Cultivating Inner and Outer Plantations: Property, Industry, and Slavery in Early Quaker Migration to the New World

Abstract

For American Quakers during the seventeenth century, a careful moral calculus permeated the Society's negotiations between their twin goals of spiritual reflection and economic sustenance—balancing one's metaphorical plantations, both "inner" and "outer." In Barbados, where the Society of Friends had attracted a large following by the 1660s, slaveholding and plantation culture were facts of life that dominated efforts to implement universalist ideals without threatening social control. Many leading West Indian Quakers embraced a paternalistic evangelization campaign to the enslaved in an effort to ease the consciences of individual masters, to create a consensus among the Society's members, and to help Friends in the colonies build up a stock of "moral capital" to be used against their non-Quaker peers. Although some Friends experimented with the idea that particular enslaved individuals could redeem themselves through "moral" behavior or industriousness, the process of legal racialization virtually negated the concept of free will, the heart of non-Calvinist Protestant conversion. In following the migratory patterns of wealthy Barbadian Friends to the North American Middle Colonies, this article demonstrates the depth of their influence in promoting African slavery and quelling critiques of the institution.