were to be spared” because of ”their being ﬁiendly to liberty. "61 Gabriel's
Rebellion will be discussed in more detail later in this study. For now, it is
enough to consider that with such a precedent in mind, Coﬁn doubtless believed
that the reputation of the Society of Friends among the black population of North
Carolina would protect faithful Quakers from violence in the event of a slave
uprising. However, as we shall see, not all Quakers were as conﬁdent as Cofﬁn

concerning their immunity from violence.

 

“Ibid, p. 59. McKiever’s study mostly covered the general ideological opposition of
Quakers to slavery as a component of the Great Migration. Like other scholars who have
written on the Great Migration, McKiever brieﬂy mentions slave insurrections as a
motivational factor but fails to describe or analyze the problem and its importance in
detail.

61SeeDouglasR. Egerton, rm'- ~ '- ' ' . ' '

andJBllZ. (Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 49. See also
Winthrop D. Jordan, - ~ r. . ~ .
1812, (NewYork: W..W Norton&Company, 1968), p. 394forabriefdiscussionon
someoftheothergroupstohavebeensparedduringtherebelliorr.

 

 

38
Coﬂ'rn's statements provide evidence of the role of fear in the Great

Migration. Unfortlmately, they are exceptional. Understanding the motivations of
the Quakers who migrated to the Northwest is seriously inhibited due to the
relatively small amount of written evidence available to historians. Although
journals of several leading Quaker antislavery agitators contain references to
slavery and migration, there is very little in meeting minutes, or personal letters,
that refer to non-economic motivations for migrating to the Northwest. Thomas
Hamm, Director of Archives at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, has
remarked that Quaker meeting minutes usually only state that Quakers did migrate
- not why they migrated. For example, when Quaker antislavery leader Levi
Cofﬁn sought permission from his monthly meeting to move to Indiana, the
meeting's minutes noted the request and the decision but mentioned nothing as to
why such a prominent member of the Society of Friends desired to leave.62 Rufus
Jones commented on this problem by stating how meeting minutes "present for the
most part only dry bones to one looking for the real life of these communities. ”53
Historian Larry Dale Gragg pointed to these problems as well in his study

' ' ' s u an s' I:- ' .° . ': or _: . er .0.”le '-H - ”Unfortunately for

 

the historian, few Quakers committed to paper their reasons for moving" Gragg
lamented. ”The surviving fragments of their writings usually provide only
tantalizing clues . . . The important question of motivation can in part be answered,
however, by examining the timing of their movements and their choice of

destination in relation to speciﬁc developments. ”64

 

$2887?) McKiever, p. 65. See also Levi Coﬂin, WWW (Cincinnati,

63Jones, LE2, vol. I, p. 395.
64See Gragg, p. 57.

39

Gragg is, to a large extent, correct in describing the problems involved with
analyzing Quaker motivations for migrating. Other scholars studying general
patterns of human migration have also commented on the problems involved with
determining motivations among migrants; and the importance of analyzing and
understanding migrations within diﬂ‘erent contexts. As Sune Akerman has written,
"Essential categories of information about migration include who the migrants
were, when they left, whence they departed and where they arrived, under what
circumstances the migration took place, and from which social and economic
context the migrants were uprooted. "65

Several of the categories mentioned by Akerman have been discussed in
Part One. The remainder of this study will describe and analyze crucial elements
of the social and personal contexts which inﬂuenced the Great Migration of
Quakers ﬁ'om North Carolina to the Northwest. Slavery formed much of the basis
for those contexts. Dming the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries North
Carolina, like the rest of the South, became a slave society: a society in which
slavery inﬂuenced or effected virtually every aspect of life. Central to North
Carolina's slave society were problems generated by the threat of slave revolts.

The fear of slave revolts acted as the primary motivation for North Carolina
Quaker migration to the Northwest. An understanding of the relationship between
slave revolts and the Quaker migration will be established by considering some of
the important aspects of the legal and social history of slavery in North Carolina;
the North Carolina Quaker antislavery movement; the growing fear among North
Carolinians, Slaveholders and non-slaveholders, over slave uprisings; and the
racial prejudices held by many Quakers. All of these elements combined to create
an atmosphere of fear within the Society of Friends in North Carolina.

 

‘5 Akerman, ”Towards an Understanding of Emigrational Processes," p.287.

40

Furthermore, although the Great Migration lasted lmtil the outbreak of the
Civil War, the movement of North Carolina Quakers to Ohio and Indiana reached
its greatest intensity between the years 1800 and 1835 (see Part One). These years
encapsulated the three most famous attempted slave insurrections in the United
States timing the post-Revolutionary era. It will become clear that the timing of
those attempts and the high-point of the Great Migration were not merely
coincidental. Moreover, although no slave insurrections actually occurred in
North Carolina, rumors of slave conspiracies in that state abounded. This was
especially so in the northeastern counties where the majority of North Carolina's
slaveholders and slaves lived. Not surprisingly then is the fact that many of the
Quakers who migrated to the Northwest originally came from the northeastern part
of the state.

Recalling the value-added process of migration discussed in Part One, the
threat of slave insurrections in North Carolina existed as a structural stress and
acted as a trigger eﬁect for setting oﬂ‘ Quaker movements. Yet as discussed in
Part One, the process of human migration involves much more than just having a
reason to leave and a place to go. The motivations to be discussed in Part Two
must be seen as an essential part of an overall working process of migration. In
many instances that process involved the interpersonal relations between migrants
and potential migrants as much as - and in some cases perhaps more than - the
stress factors and trigger effects which motivated Quakers to leave North Carolina.
However, the Great Migration cannot be rmderstood without exploring and
analyzing the rmderlying motivational factors forming the base of the migration
process. Part Two will demonstrate how problems related to slave revolts
combined to serve as the primary motivational factor for North Carolina Quaker
participation in the Great Migration

41
NnnhﬂarolinaﬂuakersandSlaym

Before examining the problem of slave revolts and their inﬂuence on the
Great Migration, it is ﬁrst necessary to sketch the history of slavery in North
Carolina and its relationship to the Quakers. Slavery existed in North Carolina in
some way since the establishment of the colony of Carolina in 1663.66 Although
various and usually unsuccessful attempts were made at enslaving Indians living in
the area, colonial North Carolinians seeking rmﬁee labor relied primarily on the
importation of African slaves as well as European indentured servants. The
earliest legal recognition of slavery in North Carolina can be folmd in Section 110
of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina of 1669 which states that ”Every
freeman shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves. " Earlier, in
1665, several of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina took measures to encourage the
importation of slaves by offering settlers seventy-ﬁve acres of land for every slave
over the age of fourteen brought to the colony.“

Although North Carolina eventually developed a substantial slave
population, several scholars have noted a marked dissimilarity between slavery in

 

66North Carolina was not made a separate colony until 1712, and the boundary not
oﬂicially established until 1735. By the late seventeenth century most Carolinians were
making a social as well as a geographical distinction between the southern and northern
parts of the colony.

See Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary, MW
1125. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Jeﬂ‘rey J. Crow,
AlﬁstonmfAﬁicaneAmericansinNonhﬁamlina, (Raleigh: North Carolina Dept. of
Cultural Resources, 1992). See also John Spencer Bassett, WM
Cnhmfﬂonhﬁamlina. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1896) and 31mm
Wamlina, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1898). Bassett's accounts
are valuable historiographical sources for understanding slavery m North Carolina
57 The colony also offered one hundred and ﬁfty acres for every male servant brought to
Carolina. However, while servitude was generally temporary, slavery was perpetual and
alsohereditary. Thusbringing slaves instead ofservantsmeanginthelongrun, amore
permanentlaborforceunableto competelaterwithestablished landownersasservants
could theoretically do at the end of their indentures.

42
colonial North Carolina and that of Virginia and South Carolina. 63 For example,
colonial North Carolinians did not produce an agricultural economy based on the
large plantation nearly to the same degree that colonial Virginians and South
Carolinians did. Slaveholdings in North Carolina tended to be comparatively
small and widely dispersed. It has also been argued that German and Scots-Irish
immigrants living in North Carolina never became fully convinced that their way
of life depended on slavery. Moreover, that colonial North Carolina had no major
port on its coast meant that many of its imported products came predominantly
from contacts with Virginia and South Carolina. This reliance on Virginia and
South Carolina extended as well to the development of North Carolina's laws and
social customs concerning, among other things, slavery. Even North Carolinian
fears of slave uprisings resulted primarily from attempted or planned uprisings in
South Carolina and Virginia.69 Historian Winthrop Jordan has commented on the
differences between the upper and lower South dming the late eighteenth century
by stating that ”North Carolina served (as it had since the days of William Byrd)
as a nebulous, anomalous borderland, characterized by diversiﬁed agriculture, a
relatively low proportion of Negroes, and a culture which belonged, everyone

 

68By 1790, for example, North Carolina had about 100,572 slaves making up 26% of the
state's population. By 1860 the numbers had increased to 331,059 slaves or about 33% of
the population. In comparison, Virginia in 1790 had 293, 427 slaves ( around 39% of its
population). In 1860 Vrrginia slave population had increased to 490, 865 (31 % of the
state's population). In 1790 the slave population in South Carolina amounted to 107, 094
(43% of the overall population). By the time of the Civil War that number had risen to
402, 406 slaves or about 57% of the population. Population data from Peter Kolchin,

W (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 242.

69See Lindley S. Butler and Alan D. Watson, eds. ,IheNntthEamlinaExpmienmn
Wm (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press,
1982), pp. 194-95.

43

agreed, almost in a class by itself. There was not one South but two and a half
(emphasis mine)"70

In spite of what may have been an anomalous situation, slavery in colonial
North Carolina did become increasingly entrenched as many whites took
advantage of their "absolute power and authority" over their slaves. Among those
North Carolinians who exercised that power and authority were many members of
the Society of Friends. Like virtually all transplanted Europeans living in the
British colonies dming the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, most
Quakers did not regard slavery as either wrong or sinful. In fact, just like
slaveholding members of other Christian denominations, many Quaker
slaveholders during that time used excerpts from the Bible as a justiﬁcation for
owning Aﬁican slaves. And though most Quakers may have recognized black
Aﬁicans as objects of God's love and therefore capable of receiving His grace,
civil freedom and religion did not necessarily go hand in hand. As one historian
has explained, many slaveholding Quakers attempted “to justify slavery by pointing
to the potential of providing Christian tutelage for Africans.71 Furthermore, the
inﬂuence of Quakers who had migrated from Barbados and the West Indies (two
places where slavery was widely practiced and especially harsh) to the mainland
colonies, ensured that a strong pro-slavery element would remain rooted in the
Society of Friends for a long time.72 To be sure, many prominent American

Quakers, including William Penn, owned slaves.

 

7° Jordan, W p 316.
71SydneyV.,.James'-. \.-. . :-- - '
CentunLAmmica, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 104.

728cc J. William Frost, editor, WW (hence cited as Frost,
QOA), (Norwood, Pa, 1980), p. 11 (introduction).

 

44

As is well known, however, the Quakers gradually began to have second
thoughts about slavery as an acceptable practice, and eventually came to be
opposed to it outright. It is beyond the scope of this study to provide an in-deptlr
analysis of the rise of Quaker antislavery thought and practice in America. That
story has already been told many times. But a basic outline of those developments
is necessary in order to illustrate how opposition to slavery in general, and the fear
of slave revolts in particular, inﬂuenced the North Carolina Quakers who
eventually participated in the Great Migration.

Even during the early years of the Society of Friends some inﬂuential
Quakers had misgivings concerning the practice of slavery. For example, although
he was not opposed outright to slavery as an institution, George Fox, the principle
formder of the Society of Friends, became disturbed by the harsh treatment
received by slaves. While visiting the islanders of Barbados in 1671, including
several slaveholding Quakers, Fox expressed concern for the various disruptions of
slave families, particularly the abuses against slave women and children.73 Fox's
comments on the harsh treatment of slaves brought down the wrath of Barbadian
planters who accused him of inciting their slaves to rebel. Fox vehemently denied
these charges against him, yet continued to remark on the treatment of slaves
drning a visit to the mainland British colonies, including North Carolina in 1672.

 

 

(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973). For a more recent study on the inﬂuence of

QuakerdomesticityinAmericaseeBarryLevy, WWW

Settlmentrnthellelamreﬂallex, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Levy
contends that the Quakers played a more signiﬁcant role than the Puritans m providing a

model for nineteenth century American domesticity.

45

While George Fox was a most notable early Quaker critic of slavery in
terms of treatment and living conditions, William Edmundson is generally credited
as the ﬁrst prominent Quaker to denounce slavery publicly as an institution.
Edmundson had visited Barbados with George Fox. During a retrnn trip to the
island, Edmundson stood accused of inciting slaves against the white islanders
due to his religious teachings to slaves. He avoided prosecution by convincing the
Barbadian governor that slaves taught to be good Christians would be far less a
threat than slaves held in ignorance.74 Although this line of reasoning worked
with the higher civil authorities on Barbados, Edmundson failed to win over the
general population. Beginning in 1676 Barbados passed a series of laws at ﬁrst
intended to prevent blacks from attending Quaker run schools, but eventually
geared toward preventing Quakers from meeting at all. In spite of Barbadian
Quaker opposition to these laws, the rapid decline of Quakerisrn on the island
became inevitable.

Soon after his eventful second visit to Barbados, Edmundson began to
question further the problems of slavery - problems beyond those of treatment and
living conditions. Beginning with what he considered the negative eﬁ‘ects of
slavery upon the slaveholders as well as the slaves, Edmundson came upon his
outright opposition to slavery rather suddenly in 1676 when he asked why
slaveholding Quakers considered it unlawful to enslave Indians but not to enslave

 

7‘ See William Edmundson, loumalnfthaLifenfElliamEdnnmdson. 1715, especially
section DK, reprinted in Frost, QQA, pp. 56-63. See also Herbert Aptheker, ”The Quakers

and Negro Slavery,” WV, (1940), pp. 331-362. Aptheker
was critical of the praise rendered to the Quakers for their antislavery work. Concerning
William Edmundson, Aptheker pointed out that in essence Edmundson's defense against
his accusers was that ”Ignorance and brutal treatment would cause slave revolt, religious
teaching would prevent it, i.e., this Quaker was saying that his teaching would help
maintain slavery (p. 333).”

46

Aﬁicans? Edmundson then referred to the Golden Rule and asked of the Quakers,
”which of you all would have the blacks or others to make you their Slaves with
out hope or expectation of freedom or liberty?” The implication was clear:
Slavery of any kind was wrong and therefore sinful. "So make their (the slaves)
conditions your own,” Edmundson concluded, ”for a good Conscience Void of
oﬁ‘ense is more worth than all the World."75

Unfortlmately, William Edmrmdson's opposition to slavery as early as 1676
placed him in a very small minority among the Society of Friends at that time. In
general, Quaker opposition to slavery began and grew slowly until the mid-
eighteenth centlny. Quaker protests until then generally came ﬁom radical
individuals. There were, however, important exceptions to that rule. For example,
the ﬁrst formal protest against slavery by a group of Quakers occurred at
Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1688. In putting their concerns about slavery down
on paper, these German Quakers, like William Edmrmdson, pointed to the Golden
Rule as an important reason for opposing slavery. "Is there any among us," they
asked, "that would be done or handled at this manner? viz., to be sold or made a
slave for all the time of his life."76 At its heart, slavery existed as a direct
contradiction to the freedom that these German Quakers had hoped to ﬁnd by
migrating to America. The Gennantown Quakers also attacked slavery on grormds
that it constituted the biblically denounced practice of manstealing. Furthermore,
while many Christian denominations, including the Puritans, regarded captives

 

”See William Edmundson, For Friends in Maryland Virginia and other Parts of
America, reprinted in Frost, QQA, pp. 66-67. See also Thomas E. Drake, Quakmaud
SlaminAmerica..(Nm Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 9-10. Although some
of his interpretations are considered dated, Drake's study is still considered by many
scholars to be the best book to read in order to begin studying the problem of Quaker's
and slavery.

76Gemrarrtarm Friends' Protest Against Slavery, 1688, reprinted m Frost, QQA, p.69

47
taken in a "just" war as ﬁt for enslavement, the Germantown Quakers expressed
concern that buying captives as slaves constituted proﬁteering from war - a
violation of the Quaker Peace Testimony.

The fear of violent slave insurrections also led the Germantown Quakers to
point to the Peace Testimony as an argument against slavery. They astutely
observed that blacks did not like slavery, and were capable of rebelling. As with
Quakers migrating to the Northwest during the nineteenth century, the
Germantown Quakers in 1688 recognized the physical and theological dangers
involved with slave uprisings. They pointed to the potential dangers by asking
other Quakers what would happen if the slaves were to

Joint (sic) themselves, ﬁght for ﬁeedom, and handle their masters and
mistresses as they did handle them (the Negroes) before. Will these
masters and mistresses take the sword at hand and war against the poor
slaves, like, we are able to believe, some will not refuse to do? Or have
these Negroes not as much right to ﬁght for their ﬁeedom as you have to
keep them as slaves?"

The Germantown Quakers's concerns over slave revolts were due largely to
problems related to two central tenets of Quakerisrn: the Quaker Peace Testimony;
and its effects on each individual's ”Inner Light." In rejecting as rmnecessary the
doctrinal authority of organized religions (as well as their clergy and rituals),
George Fox explained that ”every man was enlightened by the divine light of
Christ . . . and they that believed in it came out of condemnation to the light of
life, and became children of it. " Thus to Quakers, the Inner Light was a gift from
God to mankind; "a still small voice" in the soul ”of every man" that if listened to
was capable of guiding an individual to salvation.

 

"Ibid, p.69.

48

Quaker adherence to the Inner Light and the belief in spiritual equality
usually involved "quietism." Quietism required complete passivity in order to
allow God through the Inner Light to operate unopposed. Quietisrn in the form
of group worship involved ﬁrst gathering in a plain meeting house free of stained
glass, ornamentation, or organ music. Quakers silently entered the meeting house
and sat on benches. Men and women sat separately. With the exception of Elders,
who sat in a ﬁ'ontal gallery, no distinction was made as to seating arrangements.
The meeting sat in silence until the Inner Light moved someone, man or woman,
to oﬁ‘er a message, a sermon, or a prayer. Speaking out was a serious matter. Yet
to do so was not regarded as something which required intellectual preparation
since Quakers held that the Holy Spirit guided speakers. Speakers took anywhere
from several minutes to an hour, sometimes longer. Meetings normally lasted I
about two hours, ending when an Elder or clerk shook hands with the person next
to him.78

The power of the Inner Light acted as the central belief of the Society of
Friends. Therefore, according to Quakers, war and all other forms of violence
( including the use of force to protect one's self ﬁ'om an immediate physical attack
by another) came from evil human desires that in turn interfered with one's ability
to follow their Inner Light and, ultimately, their salvation.79 Violence resulting

from slave insurrections would presumably have had such a negative effect. The

 

78For a basic overview of quietism see Barbour and Frost, Ihaﬂuakcrs, pp. 97-101. For
a more in depth discussion of quietism see Jones, LBQ, vol. I, pp. 32-103.
79 George Fox quoted in Thomas D. Hamm, W

W Pp 2-3. Hamm gives a good concise explanation of the
”Inner Light." For an excellent history of Quakerisrn and the development of Quaker

theology for the general reader see Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, 1111mm
especially chapter 4, "Quaker Worship and Ethics." See also Peter Brock, mm
W215. (York, England. Sessions Book Trusts, 1990).

49

Germantown Quakers recognized that a slave rebellion would most likely mean
force and violence. Rather than risk the dangers involved in such actions, they
saw ending slavery as the only sure way of avoiding the problem altogether. To
the Germantown Quakers, slavery led to far too many spiritual as well as physical
dangers.80

Although eventually received by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the
Germantown Protest was set aside due to the fact that it was ”not to be so proper
for this meeting to give a positive judgment in the case, it having so general a
relation to many in other parts; and so at present they forbear it (emphasis
mine)"81 It should be pointed out that the protest was ﬁled away and not
rediscovered until 1844. It is therefore doubtful that the Germantown Protest had
a direct inﬂuence upon migrating Quakers during the early nineteenth century.
On the other hand, it does indicate that Quaker recognition of the problems
concerning slave revolts was actually long-standing. The ”many other parts”
mentioned in the Yearly Meeting's response apparently referred to Quakers who
owned slaves in other colonies besides Pennsylvania - especially the Southern
colonies. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting seems to have deemed the problem of
slavery as less important than unity among the Society of Friends at large.

 

8"See Hilty, pp. 9-10. The possibility of violence in America between whites and non-
whites was a mq'or concern for Quakers. When George Fox visited America in 1672 he
attempted to demonstrate to others that Indians responded to a spiritual conscience, or
”Inner Light. " Quakers such as William Penn often used Fox's example when justifying
fair dealings with Indians in Pennsylvania as a means of maintaining peaceful relations.
Similarly, North Carolina Quakers tended to hold that peace with native peoples was to be
had ﬁ'orn proper treatment, not military force. Concerning relations between Quakers and
African slaves, good treatment was often considered a key to preventing insurrections.
See James, p. 103-105 for a discussion ofwhy many Quakers held that it was all right to
own Aﬁicans as slaves but not Indians.

81Minutes ofPhiladelphia Yearly Meeting, Vol. A2, p. 18, Burlington, 5 September, 1688
cited in Drake, p 13.

50

In spite of what may appear as general indiﬂ‘erence or tacit acceptance of
slavery among Pennsylvania Quakers, in 1696 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
did issue an advice to their lower meetings that Quakers should avoid importing
more slaves and treat well any slaves that they already owned. This statement was
merely an advice and did not in any way make the importation of slaves at that
time a disownable oﬂ‘ense. The reasons for the discouragement of the slave trade
often referred to the potential of slave uprisings. As Pennsylvania Quaker Robert
Pyle remarked, enslaved blacks "might rise in rebellion and doe us much
mischief. "32

The examples given above indicate that although slavery existed within the
Society of Friends, it was not without its critics. And already at an early stage,
some Quakers came to see the physical and theological problems involved with
slave revolts. In addition to the problems associated with violence and war, many
Quakers began to recognize that slavery as a condition made it impossible for the
slaves themselves to experience their own Inner Lights. Quaker critics argued that
slavery denied persons the ultimate responsibility for their own lives and therefore
their ability to follow the Inner Light. Although Quakers did not necessarily
believe in complete secular human equality, most did hold that the Inner Light
could be found in all human beings, even Aﬁican slaves. For a Quaker to take part
in slavery, so this arglnnent went, was to prevent another human being from

experiencing the Inner Light.83

 

82Robert Pyle quoted in Marming Marable, "The Death of the Quaker Slave Trade,”
kactHismnt, (Spring, 1974), p. 30.

See also Davis, especially the chapter entitled "The Quaker Ethic and the
Antislavery International," pp. 213-254.
33 See Davis, p. 254 for an interesting interpretation of this problem involving individual
responsibility and the Inner Light. .

5 1

The process of ending slavery among the Quakers was a relatively slow
one until the middle of the eighteenth century, when Quaker attitudes toward
slavery turned from mostly concern over the treatment of slaves to ending the
practice itself within the Society of Friends. As mentioned earlier, Quaker protests
against slavery during the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century generally came from
radical individuals. Many of these protesters came to be disowned by their
monthly meetings for opposing the unity of the larger Quaker body. Yet
gradually, dissenting voices came to have more credence. Quaker theology made
this possible due to what can be described as its progressive nature. A major
problem with transforming the Society of Friends (and other Christian
denominations) had to do with the fact that the Bible itself did not condemn
slavery. Even Jesus Christ had made no protest against slavery's existence. How
then could the Quakers arrive at the conclusion that slavery was sinful?

Quakers acknowledged the authority of scripture. They referred to the
Bible in order to validate individual and group testimonies of the Inner Light.
However, because of its emphasis on the Inner Light, Quakerisrn did not adhere to
a strict literal biblicism. Unlike the Puritans, the Quakers in many cases
understood biblical revelation not as a ﬁnished act, but as part of a gradual process
toward understanding and unity with God. Even on the individual level, Quakers
considered their justiﬁcation to God as part of an ongoing process rather than as a .
singular turning point in one's life. To those Quakers becoming concerned about
the potential sinfulness of slavery, that the Bible did not condemn the practice
merely indicated that God had not chosen to reveal everything concerning the
sinfulness of slavery dining biblical times.84

 

“SeeHmmppJ-ll. Seemrroarhemaketramihtmnolommmpp- 51-
53.

52

While nrisgivings about slavery within the Society of Friends grew slowly
but steadily among the mass of Quakers in America during the early to mid-
eighteenth century, certain individuals gained special prominence among
antislavery voices. Without a doubt the most famous, if not the most inﬂuential,
Quaker opponent of slavery during eighteenth century was John Woolman. Born
in Mount Holly, New Jersey in 1720, Woolman made his living as a tailor and also
acted as a notary public. The story goes that on one occasion Woolman was asked
to draw up a will for a man wishing to pass ownership of his slaves to his son.
Woohnan became deeply disturbed at the thought of another human being held in
slavery. He declined to draw up the will and explained his dilemma to the
slaveholder. So powerful was Woolman's explanation that the slaveholder himself
became troubled and agreed to emancipate his slaves upon his death.

Woolman eventually began a career of protesting against slavery by urging
fellow Quakers to emancipate their slaves. He traveled widely throughout the
cormtryside. In 17 57 Woolman began a journey through the Southern colonies,
including North Carolina, in order to address the problems of slavery.
Interestingly, most of Woolman's critique of slavery involved the negative eﬂects
of slavery upon the slaveholders. For example, in addressing some Quakers in
western North Carolina, Woolman stated:

When slaves are purchased to do our labor numerous difﬁculties attend it.
To rational creatures bondage is uneasy and frequently occasions sourness
and discontent among them; which affects the family and such claim of
mastery over them. Thus people and their children are many times
encompassed with vexations, which arise from their applying wrong
methods to get a living . . . I beseech you that you keep clear of purchasing
any slaves . . . so that you may be preserved from those dangers which
attend such as are aiming at outward ease and greatness.85

 

85300 John Woolman, mmmmmpzﬁssaxsnflohnﬂmlman. Philip P.

53

Or, in a more summarized form, Woolman concluded that ”while the life of
one is made grievous by the rigour of another, it entails misery for both. "85
Woolman went on to describe the inhumanity involved in slavery and the slave
trade. He also pointed to a number of scriptural passages commanding kind
treatment to slaves and eventual manumission. Moreover, Woolman understood
that racial prejudice formed the basis of slavery in America. ”This is owing
chieﬂy to the idea that of slavery with the black colour, and liberty with the
white," Woolman observed. "And where false ideas are twisted in our' minds it is
with diﬁculty we get fairly disentangled.”87 Woolman's insights concerning race
and slavery will help later in this study to understand Quaker attitudes toward
blacks and how those attitudes aﬁ‘ected Quaker fears of slave revolts. For now, it
is important to understand the signiﬁcance of John Woolman in articulating a
convincing and moving antislavery ideology that did not overtly condemn or
challenge the religious views and practices of the Society of Friends. Indeed, it is
the humility and sense of inner struggle contained in Woolman's writings that may
have made his criticisms of slavery palatable to many Quakers.

While recognizing the contributions of John Woolman to Quaker
antislavery, it is important not to forget that his voice was actually one among
many less well-known antislavery Quakers timing the early to mid-eighteenth
century. For example, two years before Woolman's mission to North Carolina,
antislavery Quakers Samuel Fotlrergill and Israel Pemberton had traveled to the

 

Moulton, ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 69.

“Ibid, p. 206.

87mm, pp. 224-25. See also Jordan, W pp-274-75- Jordan makes good
useofWoolmaninsupportinghismain argument inWBlackthat racial
prejudice among whites and slavery among blacks had a reciprocating relationship. In
short, according to Jordan, prejudice led to slavery at the same time slavery led to
prejudice.

54
same areas that Woolman later visited. Fothergill and Pemberton spent a great
deal of effort preaching against slavery. Thus when Woolman arrived in North
Carolina, he foimd many receptive listeners quite familiar with antislavery
language.88 If John Woolman brought the ideology of antislavery among Quakers
to its ﬁuition, he had by no means planted the ﬁrst seeds.

In discussing the actions taken by Quakers toward antislavery, we need to
take a moment to sketch brieﬂy some of reasons oﬁered by historians as to why
individual Quakers and later the entire Society of Friends began the process at all.
To trace and analyze the historiography of Quakers and slavery would require a
separate study of its own. For this study, a few historiographical examples will
serve to demonstrate that the motives behind Quaker opposition to slavery had
many possible faces.89 f

In 1950 Thomas Drake argued in his classic work WW
America that antislavery sentiment and action among Quakers progressed rapidly
after 1755 due primarily to leaders such as John Woolman stepping forth at the
right time and pricking the consciences of slave-owning Quakers. With this in
mind, antislavery leaders attacked slavery as morally wrong in the eyes of God; a
denial of natural rights to the slaves; and a corrupting inﬂuence upon the
slaveholders. "The Quaker testimony against slavery, as it ﬂowered in the late

 

88See James, p. 128-40.

89For an excellent review of the post-World War II literature on Quakers and slavery see
J. William Frost, ”The Origins of the Quaker Crusade Against Slavery: A Review of the
Recent Literature," Quakmﬂistorx, (Spring, 1978), pp. 42-58.

55
eighteenth century,” Drake maintained, "came as a product of moral and religious
idealism."90

Most historians studying Quakers and slavery following Drake have not
settled for such a simple explanation. For example, in 1967 Sydney V. James
insisted in his book ABaopleAmongBmples that antislavery among eighteenth
century Quakers - especially among the members of the Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting - could not have been divorced from an overall Quaker program of
internal reform which began in earnest after the outbreak of the French and Indian
War. The terrible violence of that war led Quakers to ask why God had allowed
such horrible things to occur? The answer for many Quakers held that God was
punishing the Quakers for their involvement in sinful worldly practices, especially
slavery. Forced out of government due to their paciﬁst beliefs, James argued, .
Pennsylvania Quakers ostensibly devoted themselves to a variety of philanthropic
activities such as antislavery and aid to Indians in order to reclaim inﬂuence in
society at large.

In 1984 historian Jack Marietta attacked James's thesis by arguing that
Quaker programs involving antislavery and assistance to Indians were actually
unpopular with the general population and therefore could not have been helpful in
regaining lost inﬂuence. He argued that Pennsylvania Quakers did not lose
political inﬂuence to any signiﬁcant extent imtil the Revolutionary War.

Marietta claimed that antislavery increased among Quakers after 1755 as part of a
program of internal religious reform aimed at setting the Society of Friends apart
from mainstream society.91

 

90Drake, p 77
91$eeJaclr D. Marietta, t.- -~ - .
(Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvama Press, 1984.)

 

56

The historiographical examples just offered are meant only to demonstrate
that historians have argued and continue to argue over why the Quakers turned
toward antislavery. What they tell us in general is that Quaker antislavery was a
complicated development due to a variety of religious, political, economic, and
social reasons. While we may question and argue about their motives - and
become ﬁ'ustrated at the slowness of the process - the bottom line remains that the
Quakers as an organization did move toward ending slavery dining a time when
most white people living in British America considered slavery to be a part of the
natural order.

TheStepsIonlardEreedom

When reading about colonial Quaker antislavery activities, it might seem as
if Quakers everywhere in America acted simultaneously. In fact, different yearly
meetings of the Society of Friends moved at different speeds through diﬁ‘erent
stages ﬁom at ﬁrst ameliorating slavery to ﬁnally ending it among the themselves.
For example, with regards to buying slaves imported from Aﬁica, Philadelphia
Yearly Meeting advised against it as early as 1696 and made the practice subject to
discipline in 1719.92 New England Yearly Meeting advised against the Aﬁican
slave trade in 1717 and 1744 but did not make it a disciplinary oﬂ‘ense imtil 1760.
Despite the fact that these two Northern meetings had at least addressed this issue
relatively early in the eighteenth century, North Carolina Yearly Meeting did not
begin to discuss oﬁicially the buying and selling of Africans until after 1768 and
did not advise against it for fun more years.

Following the problem of importing slaves ﬁom Aﬁica came the question
of buying and selling slaves already living in America. Many Quakers regarded

 

92See Part One for a discussion of the Quaker Discipline.

57
trading in slaves as denimental to slave families and therefore sinful. Sectional
differences in pace and procedure aﬁecﬁng this issue were obvious once again.
From 1730 to 1758 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting often advised against buying and
selling slaves. That Meeting ﬁnally made such acts disownable oﬁ‘enses in 1774.
In contrast, ﬁrough the North Carolina Yearly Meeting in 1772 advised Quakers
not to deal in slaves, the Meeting continued to allow the buying and selling of
slaves exclusively between Quakers. The Yearly Meeting reasoned that by
limiting slave ﬁnding between Quakers, slaves would be assured of having less
harsh masters as well as greater assm'ances that slave families would not be
disrupted.93
Finally, when Quaker yearly meetings began to make ﬁre practice of slavery

a disownable oﬂ'ense, the Northern meetings moved at a much quicker pace ﬁran
the Southern meetings. For example, New England and Philadelphia Yearly
Meetings banned slavery in 1771 and 1776 respectively. Norﬁr Carolina Yearly
Meeting did not make ownership of slaves a disownable oﬁ‘ense until 1781. That
the timing for abolishing slavery among Quakers progressed more slowly ﬁre
further south one went is, of course, not surprising. As historian David Brion
Davis has stated: ”Although Quakers in general shared a similar heritage and
subculture, they lived in very different environments that inevitably affected the
outcome of their antislavery views. In the southern states there were severe
obstacles that delayed implementation of the sect's emerging policy of self-
puriﬁcation."94

It is wrong to assume, however, that Northern Quakers gave up slavery

without a struggle. Many slaveholding Quakers living in ﬁre Philadelphia area

 

93See James, pp. 130-32.
94Davis, p. 221.

58
were quite slow to give up their ties to slavery. Historian Jean Soderlund has
argued that a great deal of attitudinal variation concerning slavery existed among
members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting during the eighteenth century.
Several prominent members of that meeting were heavily involved in endeavors
that utilized slavery. Rural Quakers who owned large farms often used slave
labor, especially during periods when free labor or indentmed servants were in
short supply. And, as was ﬁre case for many Southern Quakers, slaves often
represented social status to slaveholding Quakers in ﬁre North. According to
Soderlund, ﬁre Philadelphia Yearly Meeting became progressively opposed to
slavery as its conservative slaveholding leaders came to be replaced by leaders
with increasingly negative attitudes toward slavery. Antislavery Quaker leaders
collided with slaveholding leaders until ﬁre antislavery group dominated the
Yearly Meeting. Even then, Soderlund explained, many Quakers did not concede
the sinfulness of slavery, yet upheld the Yearly Meeting's decisions out of a need
to conform.95 In sum, Soderlrnrd demonstrated that ﬁle end of slavery among
Pennsylvania Quakers was neiﬁrer quick nor painless.

Studies like Soderlimd's shed considerable light on the difﬁculties of
Northern Quakers emancipating their slaves. But ﬁre fact remains (as Soderlund
readily acknowledged) that during and after the American Revolution, Norﬁrem
Quakers attempted to ameliorate or ban slavery amongst themselves while living
within a larger society moving, albeit slowly at times, toward ending ﬁre institution

 

95See Jean R. Soderlund, WW (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985). Soderlund mostly concurred with historian J. William Frost's

thesis that Quaker antislavery tended to be divided between sectarian reformers seeking to
purify the Society of Friends of its worldly corruption, and humanitarian reformers, like
John Woolman, who thought that slavery was morally wrong and needed to end. See J.
William Frost's article "The Origins of the Quaker Crusade Against Slavery. A Review of
the Recent Literature,” pp. 56-57.

59
as well.96 Southern Quakers, on the oﬁrer hand, lived in a society in which slavery
as an institution became increasingly strengthened and protected legally, socially,
and politically. Norﬁr Carolina Quakers (as well as Quakers living in the other
Southern states) who owned slaves had to make a diﬁcult choice between their
religion and their means of livelihood as well as their a place in society at large.
"It is difficult for us at this long distance to realize what ﬁris ﬁdelity to principle
and obedience to conscience cost ﬁre Friends of the South,” commented Rufus
Jones. "The slaves constituted in these regions a large element of wealth. Friends
had formed the habit of living by slave-labour, and furthermore, they exposed
ﬁremselves to the stern disapproval of their neighbors when they manumitted ﬁreir
negroes . . ." Southern Quakers ”soon foimd themselves living in a social world
into which they did not ﬁt."97 The stem disapproval experienced by Quakers in
North Carolina often reﬂected itself in colonial and state laws aﬂ‘ecting slavery.

Wamandﬂmﬁlﬁamlinaﬂuakers
Quakers living in North Carolina dining the eighteenth century and early
nineteenth centuries who desired to emancipate their slaves faced a myriad of

challenges. 93 North Carolina Quaker antislavery ﬁrought and practice had a

 

96See Arthur Zilversmit, W
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967).

97Jones, 13.0, vol. I, p. 385.

98For an excellent discussion of the law of slavery in colonial North Carolina as an
expression of ﬁre paternalistic ideology of the master class see Marvin L. Michael Kay and
Lorin Lee Cary, W particularly chapter 2, "Power and
the Law of Slavery." See also Hiram H. Hilty, WWW
Quakmnndﬁlm especially the chapters entitled "Quakers and Slavery in Colonial

North Carolina" and "Slaves Given Freedonr;" and Weeks, WW
For a brief discussion on the importance of slavery 111 American legal history see Paul

Finkehnan, "The Centrality of the Peculiar Institution in American Legal Development,"

W (College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, Summer
1993), Vol 68, pp 1009-33.

60
reciprocating relationship with the strengthening of legal barriers against
manumissions. In oﬁrer words, the increasingly severe legislative restrictions were
in large part due to Quakers ﬁnding loopholes in the various anti-manumission
laws; or their ignoring those laws altogether.

Norﬁr Carolina established its ﬁrst slave code in 1715. Many of its
provisions were designed to prevent or punish insurrections by slaves. "There are
several Laws made against them (slaves) in this Province to keep them in
Subjection," a contemporary historian remarked. The harsh penalties contained in
the code were deemed necessary because slaves "sometimes rise and Rebel against
their masters. . . and do a great deal of mischief, being both treacherous and cruel
in their natrnes so that mild Laws would be of no use against them when any
favornable Opportlmity offered if executing their barbarities (emphasis mine)."99

In 1741 the North Carolina Legislature passed a law allowing for ﬁre
emancipation of a slave only as the result of meritorious service performed by the
slave as judged by ﬁre courts. Slaves emancipated illegally were to leave the
colony within six months or be re-enslaved and sold at public auction. "’0 The law
came soon after an attempted, but aborted, slave uprising in New York earlier that
same year, and only two years after the ill fated Stono Rebellion in South
Carolina. 101 This law eventually created serious problems for Norﬁr Carolina
Quakers desiring to emancipate their slaves even before ﬁre Yearly Meeting made
slavery a disownable offense in 1781. Among ﬁrose problems was ﬁre question

 

99John Bricknell, WW (Dublin: the Author, 1737), pp.
272-76. Excerpt reprinted tn Butler, pp 204-5.

100See State Records of North Carolina (hence cited as State Records), Walter Clark, ed,
(Goldsboro, NC: Bookand Job Printers, 1904), Vol. xxm, pp 191-204.

101For an interesting account of slavery in colonial South Carolina see Peter H. Wood,

 

Rebellion. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1974).

6 1
concerning ﬁre status and well-being of freed slaves in the face of such a restrictive
law since many slaves freed by the Quakers were later arrested and sold again into
slavery.

The American Revolution created an added dilemma for Quakers who
desired to ﬂee ﬁreir slaves. Although publicly expressing their neutrality during
the war, many, if not most, Quakers in Norﬁr Carolina tended to recognize the
British governmental authorities as legitimate during ﬁre early years of the
conﬂict. ‘02 This did not exactly sit well with American colonists ﬁghting for
independence from Great Britain. Add to this the fact that the British offered
freedom to slaves willing to ﬁght against the American rebels. “’3 Thus while
already regarding most Quakers as de facto Loyalists, ﬁre North Carolina
Assembly charged Quakers manumitting their slaves as guilty of fomenting slave
insurrections.104

Some Quakers took advantage of revolutionary times in order to interpret
the slave law of 1741 in a raﬁrer imaginative way. These Quakers pointed out ﬁrat
that law had been established by a colonial government technically empowered by
Great Britain. Since Norﬁr Carolina had asserted its independence from the
British, Quakers argued that the law had lost its legitimacy and therefore did not

require obedience. '05

 

102See Barbour, p. 143. Eventually, however, North Carolina Quakers began working
with the Revolutionary government in North Carolina once it became clear that that
government was in control of the colony (state).

03See Jeffrey Crow, IheBlackExperienceinReynlutionamNonhQamlina. (Raleigh-
North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1977).
10“See Howard Beeth, Outside Agitators in Southern History: The Society of Friends,
1656-1800, Ph. D. thesis, University of Houston, 1984.
1°58ee Linda Adams Bland, Guilford County Quakers and Slavery in North Carolina,
M. A. thesis, Wake Forest University, 1968, pp. 35. See particularly chapter 2.

62

In response to Quaker manumission efforts, the North Carolina Assembly
took steps in 1777 to strengthen further ﬁre slave law of 1741. Entitled as A Bill to
Prevent Domestic Servile Insurrection, the new law began by pointing out that
"the evil and pernicious Practice of ﬁeeing Slaves in this State, ought at this
alarming and critical time to be guarded against by every ﬁiend and Wellwisher to
his Country."106 The law of 1777 still required meritorious service as the
condition for manumission. However, the new law stated that slaves ﬁ'eed
illegally would not be allowed six monﬁrs to leave the state - ﬁrey were to be re-
enslaved and sold immediately. Several former slaves then living in eastern North
Carolina, who had been manumitted prior to the law of 17 77, were arrested and
sold. Quaker legal counsel argued that such actions made the law an ex postfacto
law. Alﬁrough the Quakers convinced a superior court ﬁrat it was actually an ex
post facto law, in 17 79 the North Carolina Legislature ultimately upheld the law
and the re-enslavement of many free blacks as legitimate. “’7 With the problems of
manumissions and slave uprisings in mind, the Legislature singled out the Quakers
on January 26, 1779: "The act of said Quakers in setting their slaves free when our
open and declared enemies were endeavoring to bring about an insurrection of the
Slaves, was highly criminal and reprehensible . . ."103

This last statement leads us to some of the most important reasons as to

why many white Norﬁr Carolinians desired restrictions concerning manunrissions.
Most Southern whites regarded free blacks as equally dangerous as—and perhaps
more dangerous than - enslaved blacks. From a purely practical standpoint, ﬁre
mobility and communications of free blacks were more difﬁcult to control than

 

106State Records, Vol. XXIII, p.14.
1°7siote Records, Vol. xxrv, p. 205. See also Weeks, p. 210; Hilty, p. 26.
108Quoted in Hilty, p. 26.

63

those of slaves. Beyond that, ﬁ'ee blacks undermined the basic socio-racial
assrnnptions of most whites who generally held that whites were assrnned to be
ﬁne while blacks were assumed to be slaves. Moreover, the presence of a ﬁee
black population direcﬁy and indirecﬁy affected the consciousness of enslaved
blacks and ﬁreir attitudes toward their status. Knowing that ﬁeedom was possible
provided slaves with at least some measure of hope that they too might someday
be ﬁee. Most importantly, free blacks could directly inﬂuence ﬁre minds of slaves
to think about freedom by escaping or rebelling. Thus white Norﬁr Carolinians
regarded all blacks, free and slave, as potential insurgents. North Carolina law
reﬂected that understanding. ‘09

The increasingly forbidding slave laws created a quandary for North
Carolina Quakers. How were they to obey the law and still emancipate their
slaves? Christ's command to render to Caesar what belonged to Caesar, as well as
other biblical commands to obey secular authority, operated as an important part
of Quaker practices. When and how could God's higher laws be implemented if
necessary? The Society of Friends in Norﬁr Carolina continued to encourage
emancipation timing the American Revolution even though ﬁre Yearly Meeting did
not make slave-owning itself a disownable act until 1781. After 1781,
disownments tended to occur only when a Quaker slaveholder indicated no desire
to emancipate his slaves. Quakers who wanted to free their slaves but felt ﬁrat

 

109SeeIraBerlirl, : ‘.: : - . - ' -.

(New York: The New Press, 1974). See especially the chapter entitled "The Failure of
Freedom," pp. 79-107, for a discussion on the status of ﬁee blacks in Revolutionary and
post-Revolutionary America. Prior to the American Revolution 5% of blacks living in
North Carolina were free. The free black population in North Carolina in 1790 numbered
around 5 ,,000 again around 5% of the black population. Most of ﬁee blacks were

mulattos or ofsometypeofmixedancestry. See Crow, AHiatnnuﬁZAﬁicarL-Amcricans
mNorthLarolinap 7.

 

64

they could not due to the law were often allowed to remain within the Society of
Friends. 1 10

In response to the increasing legal restrictions, beginning in 1779 members
of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting petitioned the Legislature as an
admonishment against slavery. "That your remonstrants feel their minds
impressed with sorrow," ﬁre petition stated, "that such injustice and cruelty should
be perpetrated under sanction of law, in any christian community . . . " The
petitioners also cited the incompatibility between slavery and Christian ideals of

republican government noting that
We believe such proceedings (slavery) to be contrary to the laws of nature
. . . For a legislative body of men , professing christianity, to be so partial,
as to ﬁius refuse any particular people the enjoyment of their liberty, under
the laws of the government in which they live, even when the owners of
such slaves are desirous, from religious motives, that they might enjoy their
personal freedom, as a natural right of all mankind, is so incompatible with
the nature of a ﬁee republican government . . .1“

The Quaker petitioners had little positive eﬂect in swaying the Legislature
as a fear of free blacks and slaves caused many white Norﬁr Carolinians to take
further steps at limiting manumissions - particularly ﬁle slaves of Quakers. Due
to their antislavery activities, Quakers living in the norﬁreastem counties of North

Carolina came to be known as "auﬁrors of the common mischief."112

 

l”Bland, p. 46. It needs to be stressed that during the late eighteenth century many
disownments occurred over practices having nothing to do with slavery. Involvement in
the Revolution, and marrying outside of the Society of Friends, were among the acts
prompting disownment. Quakers were once again attenrpting to purify their organization
of worldly contamination. Disownments became so common that more than one opponent
of Quaker antislavery activities pointed out that the Quakers themselves were doing the
most to eliminate Quakerisrn in America. See Gragg, pp.73-76.

111Quoted in Weeks, p. 221.

112rhid, p.

65

Tensions relaxed somewhat after the Revolution, and manumissions
became slighﬁy more frequent. Yet the North Carolina Legislature continued to
enact laws designed to impede ﬁre freeing of slaves. The American Convention of
Abolition Societies noted this in 1804: "At present, the inhabitants of ﬁrat state,
consider the preservation of their lives, and all ﬁrey hold dear on earﬁl, as
depending on ﬁre continuance of slavery; and are even now riveting more ﬁrmly
the fetters of oppression." 1 13 As one example, beginning in 1791 ﬁre Legislature
passed laws requiring slaveholders who desired to emancipate their slaves to put
up a bond ranging from two hundred pounds to (after 1801) one ﬁrousand dollars.
In order for the emancipator to recoup the bond, the freed slave had to leave ﬁre
state within ninety days. .

In response to the new manumission laws, the Society of Friends in Norﬁr
Carolina eventually took steps that seemed contradictory, if not hypocritical: The
North Carolina Yearly Meeting itself became a slaveholder. Based on a law
passed in 1796 which allowed private property to be turned over as gifts to
religious organizations, the North Carolina Yearly Meeting accepted slaves ﬁ'om
individuals desiring to ﬂee their slaves. 1 14 From 1809 until ﬁre outbreak of the
Civil War in 1861, the North Carolina Yearly Meeting held slaves with the intent
of transporting them northward to free tenitory; colonizing them in western Aﬁica
or Haiti; or providing ﬁrem wiﬁr places to live and work in North Carolina with at .
least a semblance of freedom.

Many of ﬁre colonization attempts in Aﬁica and Haiti failed. But several
blacks who moved to the Northern states or Canada remarked on ﬁre
improvements in their lives, in spite of racial prejudice present in the North. For

 

113Cited in Davis, p. 199
114State Records, Vol. 26., p.276.

66

example, Hannah Elliot, a former slave, wrote to a Quaker ﬁiend in North
Carolina stating that she and her family "are well contented, better satisﬁed ﬁran in
Carolina."“5 Quaker efforts wiﬁr ﬁlis program suﬁ‘ered a setback in 1833 when
the Indiana Legislature forbade the introduction of blacks into ﬁle state.
Interestingly, several Indiana Quakers were among ﬁrose expressing alarm and
resentment over the inﬂux of blacks into the region. But North Carolina Quaker
efforts continued, especially since ﬁre race laws in Indiana were not stricﬁy
enforced. 1 16

In spite of the presumably good intentions behind having the Yearly
Meeting holding slaves, a serious problem developed due to the large numbers of
Quakers ﬁom that state emigrating to ﬁre Northwest. Many migrating Quakers,
especially those from the northeastern colmties, left their slaves in the care of ﬁre
Yearly Meeting. Often ﬁris was done without making provisions for the well-
being of ﬁre slaves left behind. These quasi-free slaves became an ever increasing
burden on the rapidly shrinking number of Quakers who chose to remain in North
Carolina. Apparenﬁy many Quakers migrating to the Northwest moved for
reasons more pressing and important to them than ﬁre welfare of their former
slaves. 1 ‘7

Quakers who did become involved wiﬁr helping slaves and ﬁee blacks leave
North Carolina may have been motivated by fear of slave revolts. Historian John

 

115Hannah Elliot, Wayne County Indiana to Martha Parker. September 21, 1829. Josiah
Parker anily Papers, Richmond, Indiana: Earlham College Archives.

116See Hilty, pp. 74-88 for an account of the attempts to relocate former slaves in the
North.

117Concerning the North Carolina Yearly Meeting as a slaveholder see Weeks, pp. 224-
26; Bland, pp. 55-61; Hilty, pp. 36-39; and pp. 41-68 for an account ofthe attempts by
the North Carolina Mamimission Society to relocate former slaves in the Northern states,
the Caribbean, and Liberia.

67
Michael Shay has suggested that while altruism smely played a role in Quaker
eﬂ‘orts to move blacks to free territory, in many instances Quakers choosing to
remain in North Carolina wished to be rid of the burden of the blacks in their care.
Beyond this, Shay suggests that many Quakers feared ﬁrat ﬁre continued presence
of blacks in North Carolina increased the threat of a slave insurrection. 1 13 As we
shall see, Quaker racial attitudes and prejudices played a large part in generating

those fears.

Quakeraandﬁacism

Given the antislavery eﬂ‘orts of North Carolina Quakers, it might seem as if
they should have been immune from the fears and prejudices present among other
American whites concerning blacks. They were not. It is important at this point to
understand that even though Quakers in many ways deﬁed the prevalent ideologies
concerning blacks, ﬁrey were still bound in other ways by racial prejudice. As was
mentioned earlier, during the mid-eighteenth century John Woolman recognized
the problems of race and slavery resulting in ﬁre debasement of blacks in the eyes
of whites, including Quakers. Unlike Woolman, some Quakers even denied that
blacks had an Inner Light. Quaker Herman Husband, a contemporary of
Woolman's, held that blacks were inferior to Indians by ”one half boﬁr in nature,
shapes, and colour." Husband opposed slavery, but out of racism. He disliked the
idea ﬁrat money which could have been used to pay a white person for labor often
went instead toward buying blacks. Husband further contended that ”as lands
being capable of maintaining but such a number of inhabitants, for each of ﬁrose

 

118See John Michael Shay, The Antislavery Movement in North Carolina, pp. 23 7-41.

Withregardsto Quakeraltruism, ShaypointsoutthatQuakersneveractuallyforced
blacks to leave.

68

Negroes ﬁre publik is denied of a white person. " Finally, Husband expressed fear
that the continuation of slavery would lead to a large, uncontrollable black
population. 1 19

Although most Quakers considered slavery morally wrong, and worked to
help emancipated slaves adjust to their freedom, as a group, the Quakers did not
consider blacks as socially equal to whites. This is most apparent when examining
black membership in the Society of Friends before ﬁre Civil War. Quaker leaders
had usually encouraged the organization of meetings for blacks. For example,
earlier it was noted that during the seventeenﬁr century George Fox and William
Edrmmdson preached to blacks. In 1758 ﬁre Norﬁr Carolina Yearly Meeting took
steps for "making provision for Negroes' meetings and it was agreed ﬁrat meetings
should be appointed for them . . . A suﬁcient number of ﬁiends were to attend
these meetings to see that good order was observed."120 Another example can be
found in 1791 when Burlington Monthly Meeting reported ”that religious meetings
have been held monthly since last year for ﬁre beneﬁt of ﬁre Black People. " 121

The examples above, at ﬁrst glance, seem to contradict the idea that
Quakers held racist views toward blacks. However, organizing meetings for
blacks and actually accepting blacks into full membership of ﬁre Society of Friends
were two very diﬁ‘erent things. "By some strange quirk of psychology,”
according to historian Hiram Hilty, ”the anti-slavery Quakers never did receive
blacks into membership before the Civil War, although Moravians did so to a

 

119Quotations from Gragg, p. 64.

120See Henry J. Cadbury, ”Negro Membership in the Society of Friends,” W
Wm XXI, (January, 1936), pp. 151-213. Citation on p.156 fromA Narrative
of Some of the Proceedings of North Carolina Yearly Meeting on the Subject of Slavery
within Its Limits, (Greensboro, NC, 1848).

121Ibid.,p. 157.

69

limited extent, and the Baptists and others evangelized them actively."122 The
irony of the situation was not lost on many Quakers. In 1795 Quaker leader
Joseph Drinker chastised ﬁre Philadelphia Yearly Meeting for its inconsistency:
”There is no People in the world . . . who hold forth such Liberal Universal
Principles as the People called Quakers, and yet to my astonishment they are the
only People I know who make any objections to the Blacks or People of Color
joining them in Church F ellowship."123

Some blacks did desire and attempt to become members of the Society of
Friends. It was not an easy thing to do. For example, in 1798 ﬁre New Garden
Quarterly Meeting petitioned the North Carolina Yearly Meeting to allow for
black membership. At ﬁrst it appeared ﬁrat membership to blacks would be
granted. A special committee noted that the Discipline recognized racial equality
and that membership should not be denied on ﬁre basis of color. Unfortunately,
the larger portion of the Yearly Meeting hesitated ﬁ'om accepting this position and
postponed the decision for two years when they ﬁnally denied permission to
accept blacks as full members. 12“ Membership to blacks was rarely denied
explicitly due to color. In language that would later sormd familiar to blacks in the
days of Jim Crow, membership was usually denied due to ﬁreir ”insufﬁcient
knowledge of Friends' principles.”125

One argument used for supposing that blacks would not make good
Quakers, or that blacks would have no natural inclination to join, came ﬁom ﬁre
observation that ﬁre quietism practiced in Quaker meetings was incompatible with

 

122m, p. 40.
123Thomas E. Drake, ed., ”Joseph Drinker's Plea for Admission of the Colored People to
the Society of Friends, 1795,” Wm 32, (1947), pp. 110-12.

1248o.- Hilty, p. 40.
125See Weeks, p. 222 note.

70

the more exuberant brand of Christianity presumably favored by blacks. While
many blacks (as well as many whites) did choose to worship God in a way that
was less than quiet, this argument obviously suﬁ‘ered ﬁ'om a drastic over
generalization (as racism always does) ﬁrat did not take into account individual
preferences or temperaments. ‘26

Besides denying ofﬁcial membership to blacks, Quakers also generally
required separate burials places for blacks associated with ﬁrem. Some
commentators have regarded this as more of a kindness to blacks. After all,
according to their argument, the Quakers were making special provisions for
people who would have otherwise had no speciﬁed burial site. On the other hand,
other commentators have seen separate burials as a statement of racial
prejudice. 127

The examples offered above indicate that many Quakers preferred a racially
segregated society. The idea among Quakers concerning the value of a racially
segregated society in America can be traced back to the Germantown Protest in
1688. The Germantown Quakers opposed slavery not merely due to ﬁreir fears of
the physical and theological dangers involved with slavery as an institution. They
sought to end slavery among ﬁremselves also because of fears generated by racism.
Racial antipathy is evident in portions of the Germantown Protest that mention a
propensity for violence among black slaves. Moreover, as historian Hugh
Barbour has noted, "Quakers did not wish to build a multiracial society in the
Delaware Valley and feared that having large numbers of blacks who would not be
integrated into the religious and political systems would destroy liberty."128

 

126Sce Cadbury, p. 168.
1271bid., pp. 160-62.

128Barbour, Iheﬂnakers, p. 120.

7 1

One hundred years after the Germantown Protest, a critic pointed out how ”the
Quakers asserted that nature had made all men equal, and ﬁrat the diﬁ'erence of
color should not place negroes on a worse footing in society than ﬁre whites; but
had any of them ever married a negro, or would any of ﬁrem suﬂ‘er their children
to mix their blood with ﬁrat of a black? They would view with abhorrence such an
alliance." 129

Much of the racial prejudice among Quakers was due to the stigma of
inferiority generated by slavery. Though the Quakers opposed slavery, ﬁrey
tended to regard their relationship with blacks, slave and ﬁ'ee, in a paternalistic
manner. ’ That is to say, Quakers tended to regard blacks as a special people who
needed guidance, and for whom Quakers felt a sense of humanity and spiritual
responsibility for, if not a sense of social and religious equality in terms of actual
membership within the Society of Friends. 130 But that many Quakers leaving
North Carolina for the Norﬁrwest left their former slaves behind indicates that not
all Quakers saw ﬁreir responsibility to blacks in ﬁre some way. 131

Racial prejudice added fuel to the fears of many Norﬁr Carolina Quakers.

Yet it must be said, and said strongly, that certainly not all Quakers harbored deep
racial prejudice. ‘32 The fact that North Carolina Quakers debated black

 

129 William Loughton Srrrith quoted 1n Jordan, Wank, p 421
130See James, p.103 for a discussion of why Quakers treated Indians diﬁ‘erently than

blacks. James reasons that initial encounters between Quakers and Indians were generally
on terms of de facto equality. Blacks, on the other hand, were generally received initially
by Quakers as slaves with their inferiority presumably established by their servile
condition.

131While this is certainlytrue, it needs to be noted thm many Quakers settling in Ohio and
Indiana did bring former slaves with them; or eventually sent for blacks in order to settle
them in the Northwest. A few of the letters in the Josiah Parker Family Papers make
references to ”the time to send for the black people.” See Hilty's chapter ”Relocation in
the West and North,” pp. 74-87.

132See Jeﬁey Brooke Allen, ”The Racial Thought of White North Carolina Opponents of

Slavery, 1789-1876," Nonhﬁamhnaﬂistmir‘ameyienr. LIX, (January, 1982), pp 49-66.

72

membership for as long as they did indicates ﬁrat many desired to make blacks
full members. But as a whole, the Society of Friends in North Carolina (or in any
other state) never made a wholesale effort to recruit black members. This may be
an unfair criticism of the Quakers in ﬁrat they did not actually actively recruit
much at all ﬁom other segments of society either. 133 However, if the Quakers .
were trying to create a separate and ”pure” society, their exclusion of blacks acted
as a rather conspicuous mark of organizational racism.

Racism existed as one more dimension to Quaker fears related to slavery.
Racial prejudice fueled Quaker fears ﬁrat the slaves whom they and others had
freed, along with those still held in bondage in North Carolina, would one day
revolt. To be sure, by ﬁre beginning of the nineteenﬁr century ﬁre fear of slave
revolts was growing steadily and strongly among virtually all white Norﬁr
Carolinians.

W
The most famous attempts at slave insurrection in post-Revolutionary and
antebellum America were ﬁre aborted attempts led by Gabriel Prosser in 1800 and
Denmark Vesey in 1822, and the somewhat more successful and bloody Nat
Turner rebellion in Virginia in 1831. North Carolina Quaker migration to the
Northwest began in earnest soon after "Gabriel's Rebellion" and surged during the .
years immediately following the Vesey and Turner plots. The purpose of this

 

Allen claims that racism among antislavery North Carolinians, including the Quakers, has
been exaggerated by scholars. As an example of a lack of racism among Quakers, he
points to the North Carolina Yearly Meeting's assertion in 1796 that all people are equal in
God's eyes. Allen's article is largely unconvincing with respect to the Quakers due to the
factthathefailsto appreciatethedistinctionbetween spiritualequalityand secular

equality.
l338cc Cadbury, p. 168.

73
section is not to analyze the nature of American slave rebellions, but a brief
discussion of this topic along with a few short sketches of the Prosser, Vesey, and
Turner revolts are necessary to understand ﬁre climate of fear which they created
in North Carolina.

The history of slavery in North Carolina demonstrates that the fear of slave
revolts was hardly isolated to the time of the Great Migration or exclusively
among the Quakers. Ironically, the fear of slave uprisings did reﬂect important
ideological contradictions among slaveholders concerning ﬁre nature of slavery as
well as ﬁre slaves ﬁremselves. In 1943 Herbert Apﬁreker summed up the problem
of fear and American slavery in his controversial study W
Kayaks. Aptheker sought to dispel ﬁre oﬁen accepted noﬁon that slaves living in
North America had been generally docile and even content with their condition.
Aptheker, in contrast, argued for a warrior tradition among the slaves, and the fear
among whites generated by that tradition. "While there is a diﬁ‘erence of opinion
as to the prevalence of discontent amongst slaves," Aptheker acknowledged, ”one
ﬁnds very nearly unanimous agreement concerning ﬁre widespread fear of servile
rebellion. ” 134 This fear, Aptheker insisted, began early in ﬁre colonial period and
continued until the end of the Civil War. The contradiction was clear: American
slaveholders feared presrunably docile and contented slaves.

Aptheker particularly noted the importance of the massive slave revolution
in Haiti during the 17908 as a major cause of fear in ﬁre United States. ”American
slaveholders trembled for their own secrnity as they followed the tremendous
revolutionary activity of the French West Indian slaves in the 1790s," Aptheker
claimed. 135 More recently, Eugene Genovese, in his book EmmRehellionm

 

134Herhert Aptheker, WW5. (New York, 1943), p. 18.
1351bid., p. 41.

74

Remhrtton, concurred with Aptheker concerning ﬁre prevalence of the fear of
slave insurrections among North American whites. Genovese held ﬁrat ”the
interlocking French and Haitian revolutions shattered the tranquillity, such as it
was, of the slaveholding regions everywhere in the hemisphere and generated fear
among rational slaveholders."136

The slave revolutions in Haiti provided a ﬂesh sense of urgency among
white North Carolinians concerned that blacks in that state might be inﬂuenced by
events in the Caribbean. Rumors of violent slave conspiracies circulated
throughout Norﬁr Carolina during the 17908. In 1794, for instance, court
testimony taken from blacks in Granville Cormty spoke of a plan among Norﬁr
Carolina slaves to raise an army of black insurgents and ﬁren ”force their way
where ever they choosed, and to murder all who stood in their way."137 While the
alleged uprising never occurred, Norﬁr Carolina responded to such rumors with a
variety of legislative measures aimed at preventing conspiracies among slaves as
well as among free blacks. For example, in 1795 ﬁre Legislature barred West
Indian slaves above the age of ﬁfteen ﬁ'om entering the state. 138

The fear of slave insurrections played a large role in forming the Southern
mindset. 139 However, as many scholars of American slavery have demonstrated,
most American fears of large scale insurrections like ﬁrose in Haiti, were
unrealistic. For one thing, with the exception of South Carolina and Mississippi,
most of the American South was predominanﬁy white whereas in Haiti blacks

 

l3‘SEugene Genovese, ' -
MakingnﬂtheModemﬂoﬁd. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979,

¥37983ee Beeth, p. 442.

138Jordan, W p.383.
139See Jordan, me several excellent discussions
concerning the ideology of slavery m the South.

 

75

outnumbered whites and mulattos by approximately seven to one. 14° Also, though
many of the slaves in Haiti tended to have been concentrated in large numbers on
Haitian plantations, most slaveholdings in North America were relatively small
and dispersed. Moreover, ﬁre strict vigilance observed among white Souﬁremers
by means of slave legislation and legal enforcement made large-scale slave
rebellions in America virtually impossible. Indeed, as Genovese put it, ”The
wonder, ﬁren, is not that ﬁre United States had fewer and smaller slave revolts ﬁran
some other cormtries did, but that they had any at all."141

But slave revolts in America did happen - or at least tried to happen. In
1800 Gabriel Prosser, a blackmith in Richmond, Virginia, and his broﬁrer, a slave
preacher named Martin, planned to organize slaves in order to march on Richmond
and kill all the white residents except for the Quakers, Methodists, and ﬁre French
(Prosser was counting on French aid due to the undeclared naval war between ﬁre
United States and France in 1800) living in and arormd ﬁre city. In hoping that his
rebellion would lead to a larger slave revolution in America, Prosser looked to the
Bible; the slave revolution in Haiti; and the American and French Revolutions for
ideological inspiration. “2 The uprising ended before it began on the planned
night of the march due to a storm which washed out many of the roads leading to
Richmond. This set-back caused most of the participants to scatter. The plot was

 

l“"See Genovese, pp. 14-15; Jordan, W p.385.
141Genovese, pp. 49-50. See also R H. Taylor, "Slave Conspiracies m North Carolina,”

Nonhﬁatolinalﬁstoﬁcalmm Vol. 5, (1928), pp. 20-34.

142See Jeﬂ‘rey Crow, "Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conﬂict in North Carolina, 1775 to
1802," Ward; XXXVI], (January, 1980), pp. 79-102. Crow
contends that the American Revolution provided social and ideological conditions
necessary for uniting blacks in collective resistance. He cites one contemporary observer
who noted how at the begimring of the Revolution slaves had ”fought for Mom merely
as a good; now they also claim it as a right (p. 102)."

76
eventually discovered. Both Gabriel and Martin were tried and executed along
wiﬁr several other alleged conspirators.

In 1821 and 1822 Denmark Vesey, a free black carpenter living in
Charleston, along with an Angolan born mystic called Gullah Jack , recruited and
organized urban and rural slaves to arm themselves and attack Charleston. Vesey,
like Prosser, looked to ﬁre Bible for inspiration as well as to ﬁre revolution in
Haiti. He also became aware of the growing antislavery climate in the North
dming ﬁle Missomi debates over the expansion of slavery. Vesey and his
followers were betrayed before their plans could unfold. Many of the plots
leaders, including Vesey himself, were tried and executed.

In 1831 a slave preacher named Nat Turner led the most famous American
slave uprising. Convinced that he had been selected by God to lead his people to
ﬁeedom, Turner led a twelve hour rebellion during which he and about eighty of
his followers moved throughout the countryside of Southampton Cormty, Virginia
killing any and all white people they encountered - primarily women and
children. By ﬁre time the rebellion was ﬁnally suppressed, about sixty white
people had been killed. Truner's insmrection led to an immediate panic
throughout the South. Dozens of innocent blacks were killed upon suspicion of
conspiracy. After managing to escape his pursuers for almost seven weeks, Turner
was captured, tried, and executed. While awaiting his execution, someone asked
Turner if he regretted his actions. Turner responded by asking, ”Was not Christ
cruciﬁed?”

Although none of these attempts at insrnrection even came close to the
racial violence in Haiti where thousands died, they were enough to remind white
Americans that ﬁre image of the docile contented slave described by the
proponents of slavery was just ﬁlat, an image without basis in reality. Still, ﬁre

77

fear of major slave uprisings, while itself not usually ground in reality, remained
an ever present reality in and of itself. ”We can never count with certainty" on the
slaves's ”tranquil submission," admitted one commentator soon after Gabriel's
Rebellion. Upon viewing the condemned conspirators, another observer stated
grimly that "The accused have exhibited a spirit, which, if it becomes general,
must deluge the Southern country in blood.” “3

Whites in North Carolina had always been concerned over the possibility of
slave insurrections in their state. Gabriel's Rebellion and its alleged oﬂ-shoot in
northeastern Norﬁl Carolina and southern Virginia, the so-called ”Easter
Conspiracy” of 1802, turned that concern into genuine paranoia. 14‘ Patrols and
vigilante activity directed violence toward a number of blacks thought to be
involved in conspiring against whites. The Norﬁr Carolina Legislatlu'e amended
the 1741 slave code by denying condemned conspirators the right to clergy. "5
Horrible executions awaited ﬁrose convicted of conspiracy. Hangings, mutilations,
whippings, and even burning persons alive were among ﬁle punishments for
convicted or even suspected conspirators.

The news of Denmark Vesey‘s failed attempt at insurrection in South
Carolina sent shockwaves of fear into Norﬁr Carolina. That Vesey had been free
led many white North Carolinians to view "free persons of color” with a greater

animosity and suspicion than ever before. ”6 Vesey's plot evoked loud outclies of

 

143Quotatioas ﬁom Jordan, W p 395 and Stephen B Oates W
lubﬂeelﬂatlumeﬁaﬂmkebelﬁmmew York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 19.
144Ibid., p. 397. See Douglas R. Egerton,

WWW
WW. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1993.
See Egerton' 8 article entitled” 'Fly across the River': The Easter Slave Conspiracy of

1802, Nonhsaroﬁmmnnncalkmmmpﬁl, 1991), pp. 87-109.
145Taylor, p. 22.
1‘5Ibid., p. 27.

78
racial hatred among Southern whites. As one example, the sharp warning of
Edwin C. Holland, a South Carolina planter, echoed into North Carolina and the
rest of the South:

Let it never be forgotten, that our NEGROES are truly the Jacobins of the
country; that they are the anarchists and ﬁre domestic enemy; the common

enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, IF THEY
COULD, become the DESTROYERS of our race.”147

In spite of the fact that no slave insurrections actually occurred in North
Carolina, rumors of slave conspiracies abounded throughout ﬁre state during the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in the eastern counties

where the largest numbers of slaves and slave-owners lived. 143 According to one

 

147Edwin C. Holland quoted 1n William W. F reehlmg, W
W (New York: Harper & Row,
1965), p. 59. Freehling points to the Vesey plot as a major factor m the development of
the political showdown between South Carolina and the federal government headed by
Andrew Jackson.

148See Bland, p.44. A good example of the disparity in slavery between eastern and
western North Carolina can be discovered by comparing the slave populations of
Perquimans County in eastern North Carolina to that of Guilford County in the western
part of the state. US. Census Reports in 1790 for the two counties show a striking
contrast. Of the 1,096 families living in Guilford County in 1790, only 176 families (16%
of Guilford County families) owned slaves. The slave population in Guilford county was
516 out of a total population of 7,291 (7%). By contrast, in Perquimans County 322
(45% of Perquimans County families) out of 709 families owned slaves. The slave
population in that county numbered 1,878 out of a total population of 5,440 (35%). See
Hugh Talmage Leﬂer, North Carolina History Told by Contemporaries (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1934), p.262 for summary of 1790 census ﬁgures for
North Carolina. In 17 90 the total North Carolina slave population numbered 102,726
slaves out of a total population of 395,005 (25.5%). The numbers of slave owning
families came to a total of 16,310 or about 31% ofNorth Carolina families in 1790. The
most common, and the most plausible, explanation for this disparity is that eastern North
Carolina was populated primarily by families with a much longer history in North Carolina
and therefore a longer history of owning slaves. In contrast, many of the whites living in
western North Carolina in 1790 were descendants of migrants who had moved to North '
Carolina during the mid-eighteenth century (see Part One of this study). Many of these
settlers, including Quaker settlers, had come from Pennsylvania and other northern regions

79
scholar, ”As to insurrections in North Carolina there were none; as to conspiracies,
there were a few; but, as to rumors of conspiracies and insmrections, there were a
multitude."149 Among the rumors provoking white fears were numerous reports
of escaped slaves hiding and conspiring in the Dismal Swamp region along ﬁre
North Carolina/Virginia border. 150 Most of these rumors had litﬁe basis in fact,-
but the fear which they inspired was quite real.

Besides fearing death itself, white Southerners intensely dreaded ﬁle
possibility of black sexual transgressions directed toward white women during a
slave insurrection. A persistent ingredient of most rumored slave uprisings was
the belief that rebelling slaves planned to kill the white men and older white
women while reserving the young white women for themselves. When we take
into account the previous section‘s discussion of Quaker racial segregation, North
Carolina Quakers undoubtedly feared the prospect of their women being raped by
rebellious blacks as ﬁre worst possible scenario of racial amalgamation. In many
ways, Quaker attitudes on the subject of race and sex reﬂected the fear and anxiety
felt by Souﬁlem whites in general.”1

 

to western North Carolina in part because slavery was not widely practiced in that area at
that time. These migrants then did not have strong ties with slavery. It is also important

to note that much of the Quaker antislavery movement came from the Western Quarterly
Meeting in that state. See Gragg, pp. 57-66; and Hilty, p. 22.

Fear of slave revolts in western North Carolina was still widespread. For an
understanding of slavery m that part of the state see John C. Inscoe, "Mountain Masters:
Slaveholding ln Western North Carolina,” WW XCI, (April,
1984), pp. 143 -73.

See also Charles Edward Morris, "Panic and Reprisal: Reaction ln North Carolina
to the Nat Turner Insurrection, 1831, " WWW. LXI], (January
1986), p. 51.
1”Taylor, p. 29.

5°,Genovese p. 68.
151806 Jordan, Wank. pp. 150-54. On the topic on sexuality and slave revolts,
Jordan claims that fears of presumed black sexual aggressiveness played an important part
in white anxiety generated by the fear of slave uprisings. He notes, however, that there

80

The anxiety and fear born of conspiracy rumors led the Southern states to
intensify their laws governing manumissions; the movement of blacks within their
borders; and communications between ﬁee and enslaved blacks. In 183 0, for
example, just one year prior to ﬁre Nat Turner Rebellion, the North Carolina
Legislature passed A Bill to Prevent All Persons from Teaching Slaves to Read or
Write, the Use of Figures Excepted. The law stated that teaching slaves to read
and write had "a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to produce
insurrections and rebellion . . ."152 In 1830 North Carolina slaveholders -
actually, all American slaveholders - had good reason to interfere with slave
literacy. In ﬁrst year, a free black living in Boston named David Walker began
distributing an Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Walker's Appeal
called on all blacks to rebel and overthrow the established order. "When God
Almighty commences his batﬁe on ﬁle continent of America, for ﬁre oppression of
his people," Walker declared, "tyrants will wish they never were born."153 What
made matters worse in the minds of pro-slavery North Carolinians was that
Walker had been born in Wilmington, Norﬁl Carolina. Besides enacting an anti-
literacy law in order to prevent the dissemination of Walker's Appeal and the ideas
it espoused, the Legislature made the smuggling of such inﬂammatory literature
into North Carolina punishable ultimately by death. 15‘ '

 

were in fact no reported incidents of rape committed by slaves during colonial uprisings.
For a more detailed discussion of this problem see Jordan's IunnlhjniSilcnsmSmm
WW (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1993). See especially the chapter entitled ”Of Women White and
Black,” pp. 149-80.

152Reprinted tn Lindley, p. 209-10.

153Quotation ﬁom David Walker‘s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens ofthe World, (New
York: Amor Press & N. Y. Times, 1969 (originally published m Boston, 1829), p.58.
154See Shay, pp 379-380.

81

Fear of slave uprisings in North Carolina inl830 turned to outright panic in
1831 when Nat Turner and his ill fated rebels struck. As soon as news about
Turner reached Norﬁr Carolina, ﬁre norﬁreastem counties went into a frenzy.
White citizens immediately gaﬁrered weapons to put down ﬁre rebellion in case it
spread to their area. ”In North Carolina the terror and fear inspired were not less
than at the site of ﬁre disturbance," wrote historian Stephen Weeks. ”The state
militia was called out. In the more eastern counties drafts were made to. go into
the Dismal Swamp to hunt the fugitives, and by ﬁre end of the week ﬁrere were
enough men under arms . . . to have killed every negro in Southampton in an
hour."155

Rumors spread rapidly throughout North Carolina that numerous other plots
were in the making. ”Confessions" from suspected conspirators were usually
extracted with torture. For example, in September 1831, soon after the Turner
Revolt, rumors spread of a slave plot to burn Wilmington, North Carolina and ﬁren
march on the state capitol at Raleigh ”spreading destruction and murder on their
way. " 156 Although the rumored plot never materialized, ﬁre fear created by the
rumors caused hysteria among whites anticipating honible events. One witness
reported in his diary that when he arrived at a white garrison, ”there were 120
women packed in a small dwelling half dead with fear . . . A few men too I noticed
with tremulous voices, & solemn visages, pacing back and forth in fearful

 

l”Stephen Weeks, "The Slave Insurrection 1n Virginia, 1831," originally printed m Ill:

AmeﬁcanMagazineanmelicanHistoryOune, 1891), pp. 448-458. Reprinted inHenly
Irving Tragle, ed ,IheSnuthamptnlLSlaveRertohnﬂﬁllnAﬁomnﬂanonnLSautce
Material. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), pp. 358-368. Quotation on
p.366. See also Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion, (New York: Humanities
Press, 1966).

156Natiom1 Intelligencer, September 19, 1831. Reprinted article in Erie Foner, ed., Nat
Iumer, (Englewood Cliﬁ‘s, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1971), pp. 62-3.

82

anxiety. " The residents of ﬁre area seemed genuinely surprised ﬁlat their throats
had not been cut during the night. Several blacks were ultimately arrested and
charged with conspiracy then beaten into "confessing” ﬁreir involvement. Those
convicted were summarily slain, "their heads . . . sticking on poles in diﬁ‘erent
parts of town.” Many North Carolinians believed ﬁrat there had been as many
executions of "intended insurrectionists in NC. as were destroyed for ﬁreir
violence in Va.”157

That plots like the one just described were largely the products of North
Carolinian panic instead of facts becomes clear when one reads portions of a letter
written from Montfort Stokes, the Governor of North Carolina, to the Governor of
South Carolina, James Hamilton. Stokes wrote the letter a few monﬁrs after
another "plot” had been discovered:

In the South Eastern counties . . . about ten or twelve negroes have
been convicted for conspiracy to raise an insurrection, and most of them
have been executed. I have no doubt, but ﬁre news of the Virginia
insurrection prompted ﬁre resﬁess and unruly among the slaves, in a few
instances, to make similar attempts in this state (Norﬁr Carolina); but
nothing like a concerted or extensive plan has been discovered; and I am

aﬁaid, that among the negroes condemned and executed, some, who were
innocent, have suffered (emphasis mine). 15"

Stokes, however, did not hold that North Carolina was free of danger.
On the contrary, he insisted that the state increase its military strength in order to

”guard against these evils, which in all probability will continue!”9 Eventually,
the panic created in the wake of Nat Turner's Revolt subsided, but the sense of fear

 

l”Moses Ashley Curtis, Personal Dimy, 1830-36, (Moses Ashley Curtis Papers:
Southern Historical Collection). Portions reprinted in Butler, pp. 208-9.

158Governor Montfort Stokes to Governor James Hamilton. Reprinted in Forrer, pp. 64-
65.

159See Stephen B. Oates, W p. 123.

83

it created among white North Carolinians toward blacks, slave and free, did not.
Legislation governing activities of free blacks as well as slaves increased along
with an increased sense of militancy among ﬁle white population. 150 Many whites
agreed that blacks needed to be ”convinced that they must and will be soon
destroyed if their conduct makes it the least necessary."161 Norﬁr Carolinians,
white and black, lived in a climate of violence, militancy, and fear.

WNW

Based on what we have seen already, there can be litﬁe doubt that the fear
of slave revolts in North Carolina created a powerful structural stress capable of
motivating to Quakers to emigrate. The question remains, of course, as to whether
or not fears of slave insurrections did motivate Quakers to leave North Carolina.
As mentioned earlier, due to the small nlnnber of explicit statements of
motivation, it is usually necessary to search for clues based on the context and
timing of Quaker movements. Up to this point we have had to rely mostly on
circumstantial evidence in order to draw conclusions concerning the relationship
between slave revolts and the Great Migration. Yet beyond circumstantial
evidence, Quaker writings occasionally do provide important clues as to what
motivated participation in ﬁre Great Migration. Some examples of these clues can
be formd in a letter written on February 16, 1808 by a Norﬁr Carolina Quaker
named Joel Judkins to another Quaker, Isaac Parker:

 

160For example, besides placing severe restrictions on slave preachers and the teaching of
slaves to read, in 1835 the state legislature formally removed the right of any and all free
blacks to vote.

161Quotation in Oates, p. 121.

84
freined (sic) Isaac,

I received thy letter some time past which informed me of thy continuance
of mind to see the Ohio once more . . . My intention is to go ﬁris spring &
and I expect that Carolus will go with us. I wants thee to take his money
along with thee so he may get it when we meet to buy land in ﬁre new
country. The Indiana seems to bear the greatat name amongst us at
present. Jonathon Lindley has been out there and has left money in the
hands of the governor who has purchased a large body of land for his who
is going as soon as he can settle his busyness. Zachariah Dicks is going to
move there this spring and ﬁiends are ﬂocking there fast at which the
governor is much pleased with a prospect of ﬁiends settling about him --
they say that it is ﬁre most convenient for trade of any part of the western
world as the Wasbash on which ﬁrese lands are situate runs into ﬁre Ohio
quite below ﬁre falls and produce ﬁsh in great ablmdance, & is not so

intensley cold as higher up and I think it would do us no harm to day it at

least. Carolus and I are both warm for it. I want thee to come by and we
will explore the country . . . (emphasis mine)”2

At ﬁrst glance, the letter above appears to mention only non-slavery related
issues concerning Judkins's desire to live in Indiana. Due to ﬁre lack of any
mention of slavery, one might ﬁnd it impossible to draw the conclusion that fear of
slave revolts in North Carolina - or for that matter, slavery in general - was a
motivation to migrate for Judkins or others like him. However, that Judkins
speciﬁcally referred to Zachariah Dicks in connection wiﬁr Quakers ﬂocking to
Indiana is an important clue for recognizing the presence of fear as a strong
motivation for Quaker migration.

Zachariah Dicks spent much of his life working as a Quaker antislavery
leader in North Carolina He eventually became concerned about the bloody slave
insurrections in Haiti (San Domingo) during the 17908. Fearful that ﬁre violence

 

162Joel Judkins to Isaac Parker, 16th day Second month,l808, Josiah Parker Family
Papers, (Richmond, Indiana: Earlharrr College Archives).

85
of those insurrections would extend to the United States, Dicks traveled widely
throughout ﬁre Carolinas and Georgia, warning Quakers of the potential dangers.
Dicks ”was thought to have the gift of prophecy," claimed one observer. ”The
massacres of San Domingo were then ﬂesh. He warned them (Quakers) to come
out of slavery. He told them that if they did not their fate would be that of the
slaughtered islanders. This produced a sort of panic and removals to Ohio

commenced."163
Dicks's most famous warning to Southern Quakers came in 1803 at Bush
River Monﬁrly Meeting in South Carolina.164 ”0 Bush River! Bush River!" Dicks

reportedly cried. ”How hath thy beauty faded. Gloom and darkness have eclipsed
the day." The effects of Dick's warning on Bush River were dramatic indeed.
Following the warnings given by Dicks, Quakerisrn in Bush River virtually ceased
to exist due to a rapid widespread migration to the Norﬁrwest. According to Rufus
Jones, "The Friends in many instances sold their farms for halftheir value, loaded
their indispensable goods on wagons, and started for the Canaan beyond the
mountains. " ‘65
The experience described above offers an excellent example of how ﬁre fear
of slave insurrections motivated Quakers to move to the Northwest. Bush River
was admittedly an exceptional case in that entire Quaker communities did not
normally move all at once, but ﬁle incident does demonstrate the potential power
which fear had in motivating Quakers to emigrate. Fear srurounded ﬁre Quakers
in North Carolina and acted upon them. While some Quakers may have felt

 

163Quotation in Weeks, p. 266.

164Bush River Monthly Meeting operated under the authority of the North Carolina
Yearly Meeting.

16~"See Jones, LE2, vol. I, p.409.

86
assured that they would be protected in the event of a large-scale slave uprising,
many others believed that they too were potential victims - in physical, social,
and religious ways. Rather ﬁran risk those dangers, many Quakers left North
Carolina to begin life again ﬁre Northwest.

CONCLUSION

Dming the eighteenth and nineteenﬁr centluies the Society of Friends in North
Carolina was confronted with a number of problems antiﬁretical to Quakerisrn.
Many, if not most, of ﬁrose problems extended from the effects of slavery,
particularly from the dangers involved with slave revolts. It is difﬁcult -
impossible, really - for those of us living in the United States at the end of the
twentieth century to comprehend life within a slave society like ﬁre one which
operated in North Carolina. For this reason, it is tempting for the historian to view
the motivations for the Great Migration in concepts and terms more readily
comprehensible to his or her contemporary modes of thinking. This is, of course,
one of the great dangers of doing history: robbing the past of its pastness.

If we succumb to that temptation, the Great Migration of Quakers ﬁ'om
North Carolina to ﬁre Norﬁrwest might be seen simply as an economic mechanism
pushing and pulling people from one place to another. There were admittedly
strong economic reasons for leaving the South and moving to Ohio and Indiana.
To this way of thinking, slavery acted upon the Quaker migrants as but one more
component of a larger economic order. The problems related to slavery, while
possibly inﬂuential, would be seen as ancillary to broader economic motives for
Quaker migration.

Economic explanations of the Quaker migration ﬁ'om North Carolina
can be, and often are, made. However, a primarily economic approach fails to
take into account the nature of North Carolinian society preceding and during ﬁre
time of the Great Migration. North Carolina, like the rest of the South, was not

87

88
a society that just happened to have slaves as part of its labor force. North
Carolina was a slave society. Slavery in North Carolina inﬂuenced or effected
virtually every aspect of life for whites and blacks. From an economic standpoint,
the slave system did not merely operate as an outgrowth of the economic system
but was instead ﬁre basis for and, in many ways, the point of the economic system.
To argue that economic issues took precedent over slavery related issues in
motivating Quakers to migrate is to demonstrate a serious misunderstanding of the
larger context surrounding the Society of Friends in Norﬁr Carolina. '

But while slavery formed ﬁre structural basis for life in North Carolina, we
need to remember that slavery as an institution had a structure. As Part Two of
this study demonstrated, slavery in North Carolina was held togeﬁrer, protected,
and encouraged by a system of militancy and violence which developed largely
out of the fear of slave revolts. Furthermore, Quaker racial prejudices intensiﬁed
the fear and anxiety felt by individual members of the Society of Friends. Along
with the individual, social, and institutional contexts related to slavery in general,
there is much to support the argument for a direct relationship between Quaker
fears of slave revolts and the migration, especially given ﬁle fact ﬁrst the largest
numbers of Quakers left North Carolina soon after ﬁre slave revolts in Haiti and
during the same period of time as the Prosser, Vesey, and Turner rebellions.
Consequently, slavery as a motivation for North Carolina Quaker emigration
cannot be rmderstood without recognizing fear as its primary component.

When migration opportunities in Ohio and Indiana oﬂ‘ered realistic and
beneﬁcial solutions to problems related to slave insurrections, Quakers left Norﬁr
Carolina. It needs to be emphasized again that the Great Migration involved
additional elements of an actual migratory process. The stresses which created a
desire to leave, along wiﬁr the offerings of a place to go, were important parts of a

89
larger chain nrigration process. A shift in Quaker social control along with the
strong inﬂuence of interpersonal relationships and commrmications between
people at the places of origin and destination also operated as necessary parts of
the overall process as well. The Great Migration was ﬁre culmination of all of
these elements working simultaneously.

Quaker fears stemming from problems related to slave revolts reﬂected
many problems particular to the Society of Friends, but they also reﬂected larger
problems in American society concerning race, slavery, and the meaning of
freedom. Those problems were addressed in diﬂerent ways. The United States at
large took a route that culminated in a terrible civil war. The vast majority of
Quakers in Norﬁr Carolina sought a peaceful solution to their problems related to
slavery. Analyzing ﬁre effects of slave revolts on the emigration of Norﬁl
Carolina Quakers can help us to gain a better rmderstanding of how at least some
Americans chose to respond to those problems which divided and, unfortlmately,

in many ways continue to divide America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PrimSnumes
Butler, Lindley S. and Watson, Alan D., eds.

,IheNnnhLatdexmmAn
Interpretirteandmcumentatrtﬁim (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1982)

Cofﬁn, Levi. Reminiscencesoflmdﬂoﬁn. (Cincinnati, 1876)
Foner, Eric, ed., Natlumer, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1971)

Frost, J. Wllliam., ed., WWW (Norwood, Pa: 1980)

Hoover, David. - ' . -
(Richmond, Ind: James El,der Publisher, 1857)

Leﬂer, Hugh Talmage, ed, WWW
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, third edition, 1956)

 

Parker Family Papers, (Richmond, Ind: Earlham College Archives)

Starobin, Robert 8., ed., WWW
(Englewood Cliﬂ‘s, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1970)

State Records of North Carolina, Walter Clark, ed.,
(Greensboro, NC: Nash Brothers, 1904-05)

Tragle, Henry Irving, ed. ,IheSnmhamptonSIayeRemltnﬂlﬁlLAﬁnmpilationnf
SnutseMatetiaL.(Amher8t: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971)

Walker, David. An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,
(New York: Arno Press & NY. Times, 1969. (originally published in 1829))

Woolman, John. IheiournatandMaionassavsoanhnnlnclman.
Phillip P. Moulton, ed, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)

91
SesandanLSaummﬁslesndLms

Akerman, Sune. ”Towards an Understanding of Ernigrational Processes, Human

WWW William H McNeill and Ruth S. Adams, eds,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 287-305.

Allen, Jeﬂ‘rey Brooke. ”The Racial Thought of White North Carolina Opponents of
Slavery, 1789-1876, WWW LD(, (January, 1982),
pp. 49-66.

Aptheker, Herbert. ”The Quakers and Negro Slavery,” Ihelnumalﬂiﬂmlﬁm
(1940), XXV, pp. 336-38.

Brown, E. Leonard. ”Nineteenth Century Quaker Migration to the Frontier," Claiming

 

Gaskins Printing, 1992), pp. 1-8.

Cadbury, Henry J. ”Negro Membership in the Society of Friends," lnumamﬂﬂesm
Him XXI, (January, 1936), pp. 151-213.

Censer, Jane Turner. ”Southwestern Migration among North Carolina Planter Families:

'The Disposition to Emigrate'” Ihalnnmalnfﬁnuthemﬂm LVII,
(August, 1991), pp. 407-427.

Crow, Jeffrey J. ”Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conﬂict in North Carolina, 1775 to
1802,” MlliamandManLQnanetly, XXXVII, (January, 1980), pp. 79-102.

Egerton, Douglas R. "'Fly across the River’: The Easter Slave Conspiracy of 1802, "
NonhCamlinaHistaricalReyient, (April. 1991) PP 37-109

Finkelman, Paul. "The Centrality of the Peculiar Institution in American Legal

Development," W College of Law, Illinois Institute of
Technology, (Summer, 1993), v. 68, pp. 1009-1033.

”Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,”
loumalnftheEaﬂxRenuth 9, (Spring, 1989), pp.21-51.

"Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: a Study in Ambiguity,”
WW6, (\Vlnter, 1986), pp. 343-370.

Frost, J. William. ”The Origins of the Quaker Crusade Against Slavery: a Review of
Recent Literature," QuakeLHismtx. (Spring, 1978), pp. 42-58.

92

Hudson, John C. "North American Origins of Middlewestern Frontier Populations,"
AnnalsoftheAssociationnLAmericanﬂengtaphers. 78, (1988), pp 395-418.

Inscoe, John C. "Mountain Masters: Slaveholding in Western North Carolina,”
NatthﬂatolinaHistoricalRertieru, XCI, (April, 1984), pp. 143-73.

MacDonald, John S. and Leatrice D. "Chain Migration, Ethnic Neighborhood Formation,
and Social Networks, MilbankMemoﬁaiEundﬂuattetlx. 42, (1964), pp. 82-97.

Marable, Manning. "Death of the Quaker Slave Trade," kaeLHismrx.
(Spring, 1974), pp. 17-33.

Morris, Charles Edward. ”Panic and Reprisal: Reaction in North Carolina to the Nat

Turner Insurrection, 1831, ”WWLH,
(January, 1986), pp 29-52

Opper, Peter Kent. "North Carolina Quakers: Reluctant Slaveholders," Nnnhﬁamlma
WM], (January, 1975), pp. 38-58.

Parramore, Thomas C. "Aborted Takeoﬁ‘: A Critique of "Fly across the River”, "
Nonhﬁatolinaﬂistoncalliertiew. (April, 1991),pp. 111- 124.

Rose, Gregory S. "Upland Southerners: The County Origins of Southern Migrants to

Indiana by 1850, ItldianaMagazinentrIinmsz, (September, 1986), pp 242-
63

Shuval, Judith. ”The Role of Ideology as a Predisposing Frame of Reference for
Immigrants" Hrtmankelaﬁmm (Febnrary, 1959), pp. 51-61.

Taylor, R. H. "Slave Conspiracies in North Carolina," Ngnh Carolina Histon'cal Raiders:
5, (1928), pp. 20-34.

Tilly, Charles. ”Migration in Modern European History,” HumanMstatiQnLEattemsﬁ.
Belicia... William H. McNeil] and Ruth S. Adams, eds, (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1978), pp. 48-68.

Troeltsch, Ernest. "Sect-Type and Church-Type Contrasted,”
WWW Louis Schneider, ed,
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1964), pp. 457-465.

93

W

Aptheker, Herbert. AmeﬁcanNemSlayeRemlts, (New York, 1943)
Natlumeﬂnﬁlartakehellinn, (New York: Humanities Press, 1966)
Barbour, Hugh and Frost, J. William. IhaQuakets. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988)

Bassett, John Spencer. WW
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1896)

SI . l S [H l C l'
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1898)

 

WWW (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 197 l)

Beeth, Howard. Outside Agitators in Southern History: The Society of Friends, 1656-
1800. PhD. thesis, University of Houston, 1984.

Bland, Linda Adams. Guilford County Quakers and Slavery in North Carolim,
M. A. Thesis, Wake Forest University, 1968.

Blassingame, John W. W
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)

Brown, E. Leonard. Quaker Migration to 'Miami Country," I 798 - 1861,
Ph.D. thesis, Michigan State University, 1974.

Buys, John. Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century,
PhD. thesis, University of Florida, 1973.

Crow, Jeffrey J. AHlstorrtanﬁicanAmenmslnNnnhCamlina,
(Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1992)

IhaBlackExnenencemRexolunonanLNorthﬂamlma
(Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 197 7)

Davis, David Brion. WWW;
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975)

 

m (Glendale, California: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1977)

94

Drake. Thomas E. kaeraandSlaminAmelica
(New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1950)

Edmunds, R. David. IheShamllmphet
(Lincoln, Neb: University of Nebraska Press, 1983)

Egerton, Douglas R. WWW
1892,(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)

Elliot. 517011 T. QuakersnnheAmerimnﬂontier
(Richmond, Ind: Friends United Press, 1969)

Freehling, William W W
CamimaJﬁlﬁ-Jm (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)

Frost,.JW1lliam. '1' : ‘ : ' ' '
EnendS.(New York: St. Martin'sPress, 1973)

 

 

Genovese, Eugene.

WM (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1979)

Gragg, Larry Dale. Migration in early America: the Virginia Quaker Experience,
PhD. thesis, University of Missouri, 1982.

 

Hilty, Hiram H. ’1 . - -
(Richmond, 1nd,: Friends United Press, 1984)

 

Jacobs, Wilbur ~ ~ ' - ' ' ' ' '
antier, (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1985 (originally published in 1972))

 

James, SydneyV. .-. -. . :-
America, (Cambridge: Harvard University Pre88,1963)

 

Jones, Rufus M. Ihalatcrﬂerindaofﬂuakerim.
Volumes I & 11, (London: MacMillarr and Co., 1921)

I] n I . I a . c1 .
(New York: Russell 8: Russell, 1962 (originally published in 1911))

95

Jordan, Winthrop D. W
SlarteLonspimmt. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993)

 

 

Jospehy, Alvin. - ° ' . ' ' ' .:
(New York: Penguin Books, 1976 (originally published in 1961)).

Ketr'ing, Ruth Anna. ChaﬁesﬁsbominjheAnﬁzﬂaxentMoxemem.
(Columbus: The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 193 7)

 

Yancy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)

Marietta. Jack D. IheRefonniuionanmericanQuakerimJJAlislm
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984)

McKiever, Charles Fitzgerald.
(Murfreesboro, NC: Johnson Publishing Company, 1970)

 

W (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993)

Michael Kay, Marvin L. and Cary, Lorin Lee. W
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)

Moch, LesliePage. u . . - ' ' '
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)

 

Oates, Stephen B. Iheﬁmsnfhlbilesmﬂumeﬂsﬁetcekehellion
(New York: Harper & Row, 1976)

Russell, Elbert. Warn, (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1942)

Shay, John Michael. The Antislavery Movement in North Carolina,
PhD. thesis, Princeton University, 1970.

Soderlund, Jean R ankersulaxenLADntidedSpint.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985)

Tolles, Frederick E. Meenngﬂmueandﬁounnngﬂouse.
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948)

96

Turner, Frederick Jackson. IhaEmntieLinAmerinanHismty,
(Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 1986 (originally published in

1920))

Weeks, Stephen B. SonthemﬂuakersandﬁlaxeryASmdxmlnstmlnonalHlsmry.
(New York: Bergman Publishers, 1968. ,(originally published in 1896))

White, Richard. WWW
W11. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Wood, Peter H. = z. . .
thmughjheﬂmkehellmn. (New York. W. W. Norton and Company, 1974)

Zelinsky, Wilbur. IheLulnlralﬁeographLofthejlnitﬂStates,
(Englewood Cliﬂ‘s, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973)

 

Zilversmit, Arthur.
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967)

HICHIGRN STQTE UNIV. LIBRQRIES
lll11111111|Willlllllllllll11111111111
31293015948114