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.
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