...This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It first discusses the origins of the Quaker antislavery movement and how the Quaker response to the problem of slavery was deeply affected by their shared religious tenets, formal structures, disciplinary procedures...

...This chapter examines the correspondence between Samuel McGill, a black emigrant to Liberia, and Moses Sheppard, a white Quaker supporter of the American Colonization Society (ACS). It casts light on the vexed role of the ACS in abolitionist thought of the 1850s, as well as on Quaker notions...

...This chapter asks how an ordinary Quaker not involved in the abolition campaign might have considered the matter of slavery and answers this by reading the memoir of Charles Pancoast, A Quaker Forty-Niner: The Adventures of Charles Edward Pancoast on the American Frontier. Pancoast...

...This introductory chapter considers the complicated history of Quaker interracial activism. It specifically looks at the complex relationship between the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and race, charting both the successes and shortcomings of the organization's activist work. The story...

...This chapter presents an analysis of Amy Kirby Post, an antislavery Quaker who quit her meeting in the mid-1840s to pursue “worldly” efforts to end slavery. It seeks to explore what led an individual whose Quaker coworshippers already accepted the wrongs of slavery to seek nonetheless a different...

...This chapter assesses the Quaker impact on the early British anti-slave trade campaign and, in particular, the influence Quaker writings and networks had on the early career of Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson pioneered the abolitionists' research into the slave trade and the slave ships. It was his...

...This chapter presents a reading of Thomas Clarkson's “Quaker Trilogy”— comprising A Portraiture of Quakerism, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, and The Memoirs of the Private and Public Life...

...This chapter examines the eighteenth-century Quaker reform Joshua Evans. Evans was an important voice in Quaker antislavery, Indian rights advocacy, and American peace history. He was a critic of the developing capitalist economy. He perceived that people were increasingly implicated...

...This chapter considers the question of why, after the Quakers began directly addressing the problem of slavery in the 1670s, there was only one period, between 1758 and 1827, during which they achieved any kind of consensus among themselves on the issue. The answer lies in changes within Quakerism...

... controversial teachings helped fracture American Quakerism in the 1820s. In the 1840s, White was the most controversial, polarizing figure in Hicksite Quakerism. He felt it his duty to use his unquestioned talents to warn Friends, in the most forceful terms, against participating in antislavery, temperance...

...This chapter demonstrates the ways in which dress can be used as a powerful interpretative tool in understanding how the Quaker family, and especially women, engaged with antislavery activism in the 1850s. It discusses how dressing in free-labor cotton clothes embedded antislavery consumption...

...This book examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. The chapters show Quaker's beliefs to be far from monolithic. They often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about the morality of slaveholding...