"A Great and Good People"

Midwestern Quakers and the Struggle Against Slavery

Thomas D. Hamm, April Beckman, Marissa Florio, Kirsti Giles, and Marie Hopper

In the writing of American history, Quakers have occupied a place out of proportion to their relatively small numbers. Probably the most important reason for this conspicuous presence is the group's pioneering work against slavery. Nearly every history of the antislavery movement affirms the Quakers' precedence, both in Europe and America, in recognizing the evil of human bondage and in speaking out against it. Typical is the verdict of Louis Filler, whose work set the standard for a generation: "Although there were always individual voices opposing slavery, the first group to take a stand on slavery had been the Quakers." Filler's evaluation was echoed by Merton Dillon, who writes that Quakers "alone grasped the dimensions of the problem." David Brion Davis, in his magisterial The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, reaches the same conclusion: "[W]hen all allowances are made for cultural trends and climates of opinion, one must ultimately come down to the men who precipitated change." The precipitators, in his view, were disproportionately Friends.1	1
Fugitives Arriving at Levi Coffin's Indiana Farm, a Busy Station of the Underground Railroad, no date, artist unknown. (Copy of The Underground Railroad, by Charles T. Webber, 1893.) Courtesy Cincinnati Museum of Art
Opposing slavery was one thing; envisioning the place of free people of color in American society was quite another. Here we find more diversity of opinion among historians. Many Quaker historians have focused on benevolence and support for legal equality, a view some non-Friends reflected. Emma Lou Thornbrough, for example, gives extensive attention to Quaker work in Indiana on behalf of free blacks and highlights the relative enlightenment of Friends amidst the state's pervasive racism.2	2
Other historians, however, have reached different conclusions about Quaker racial attitudes. Anyone approaching the subject must confront the slow acceptance of black members in the faith, a topic exhaustively treated by Henry J. Cadbury in 1936. More recently, Jean Soderlund argued in Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit that the Quaker approach to slavery and African Americans generally was "gradualist, segregationist, and paternalistic," and that it "set the tone for the white antislavery movement in America" before 1833. A recent article by Ryan Jordan makes a similar argument, as does a new work by Stephen Vincent on African Americans in Indiana.3	3
Most of this work has focused on the East, especially Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley. Our study moves the focus westward, to the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends (both a regional unit and an annual convention), formed in 1821, and its offshoot bodies. This focus is appropriate for several reasons. By 1850, the Indiana Yearly Meeting (Orthodox), the largest yearly meeting of Friends in the world, stretched from central Ohio to Iowa. In short, before the Civil War, with the exception of badly fractured Quaker groups in eastern Ohio, the Indiana Yearly Meetingwas midwestern Quakerism.	. . .