From New Eng­land Friends, a very impres­sive research find­ings of the NEYM Quak­er Indi­an Board­ing School Research Group (PDF). The main doc­u­ment is 17 pages but with foot­notes and maps and sources it stretch­es out to 62 pages. It’s going to take me awhile to go through this since it’s quite packed but this pas­sage real­ly stands out:

Friends of that era, the vocal ones at least, were unapolo­getic assim­i­la­tion­ists even as they wrote to Con­gress to protest the bru­tal and unjust removals of Native Peo­ple, the vio­la­tion of treaties, and the greed and duplic­i­ty of White set­tlers and politicians.

One of the things we looked for and have not yet found are the voic­es of Friends who advo­cat­ed that Indi­an Peo­ples should be allowed to live accord­ing to their val­ues and tra­di­tions. What dis­agree­ments we came across were over how best to pur­sue assim­i­la­tion (and the implic­it cul­tur­al era­sure). In Samuel Tay­lor’s con­clu­sion to the 1856 report for the NEYM Com­mit­tee on the West­ern Indi­an (CWI), assim­i­la­tion “may be the only alter­na­tive left and the one most like­ly to save them from utter extin­guish­ment,” we hear a fore­shad­ow­ing of Richard Hen­ry Prat­t’s infa­mous descrip­tion of his task at the Carlisle School, to “kill the Indi­an in him, to save the man.”

Nineteenth-century Quak­er atti­tudes toward Natives Peo­ples is trag­ic, yes, but also just so per­plex­ing. There are moments of great sym­pa­thy and kind­ness in the records — help with need­ed food and sup­plies, assis­tance when nego­ti­at­ing treaties — but also what I can only describe as a clue­less­ness about the need to main­tain Native tra­di­tions and autonomy. 

Also I hope we’re learn­ing more about the “no about us with­out us” les­son in this. There are some Native-majority Quak­er meet­ings and even a Native-majority year­ly meet­ing and I’ve not seen them includ­ed in these re-evaluations of the rela­tion­ship between Quak­ers and Native Peo­ples. These reli­gious bod­ies are the result of mis­sion­ary work and are often appre­cia­tive of at least some of the teach­ings of nineteenth-century Friends. These Friends are solid­ly Chris­t­ian, as are the major­i­ty of Native Amer­i­cans today. This should­n’t sur­prise any­one: Jesus’s mes­sage has often been tak­en up by the oppressed, who have embraced and lived into its rad­i­cal mes­sage of lib­er­a­tion. I’ve heard some anti-Christian mes­sages in dis­cus­sions around Quaker/Native his­to­ry and while I under­stand the impulse to ques­tion all aspects of the colo­nial lega­cy, I don’t think majority-White reli­gious bod­ies should be going about denounc­ing the spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of most mod­ern Native Peo­ples. This indeed is a big part of what got us here in the first place. (Eden Grace wrote a sto­ry that touch­es on sim­i­lar com­plex­i­ties among African Friends).

We need to be able to hold the com­plex­i­ties, ironies, and nuances and find a way to con­tin­ue to lis­ten to those who inter­pret cul­tur­al his­to­ries dif­fer­ent­ly. I’m glad we have the work of the New Eng­land Year­ly Meet­ing group to give us spe­cif­ic his­to­ries so that we might under­stand ongo­ing cul­tur­al ele­ments of all this.

Over on Friends Jour­nal, the Fox-at-400 issue’s arti­cle with the most reads is the one with the bold­est title: Johan­na Jack­son and Naveed Moeed’s “George Fox Was a Racist.” There’s not much to argue here and none of it is new or sur­pris­ing: in 1671, the founder of Quak­erism trav­eled to the birth­place of British colo­nial chat­tel slav­ery and spent three months at slave labor camps run by extend­ed fam­i­ly mem­bers and did­n’t denounce it in any kind of clear way. These basic facts have been well known for 300-plus years.

The Quak­er his­to­ri­an Jer­ry Frost has writ­ten that in some ways Fox was pro­gres­sive for the time. He used Old Tes­ta­ment analo­gies of jubilee to call for the free­ing of enslaved peo­ple after an unspec­i­fied num­ber of years. If enact­ed on a wide­spread basis, this would have trans­formed slav­ery in the Amer­i­can British colonies. Slav­ery would have become an espe­cial­ly bru­tal form of inden­tured servi­tude — the kid­nap­pings in Africa and dead­ly trips across the Atlantic would have con­tin­ued but it would not have been a life sen­tence and it might not have become a gen­er­a­tional bur­den. Frost writes:

[My] the­sis is that an omis­sion in Fox’s epis­tles, jour­nals, ser­mons, and man­i­festos – of which the most famous is the Bar­ba­dos dec­la­ra­tion of faith – made the con­dem­na­tion of slav­ery as an insti­tu­tion more dif­fi­cult. Because Fox nev­er addressed the moral­i­ty of slav­ery per se, his writ­ings on slav­ery could be used by con­ser­v­a­tive slave-owning Friends in Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing in 1701 to silence the abolitionists.

It was­n’t so hard for oth­er Quak­ers to see the hor­ror. William Edmund­son was a com­pan­ion of Fox’s dur­ing the Bar­ba­dos trip and by 1675 was speak­ing out against slav­ery. The Ger­man­town Protest against slav­ery hap­pened in 1688. Fox lived until 1691 and must have heard about some of this. Just two years lat­er, a break-away group of Friends led by a for­mer trav­el­ing com­pan­ion of Fox became the first body to minute oppo­si­tion to slav­ery. (See Frost’s arti­cle for all this.)

So why did­n’t George Fox address the moral­i­ty of slav­ery? The only thing that makes sense to me is that he was afraid. Fox became more pro­tec­tive of the Quak­er move­ment over time and he made choic­es that reflect­ed con­cerns for its sur­vival. I’ve come to think of the famous dec­la­ra­tion of 1660 to Charles II (the basis for our peace tes­ti­mo­ny) as some­thing of a reac­tionary doc­u­ment: a promise not to threat­en the crown or its finan­cial or mil­i­tary inter­ests in exchange for being left alone. Fox was­n’t a dum­my and I have to assume that a decade lat­er, sit­ting in Bar­ba­dos, he could see the mas­sive injus­tice of the slav­ery on the island. His son-in-law’s plan­ta­tion had some­thing like 700 enslaved Africans, if mem­o­ry serves, and it was far from the largest. But Quak­ers were already treat­ed with sus­pi­cion and it’s pret­ty clear read­ing the denun­ci­a­tions that if they had direct­ly chal­lenged slav­ery on Bar­ba­dos they would have been crushed — first there, and prob­a­bly every­where (read Katharine Gerb­n­er’s 2019 FJ arti­cle Slav­ery in the Quak­er World for more on the sit­u­a­tion on Barbados).

There were a lot of dis­si­dent reli­gious move­ments in Eng­land at the time and the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends was the only one to make it out of the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry with­out implod­ing or being crushed. Is this an excuse for Fox’s silence? No, not real­ly. I think the Spir­it of Christ is strong enough to over­come defeats like this. It’s hard to imag­ine Charles II giv­ing a land grant to William Penn if the Quak­ers were speak­ing out against slav­ery. Most of the mem­bers of the wealthy class of Bar­ba­di­an Friends would have prob­a­bly jumped ship. Oth­er aris­to­crat­ic Quak­ers, like Penn, would have had sec­ond thoughts about their par­tic­i­pa­tion if anti­slav­ery were part of the plat­form from the begin­ning. But here’s the thing: even if Friends were all but wiped out, their stand would have laid the seeds for lat­er rad­i­cal spir­i­tu­al communities.

As far as I’m con­cerned, Fox clear­ly made the wrong choice, big time. But it is sober­ing to won­der about an alt-history in which a more embold­ened Fox trig­gered a series of events that led to the death of the Quak­er move­ment. What if we were just anoth­er Wikipedia arti­cle about an obscure, short-lived, and long-forgotten rad­i­cal sect?

But think too of the what if’s if Quak­erism had been sup­pressed and Penn­syl­va­nia nev­er found­ed. Maybe the anti­slav­ery Quak­er min­is­ter George Kei­th would have stayed with rem­nant Friends instead of doing a reverse Road-to-Damascus to denounce us. With­out Penn­syl­va­nia, maybe the Mora­vians in Geor­gia (who influ­enced young John Wes­ley!) would have picked up thou­sands of Quak­er refugees. A gen­er­a­tion lat­er, Lon­don’s Fet­ter Lane Soci­ety was already a who’s-who of inter­est­ing seventeenth-century reli­gious rad­i­cals, with the Wes­ley broth­ers, Peter Boehler, Count von Zinzen­dorf, Emanuel Swe­den­borg and fam­i­ly of William Blake all in the same room. Just imag­ine adding dis­placed Friends like Samuel Bow­nas, Ben­jamin Lay, John Wool­man, John Bar­tram, and Antho­ny Benezet in that hot­house, with every one of them debat­ing George Fox’s stand against empire and mar­tyr­dom fifty years before. The Inward Light tran­scends all world­ly empires.

I’d love to hear oth­er reac­tions. There’s the com­ment sec­tion on Johan­na and Naveed’s arti­cle, a live­ly Red­dit dis­cus­sion, and of course the com­ments here on my blog. Jer­ry Frost’s arti­cle is worth a re-read too, being a par­tic­u­lar­ly informed per­spec­tive on Fox cir­ca 1991. His­to­ries are often reflec­tions of the times they were writ­ten as much as they are a recita­tion of days gone by and these arti­cles are no exception.

Post updat­ed 7/17 with some what-ifs.