Alnwick Quakers

Quakers and Anti- Slavery

Initially, some Quakers held slaves, and a prominent

Quaker company supplied munitions for navy vessels

and forged shackles which bound African slaves in

boats out of the slave rich ports of Liverpool and Bristol.

However, other Quakers, were the pioneers of the antislavery

movement, its brains, and much of the soul too.

The movement forged most of the techniques still used

by campaigners today.

Quaker campaigners were there at the beginning:

They had a century of experience campaigning for their own rights, and channelled this expertise into defending the rights of slaves

They pioneered the mass petition:

Long before Wilberforce first spoke on the issue, the Quakers had formed a campaigning group, petitioned Parliament and distributed tens of thousands of free tracts.

They wrote articles, leaflets and tracts:

The Quaker Anthony Benezet published a formative attack on the slave trade in 1772, 17 years before Wilberforce’s first abolition motion.

They dug up evidence:

The evidence and testimonies that the passionate young ordinand Thomas Clarkson collected for them all round the country were essential to the cause.

They published other people’s articles:

When the first Anglicans got involved - the philanthropist Granville Sharp,

the rector James Ramsay and Thomas Clarkson - it was the Quakers who

published their literature and brought them together.

They worked with others:

The Abolition Committee, the engine of the movement, consisted of 12

men, nine of them Quakers. Anglicans like Wilberforce brought to the

movement both respectability and political power, which Quakers were

prevented from enjoying at that time.

ey invented modern campaigning:

The committee invented the campaign slogan and logo,

commissioning Wedgwood to produce a design of a

slave in chains with the words “Am I not a man and

a brother?”

They mastered the use of images and logos:

The use of the engraving of the Liverpool slave ship, the Brookes,

became the defining image of the battle to end the slave trade. A cross

section of the ship showing 482 slaves lying shoulder to shoulder, made

“an instantaneous impression of horror on all who saw it”, according to

Clarkson. The committee’s publication of the Brookes diagram was

a great PR coup.

Quakers pioneered and championed the consumer

boycott:

They targeted Caribbean sugar.

They took radical positions:

Some of the most radical anti-slavery voices were Quakers - such as

Elizabeth Heyrick, who argued, exceptionally, that when the slaves were

freed it was they and not their owners who should be compensated.

They encouraged famous artists

of the day to work with Quakers:

The poet William Cowper wrote a civil rights ballad.

They used the network of meeting houses:

The national network of Quaker meeting houses proved vital to mobilising

the public and spreading information.

And they were abused ..

And people thought they were not heard - ‘The Quakers keep writing

their letters and no one listens...’

Information from an article on the BBC website by Stephen Tomkins,

author of ‘William Wilberforce, a biography’