"We came here this morning from Sandy Spring, which is upwards of twenty miles distant. Got in timely so as to attend their meeting which began at the tenth hour. Crossed the river Potomac on our way. We got on horseback about break of day, and not being very well I thought I felt the most fatigued before I got in, I was ever sensible of before. When I came to the meeting, a poor little one it was, and wherein I had to suffer silence through the meeting for worship, but in their Preparative which followed, I found my way open in a measure to ease my mind."
CHAPTER XI.
The Slavery Question.
John Woolman was the mouth-piece of the best Quaker conscience of the eighteenth century on the slavery question. For twenty-five years before his death, in 1772, he was pleading with the tenderness of a woman that his beloved religious society should clear itself from complicity with the system which held human beings in bondage. His mantel apparently fell on Warner Mifflin, a young man residing in Kent county, Delaware, near the little hamlet of Camden. In 1775 Mifflin manumitted his slaves, and was followed by like conduct on the part of his father, Daniel Mifflin, a resident of Accomac County, in Virginia.
Warner Mifflin is said to have been the first man in America to voluntarily give freedom to his bondmen, and to make restitution to such of them as were past twenty-one, for the unrequited service which they had rendered him. Be that as it may, from 1775, until his death in 1799, Warner Mifflin, with tireless zeal labored with Friends personally, and with meetings in their official capacity, to drive the last remnant of slavery from the Quaker fold. His efforts appeared in various monthly meeting minutes throughout Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and he was not backward in laying his concern before the Yearly Meeting itself. In 1783, on the initiative of Mifflin, the Yearly Meeting for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Western Parts of Maryland and Virginia, memorialized the infant United States Congress in regard to slavery. The document was a striking one for the time, was signed in person by 535 Friends, and was presented to the Congress by a strong committee headed by Warner Mifflin.
These efforts at internal deliverance from connection and complicity with slavery produced speedy results, and before the close of the century not a Quaker slave holder remained in the Society, unless in some obscure cases that continued "under care." Having cleared its own skirts of slavery, the members of the Society became divided into two classes—the one anxious that the Quaker conscience should make its appeal to the general conscience for the entire abolition of the "great iniquity." The other class, satisfied with their own sinlessness in this particular, wished the Society to remain passive, and in no way mix with a public agitation of the mooted question. These two opposing views distracted the Society down to the very verge of the final issue in the slaveholders' rebellion.