Warner Mifflin by Nash Gary B.;

Author:Nash, Gary B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2017-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 14. Title page of Mifflin, Serious Expostulation with the Members of the House of Representatives, 1793. Quaker printers such as Isaac Collins in Burlington and Trenton and Joseph Crukshank and Daniel Lawrence in Philadelphia were vitally important in publishing Quaker antislavery essays, memorials, and addresses to the public. Courtesy Library Company of Philadelphia.

Mifflin began by reminding his hoped-for readership that the “harmony of the union” that his antagonists claimed he was disturbing was far from harmonious and could never be so while the stain of slavery disfigured the newborn republic. From there, he put on display excerpts from the Continental Congress’s 1774 promise to halt the slave trade; the “Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms” of July 1775, where Congress proclaimed that “the Divine Author of our existence” never “intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and unbounded power over others”; the Declaration of Independence with its ringing clauses about inalienable rights; and other Congressional statements that pronounced “the great principle (of government) is and ever will remain in force, that men are by nature free.” As for his public pronouncements, they were no more fanatical than the Continental Congress’s defense of American liberties: “If this is fanaticism, enthusiasm, &c., may the Almighty grant a double portion to what I ever experienced, if it be his holy will.”39

Calling slavery a “national iniquity” and “a national guilt,” Mifflin reminded the House that “[I] plead the cause of injured innocence” and “open my mouth for my oppressed brethren, who cannot open theirs for themselves.” Hardly a day passed when he did not encounter accounts “of the inhumanity perpetrated in these states on this race of men.” How could he not speak out, as “the Prophet did when he was ordered to cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins?” They would be arraigned at the judgment seat, he assured them, for God would not forgive “such degradation” visited on those with nothing more offensive than “the natural black skin of the body.”

Mifflin had little reason to believe that his Expostulation would move Congress or the president toward substantive action. Rather, his quarry was the public at large. In this strategy to reach a national audience, where a militant moral confrontation was at the heart of the matter, he knew he was in this endeavor for the long run. That thought must have been in his mind just three weeks after the publication of Expostulation, when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, a crushing defeat for Quaker abolitionists. Strengthening the hand of bounty hunters roaming the North to capture and reenslave escaped Africans—and seizing free blacks in the process—the act ramped up the slave-catching industry and discouraged those intending to make their break for freedom. For Mifflin, the only solace was the belief that the law would not go unnoticed from above, where a watchful God would smite the Americans for defiling their founding principles.

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