Anti-Slavery and Anti-Abolitionist?

An 1842 Critique of Baltimore's Quakers Points to the City's Troubled Middle Ground

A follower recently shared an interesting document: Published in 1842, it was a tract titled “Review of “An Address” Respecting Slavery, Issued by the Yearly Meeting of Friends, held at Lombard Street, Baltimore, 11th Month, 1842.”¹ In it, Philadelphia Abolitionist and Quaker Thomas Earle condemns the Baltimore Yearly Meeting for its unwillingness to support the objectives set out by abolition activists, especially those that aimed to immediately end slavery by political means.

As Earle put it: “The address is a substantial testimony against anti-slavery.” He wrote as one deeply committed to ending slavery by political means, someone who advocated that Congress should act unequivocally to end human bondage. In 1840, Earle ran alongside James Birney as the Liberty Party’s vice-presidential candidate. The Party rejected colonization and gradual emancipation schemes and instead advocated that the U.S. Constitution was an anti-slavery document and urged lawmakers to use it as such.²

Regarding the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of November 1842, Earle viewed the address read there as a “testimony intended to prevent the society of Friends from becoming odious to the sinners about them—a testimony calculated to preserve the popularity of the society with the politicians, the wealthy, the powerful, the unjust and the oppressor.” Some Quakers in Maryland, Earle thus charged, carefully distanced themselves from abolitionism to avoid the disapproval of slaveholders and their supporters.

Our follower asked how we might begin interpreting this document. To start, we recommended reading the original address issued by the Yearly Meeting in November 1842. Fortunately, we found it published in the December 10, 1842 issue of Niles’ National Register, published out of Baltimore under the title “Views of the Society of Friends with Regard to Slavery.” There we find evidence of distinct sort of “anti-slavery” position, one that advocated rejecting slavery as a matter of religious conscience, but discouraged affiliation with organizations that advocated the compulsory abolition of slavery.

How can we understand the distance between these two positions? Historian Ryan P. Jordan is the most recent historian to answer this question in his book Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820-1865.³ Jordan explains how Quakers in the United States increasingly distanced their communities from abolitionism as the movement took a more radical, immediatist turn and looked to political means for ending slavery. For Quakers, their commitments to religious liberty and to pacifism kept many from supporting the politics of the abolitionist movement, Jordan explains. And in a state like Maryland, this often aligned Quakers with colonizationists, slaveholders and pro-slavery advocates.

Hezekiah Niles’ paper suggests that the 1842 dust-up over aboltionism was a long-standing question among Baltimore’s Quakers. In November 1840, it reprinted a letter from Quaker P.E. Thomas, best remembered as a president of the B&O Railroad, to Maryland Congressmember W. Cost Johnson. It it, Thomas foreshadows the position taken in the 1842 Yearly Meeting address: Quakers should maintain their religious antislavery sentiments while remaining “unconnected with the excitement now so generally prevailing in our land.” That “excitement” was abolitionism. Thomas explained this position dated back to 1835. Quakers, in his view, best served as an example to others by giving “liberty to slaves,” but “the society of Friends … cannot be correctly charged with getting up the present excitement on the subject of abolition.”⁴

Thanks to our follower for sharing this fascinating document and opening a window onto how Baltimore’s Quakers kept a distance from the politics of abolitionism. We know that the Friends’ Monthly Meeting of Baltimore for the Western District disowned Mr. Hopkins along with his brother Mahlon for “trading in distilled spiritous liquors & refusing to relinquish the same” on December 8, 1825. There is nothing that suggests Mr. Hopkins took part in the later debates of the 1830s and 1840s over abolitionism. Still, we are eager to learn more about the world in which he held enslaved people and how others around him regarded the abolitionist movement for which people such as Thomas Earle advocated so strongly.

— MSJ

1. We apologize for our inability to post the entirety of Earle’s tract here. We hope some of our readers, through their libraries, will be able to read the pamphlet in full.

2. For more on the Liberty Party, see most recently Reinhard O. Johnson, The Liberty Party, 1840-1848: Antislavery Third-Party Politics in the United States (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021).

3. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

4. P.E. Thomas to W. Cost Johnson, February 25, 1840. “Speech of Mr. W.C. Johnson, of MD. on the Subject of the Rejection of Petitions for the Abolition of Slavery” (continued), Niles’ National Register, November 21, 1840.