Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich

kind treatment alone was inadequate to address the fundamental evil that permeated the whole institution of slavery in all its ramifications.
    The Quaker campaign against slavery was part of a broader spiritual reformation that was gathering force within the sect, calling upon members to return to a life of deeper simplicity, which also entailed educating their children apart from non-Quakers, avoiding marriage with outsiders, and shunning such “vain customs of the world” as music, theater, and art. In explaining their hostility to slavery, Quakers most often cited the Golden Rule, a potent principle that everyone in the intensely Christian nation could easily understand. More subtly, their opposition to slavery was rooted in their belief that a universal “divine light” was manifest in the soul of every person, female and male, black and white, and that to claim ownership of another human being was not only a moral but a spiritual travesty. In addition, slavery represented an inexcusable indulgence, a contradiction to the kind of plain life that was required by their faith.
    Countless Quakers, including Isaac Hopper, were influenced by the widely quoted writings of John Woolman of New Jersey, who in the 1750s argued that emancipation of the slave was crucial to personal salvation. How, Woolman demanded, could a slaveholding Friend expect to gain salvation when he bore the sin of slavery on his soul? “The Colour of a Man avails nothing, in Matters of Right and Equity,” he wrote. “ Negroes are our fellow Creatures, and their present Condition amongst us requires our serious Consideration. We know not the Time when those Scales, in which Mountains are weighed, may turn…And whenever gain is preferred to Equity…there is real Cause for Sorrow to all such, whose Love of Mankind stands on a true Principle.” The dawning recognition that slavery might entail real spiritual consequences provoked crisis for many, as it did for Samuel Nottingham, a Quaker who, as a result of marriage, was horrified to find himself the owner of hundreds of slaves, a spiritual and practical catastrophe that left him feeling “pierced through with very many sorrows.”
    Around the same time, Quakers began to press for the religious education of slaves, a cause championed most prominently by another Philadelphian, a French Huguenot convert to Quakerism named Anthony Benezet, who around 1750 began tutoring adult blacks at his home onChestnut Street. Benezet envisioned the eventual and complete integration of black and white Americans, but the prospect of sudden, mass emancipation was more than he—and for that matter almost any other white man of his time—could handle. “How would such a people be prevented from becoming a prey to their ignorance and passions, and a sad annoyance to their neighbors?” he worried. For Benezet, education was the answer. In the course of twenty years of teaching, Benezet helped convert Benjamin Franklin and others to abolitionism, by demonstrating that his students were capable of the same level of achievement as whites, thus undermining popular assumptions about black intellectual inferiority. Far ahead of his time, he also taught his black students that it was slavery rather than any inherent racial differences that bred ignorance and degradation among African Americans. The capstone of his life was the establishment, in 1773, of a school for free black and slave children, of which Isaac Hopper would later, in 1799, become an overseer.
    As the century progressed, there was much preaching on the subject of slavery wherever Quakers gathered. In the 1770s, slaveholding was made a “disownable offense” by the Yearly Meetings of Philadelphia, New England, and New York. Other meetings soon followed suit. In eastern North Carolina, members who still held slaves were warned to “ be earnestly and affectionately advised to clear their hands of them as