Quakers and Abolition ed. by Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank (review)

Abstract

Quakers and Abolition. Edited by Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Pp. 246. Cloth, $45.00.)Reviewed by Jane E. CalvertQuakers have long been acknowledged as an important part of abolitionist movement. But outside specialist circles, as editors of this important new volume explain, the Quakers' involvement in debates over slavery is underappreciated (5). So is complexity of their often-fraught relationship with abolitionism. Outsiders are often shocked that Quakers themselves owned slaves, held racist views, and were, at times, bitterly divided over abolition. This collection takes a broad approach to remedying these misunderstandings, with fourteen brief essays on a variety of topics related to Quakers and abolition in both American and trans-Atlantic contexts. With its rich offerings and accessible prose, this collection is bound to spark lively conversations among scholars and in classrooms alike.The collection is divided into three sections: The first deals with periods of agreement and disagreement among Friends on their anti-slavery stance; second treats race relations within Quaker meetings; and third explores Quakers' influence and public perception of their activity. This brief review can only highlight a few of work's many compelling aspects.As J. William Frost notes, only between 1760s and 1820s did Quakers agree about their collective stance on slavery (29). A powerful early impulse to refoim first oneself and then world is represented by Joshua Evans, as described by Ellen M. Ross, and Anthony Benezet, as described by Maurice Jackson. Thomas Hamm's illuminating essay unravels complexities of antebellum Quakers' ambivalence to abolitionism, and explains why Friends ultimately withdrew from veiy movement they founded. It had become tainted, some believed, by mercenary enthusiasm of evangelical preachers, more interested in lining their own pockets than saving souls. Especially here we see clearly tragic irony of Quaker abolitionism: eighteenth-century Quakers founded abolitionism to purify themselves; later Quakers withdrew from abolitionism to remain pure.Yet many Quakers did continue in abolitionism. When some individuals found that their reformist impulses could not be fulfilled within confines of meetings that had retreated from cause, they left or adapted. Amy Kirby Post, for example, found that to embrace fully Quaker teachings by which she had been raised, she had to forsake her meeting of 20 years (73). As Nancy Hewitt explains, Post founded a new meeting that was devoted to social causes that had historically defined Quakerism. In their essays, Christopher Densmore and James Emmet Ryan document ordinary Quakers' approaches to abolition and interactions between them and African Americans. One such relationship is also highlighted in Andrew Deimer's examination of Moses Shepherd's and Samuel Ford McGill's joint efforts at African colonization.Across Atlantic, British Quakers as a group were going strong, side-by-side with evangelicals and other fellow-travelers, such as Thomas Clarkson, about whom there are two essays, one by James Walvin and other by Emma Lapsansky-Wamer and Dee Andrews. Amia Vaughan Kett shows how British Quakers found creative ways to reconcile their participation in new capitalist economy with their abolitionism. Women especially used power of purse to make statements, as when they bought free-labor textiles. Kett argues that for Quakers resisting slavery, using free produce was sacralized as fonn of Christian worship, reminding us that for Friends, even mundane actions were imbued with religious puipose (68). …