Friends of Slavery: Barbadian Quakers and the Spiritual Plantation Family, 1655-1719

Caitlin McGeever

Advisor: Randolph Scully, PhD, Department of History and Art History

Committee Members: Cynthia Kierner, John Turner

Horizon Hall, #3223
November 19, 2024, 01:30 PM to 03:30 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation examines the relationship between Quakers and slavery through familial structures in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Atlantic. When Friends Ann Austin and Mary Fisher introduced Quakerism to Barbados in 1655, the development of the Society of Friends coincided and intersected with the development of slave societies in the Caribbean; Barbadian Friends did not challenge established norms of a slave society with their religious practices, but rather contributed to the creation of a slave society as they created their religious society. As Quakerism rapidly spread throughout the Atlantic, one foundational framework persisted: the family. By investigating how family structures were proposed, viewed, and practiced, this project expands the narrative that Quakers were involved in slavery to understand how they were involved in slavery. Printed tracts, letters, meeting minutes, court records, government papers, censuses, maps, and archaeological findings provide insight into how Quakers on Barbados constructed a proto-paternalistic practice of the faith to include and impose upon enslaved familial structures, subsuming them under white familial and spiritual authority. I propose that three types of family structures existed upon a Quaker plantation – the biological white enslaver family and their spiritual kin; enslaved Black families, both of biological and fictive kinship; and the overarching theological family as instructed to include the white Friends, their servants, and enslaved individuals. This became the spiritual plantation family, intrinsically linking slavery and familial salvation. I examine how these familial structures existed individually and interacted with each other within the framework of Quakerism to posit how a Quaker plantation theologically operated in the Caribbean and then was transplanted to Carolina and Pennsylvania. With the colonization of Carolina, the spiritual plantation family system became the legacy of Barbadian Quakers in North America; and when Friends transplanted their spiritual families to Pennsylvania, they taught the system to other Quaker migrants. Friends who served in their Meeting and on the colonial Assemblies felt that Quakerism and slavery were so intertwined within the family that any disruption to the slave trade risked the salvation of Friends in the entire colony, and therefore they avoided antislavery notions. Quaker abolitionism was not inevitable. By expanding geographical bounds and implementing a family history lens, this dissertation provides a new understanding of the history of Quakers and slavery.