The Dilemma of Quaker Anti-Slavery: The Case of Farmington Quarterly Meeting, 1836-1860

Abstract

In 1839, English Quaker and noted abolitionist Joseph John Gumey visited Farmington, New York, during his two-year tour ofNorth America. He later wrote that he knew no in America where the anti-slavery cause was more vigorously maintained, by Friends and others (Gurney 309). Thomas Drake's Quakers and Slavery in America also identified the Farmington region as a stronghold of anti-slavery feeling (150-51). Individual Quakers were well represented in the anti-slavery movement and other reforms in the burned-over district ofNew York State. Friends were anti-slavery lecturers, agents for the Liberator and National AntiSlavery Standard, and hosts of anti-slavery gatherings. Nancy Hewitt's Women's Activism and Social Change (1984) documents extensive involvement by Hicksite and Progressive Friends in the network of ultraist women in the abolitionist and women's rights movements in western New York. Two-thirds to three-fourths of leadership of the ultraist and women's rights organizations in the Rochester area between 1842 and 1 860 are identified by Hewitt as present or former Quakers (27 1 , Table 1 7). Yet in the early 1 840s, Quakers were being criticized in the anti-slavery press for opposing abolitionists. Eliab W. Capron of Williamson, New York, an anti-slavery lecturer and a member of Farmington Monthly Meeting, publicly resigned from the Society of Friends in a letter published in the March 15, 1844, issue of the Liberator. Capron charged that the Society of Friends stood directly in the way of efforts now being made to liberate three millions of our brethren , who are now being held in bondage as chattel slaves (7b the Monthly Meeting). Why were New York Friends, whose Discipline prohibited slave ownership or any involvement in the slave trade, and cautioned its members to avoid any act by which the right of slavery is acknowledged (NYYM, Discipline 49-50) being criticized by abolitionists? To attempt to understand the seeming contradiction between the antislavery professions of the Society of Friends and the criticisms published in the abolitionist press, I will present an evaluation of the institutional response of Farmington Quarterly Meeting to slavery in the twenty years before the Civil War.