Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit - Paperback

by Jean R. Soderlund (Author)

is book explores the growth of abolitionism among Quakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey from 1688 to 1780, providing a case study of how groups change their moral attitudes. Dr. Soderlund details the long battle fought by reformers like gentle John Woolman and eccentric Benjamin Lay. The eighteenth-century Quaker humanitarians succeeded only after they diluted their goals to attract wider support, establishing a gradualistic, paternalistic, and segregationist model for the later antislavery movement.

Originally published in 1985.

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Back Jacket

"Quakers and Slavery is an impressive monograph, a carefully argued and unpretentious study that provides the best analysis yet available of the origins, character, and limits of antislavery sentiment for any segment of the slave society of eighteenth-century colonial British America. This is a work of genuine excellence."--Jack P. Greene, The Johns Hopkins University