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Friends of Humanity: A Quaker Anti-Slavery Influence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Miles Mark Fisher
Miles Mark Fisher
Affiliation:
Durham, North Carolina
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Extract

The humanitarianism of the eighteenth century gave added impulse to the members of the Society of Friends to practice the gospel of love for all mankind. Since at first “they were in derision called Quakers,” it is most likely that all of their interests were sneered at. Nevertheless, they influenced other denominations by their anti-slavery appeals and popularized the idea of a “society” for humanitarian purposes as they gave full meaning to the words friends and humanity. The English Quakers were called “Friends of Thieves” because they worked for prison reform in London, and the American Quakers appear to be the first persons who were known as “Friends of Humanity” primarily because they opposed Negro slavery vehemently.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , September 1935 , pp. 187 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1935

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References

1 Jorns, Auguste, The Quakers as Pioneers in Social Work, New York, 1931, p. 185.Google Scholar

2 The Epistle from the Yearly Meeting, London, 1770, 1778–1782, 1784–1798 (The Library of Congress).Google Scholar

3 Sherman, James, Life of William Allen, Philadelphia, 1847, I, p. 87.Google Scholar

4 The facts of this story are given in a pamphlet authorized by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting—A Brief Statement of the Rise and Progress of the Testimony of the Seligious Society of Friends against Slavery and the Slave Trade, Philadelphia, 1843Google Scholar; see also, Bowden, James, The History of the Society of Friends in America, London, 1850–1854, II. rjp. 171–221Google Scholar, and Thomas, Allen Clapp, “The Attitude of the Society of Friends toward Slavery in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Papers of the American Society of Church History, VIII, pp. 264–277.Google Scholar

5 Just as the Quakers held yearly meetings which were dated by the numerical day and month, so did these Baptists later hold them, their Philadelphia Association being organized at the “yearly meeting” of 1707. Likewise the Association originally included groups in Philadelphia and New Jersey. Moreover the “Circular Letter” of the American. Baptists seems a counterpart of the Quaker “Epistle.” The early American Baptist associations, undoubtedly following the Philadelphia Association, had questions from the churches and later from individuals for the associations to answer, but before the American Baptist associations had been organized, in the seventeenth century, Fox had proposed that meetings of the Society of Friends meditate upon queries. See Minutes of the Philadelphia Association, 1707–1807.Google Scholar

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11 Op. cit., p. 355, and yet he himself had recorded (p. 128) that at Gloucester, Virginia, in the bounds of the Dover Association the pastor was “Wm. Lemon, a man of color: he, though not white, as to his natural complexion, had been washed in the laver of regeneration: he had been purified and made white, in a better sense.” Lemon represented his church in the Dover Association periodically from 1797 to 1803. Minutes of the Dover Baptist Association, 1797–1804.Google Scholar

12 At that time in New England Lemuel Haynes, A. M. (Middlebury, 1805)Google Scholar was the Negro pastor of white Congregational churches, as Edward Mitchell, A. B. (Dartmouth, 1828) later worked among the Baptists. In the far South Joseph Willis was not only a Negro pastor of a white church but also the organizer and moderator of the Louisiana Baptist Association. At Fayetteville, North Carolina, Henry Evans organized the Methodist Church (1802) of which he continued pastor when it became a white church, not to mention Black Harry (Hosier) who itinerated and preached with Bishop Asbury and other Methodist leaders. The Episcopalians and the Presbyterians sought to train Negroes for service among their own people. Yet John Chavis, said to have been graduated from what is now Washington and Lee University and to have attended Prince ton, went preaching to white churches in North Carolina throughout the first quarter of the nineteenth century but finally gave himself to teaching white boys and girls.

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