Quoting the Past: Sarah Harrison

The authors and I disagree on the meaning of the Sarah Harrison quotation. There is, however, a much larger question. Why does the lead quotation on this web page begins with the supposed pro-slavery attitudes of Quakers in 1788, when the official position of Quakers at that time was that slavery was offensive to God and that Quakers who did not follow the long term advice of their meetings and free their captives should be disowned? When Sarah Harrison made her statement in 1788, she was visiting Charleston, South Carolina, where the local meeting was under the care of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Here are extracts of what Philadelphia Yearly Meeting told its members in 1754:

“To live in ease and plenty by the toil of those whom violence and cruelty have put in our power is neither consistent with Christianity nor common justice, and we have good reason to believe draws down the displeasure of Heaven”¦

“Let us make their cause our own, and consider what we should think and how we should feel, we were in their circumstances”¦”

While this did fall short of an absolute prohibition of slavery among Friends, it ended with the following:

“Finally, brethren, we entreat you in the bowels of the Gospel love, seriously to weigh the cause of detaining them in bondage. If it be for your private gain, or any other motive for their own good, it is much to be feared than the love of God, and the influence of the Holy Spirit, is not the prevailing principle in you, and that your hearts are not sufficiently redeemed from the world”¦”

The enslavement of Africans was, according to Quakers, a “shameful practice” and an “enormous national evil.” Freedom was the “just right” of the enslaved. In 1774, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting further required that those Friends who would not heed the frequently repeated advices the meeting and the persistent visits by committees of Friends, and could not be “brought to such a sense of their injustice, as to do every thing which the monthly meeting shall judge to be reasonable and necessary for the restoring of such slave to his or her natural and just right to liberty, and condemn their deviation from the law of righteousness and equity, to the satisfaction of the said meeting, that such member or members be testified against as other transgressors are by the rules of our discipline for other immoral, unjust or reproachful conduct.”

This is not the voice of someone crying in the wilderness for Quakers to reform, this is the voice of the leading Yearly Meeting in North America speaking on behalf of the Religious Society of Friends.

So what is the story? From the quotation, readers could be expected to take away the impression that in 1788 “Quakers” questioned the wisdom of emancipation. Really? In fact, any Quaker that did so was going against the established position of all the Yearly Meetings in North America, and was, as far as Quakers were concerned, a “transgressor” guilty of immoral, unjust and reproachful conduct.

There is a mythology of the “good Quaker” heroically opposed to slavery. The problem with mythologies is not always that they are wrong, but that they are over simplified. Getting free of slavery, doing right to those who were formerly enslaved was and is a difficult business. Not every Quaker was a John Woolman or a Lucretia Mott.

Perhaps the authors are attempting to correct this mythology by pointing to examples of Quakers behaving badly. In this, they continue in the tradition of Quaker historians Henry Cadbury, Thomas Drake and Larry Gara, among others. However, it is too easy to read the message that “Quakers were not as wonderful as some (often non-Quakers) suggest” as “Quakers were no different than anyone else.” This, I think, is the impression left in beginning the “Fit for Freedom” discussion with the (in my judgment wrongly understood) quotation from Harrison about supposed Quaker resistance in 1788 to the liberation of the enslaved. Quakers were in fact corporately and individually, very different from the other denominations in the United States in regard to slavery. As imperfect as Quakers sometimes could be, the words of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting Discipline on slavery””

“As a religious society, we have found it to be our indispensable duty, to declare to the world our belief in the repugnancy of slavery to the Christian religion. It therefore remains our continued concern to prohibit our members from holding in bondage our fellow men.”

I take the position that this and other similar statements clearly represent the position of the Religious Society of Friends on the issue of slavery and emancipation in the 1780s. That some Friends dissented from the stated position of Friends on this and other issues does not negate that the weight of the Religious Society of Friends in 1788 was solidly behind the abolition of slavery nor the fact that in this position they were virtually alone among the churches of those times.

In response to the comment from Christopher Densmore on the our insertion of the word “Quakers” in brackets (instead of the original “people”) in the quote from Sarah Harrison on the home page of the website:

While Chris’s comments refer primarily to Sarah Harrison’s journal (in Friends Miscellany XI, March 1838), our decision to use “Quakers” rests primarily on Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of Members of the Religious Society of Friends. On page 354 of her biography is the report that her meeting liberated her to attend “all the meetings of Friends in Virginia” and other points south. This book can be seen in its entirety on Google Books.  Look for the chapter “Sarah Harrison,” of course.

In Chris’ opinion, Sarah used the word “people” because she was speaking of southerners in general. However, we found it reasonable that her words described not just her thoughts about people who were not Quaker in Charleston, where she spent a few weeks, but rather the people””namely Friends””and her experiences with them in her year of travels among Friends. The year before she had been at Virginia Yearly Meeting and during her year in the South, she attended North Carolina Yearly Meeting. There is further reference to her “religious labor” in Virginia on page 356.

In Southern Quakers and Slavery, historian Stephen Weeks writes

The work of Friends was also strengthened by the visit of Sarah Harrison to the southern meetings. She and her party visited many slaveholders. They wrote manumissions which numerous masters were induced to sign, and she gave, no doubt, a strong forward impulse to the emancipation movement.

This would suggest laboring with Friends was a””if not the””major purpose of her work. We also find evidence to believe that she is referring to Friends in these points:

• While Sarah may well have spoken to non-Quakers, the emphasis for Quaker traveling ministers was not on trying to convince southerners, but Quaker southerners.
• She spent most of her year in the South going house-to-house visiting slaveholding Friends in the company of two other Quaker companions.
• We believe she was not writing of southerners in general because she said “all we have conversed with agree that it is not right to hold their fellow creatures in bondage.” It’s hard to believe that in the 1780s “all southerners” she talked with would agree that slaveholding was wrong (not all Friends agreed””that’s why she was there). Rather southerners were busy defending slavery as the right order of things beneficial to the enslaved. Their talk was not of letting them go, whether or not they were fit for freedom; southern Friends who supported emancipation were called “an unreasonable and turbulent sort of people.”
• Although yearly meetings were banning enslavement by 1788, they still had to labor with Friends who were reluctant to follow that discipline. In North Carolina, where manumission was illegal, most weren’t freed until at least 20 years later.
• Weeks also wrote that after the Revolution “the burthen [burden] of every Friend who visited the south is always the same””slavery.”

For those who might wonder about the success of Sarah’s visitations with Friends, the report in Sketches is that “many individuals... bore a righteous testimony against slaveholding by manumitting all their slaves.” Sketches also says her “much religious labor” with slaveholders brought “unexpected success.”

In the end, none of us can know precisely what Sarah Harrison meant, but we believe there is good evidence to suggest that she was referring to Quakers.

Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye

Co-authors, Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship.

Quotation from Sarah Harrison does NOT refer to Quakers.

The quotation from Sarah Harrison, a traveling Friend, reporting that some people she spoke with as saying that those in bondage were not "fit for freedom" is misunderstood as reporting Quaker thought.

Sarah Harrison is NOT REFERRING TO QUAKERS but to the inhabitants of Carleston, South Carolina, generally. There was a very small Quaker presence in Carleston-- Harrison says "a few young men and There were, according to Harrison's journal, only a few Quakers in Charleston. Harrison's comments clearly refer to her four weeks of holding meetings in Charleston among the general population of the city.

Whatever Charleston Quakers may or may not have thought of slavery, they were part of a Yearly Meeting (Philadelphia until 1788, North Carolina afterwards) that held that no Quaker should hold another human being in slavery. Christopher Densmore Friends Historical Library