Black Resistance to Quaker Enslavement: Jim Fussell

A Quaker author chat. Jim Fussell’s article, “Black Resistance to Quaker Enslavement,” appears in the August 2025 issue of Friends Journal.

In this conversation, Martin Kelley speaks with Jim Fussell about the complex history of Quaker involvement in enslavement and the resistance that emerged from both enslaved individuals and the Quaker community. They explore the historical context of Quaker enslavement, the shifts in attitudes among Quakers, and the various forms of resistance employed by enslaved people. Through stories of defiance, including acts of arson and escape, they highlight the significant yet often overlooked contributions of Black voices in the fight against enslavement. The discussion culminates in reflections on the path to abolition and the relevance of these historical narratives in today’s context.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Quaker Enslavement
01:32 The Shift in Quaker Perspectives on Slavery
01:57 Black Resistance to Quaker Enslavement
06:14 Stories of Resistance: Confrontation, Escape, and Arson
19:01 The Impact of Resistance on Quaker Abolitionism

Bio

Jim Fussell is a scholar in residence at Earlham School of Religion and a longtime member of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. He is a descendent of both Quaker enslavers and Quaker abolitionists.

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Transcript

Martin Kelley

Hi, I’m Martin Kelley with Friends Journal and we have another author chat here. I’m joined today by Jim Fussell. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Fussell

Welcome friends. Welcome Martin.

Martin Kelley

Jim Fussell is a scholar in residence at the Earlham School of Religion and a longtime member of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. He is descendant of both Quaker enslavers and Quaker abolitionists. And he has an article in the August issue, “Black Resistance to Quaker Enslavement.” Tell us Jim, I don’t know if everyone knows about Quaker slavery. How did that get started?

Jim Fussell

Well, some of the first generation of convinced friends in the 1650s and in the subsequent decades were in fact enslavers, especially in Barbados and Virginia and Maryland. These are not Quakers who immigrated to Pennsylvania and then became enslavers, so I’m sure that happened, but people whose entanglement with human bondage began prior to becoming Quakers or adjacent to it. And I would also say that in the English speaking North Atlantic, enslavement as an institution was only just forming legally in terms of colonial laws.

in the same period as early Quakers, so in the 1660s and 1670s especially, along with the concept of Whiteness rather than that of Africans and Englishmen. But Whiteness and Blackness as not just descriptive words but as human categories were really forming in the 1670s.

My article in the current Friends Journal takes place 10 to 12 decades later. And it’s questioning how Quakers ended enslavement by Quaker enslavers.

Martin Kelley

Tell us how that started shifting among Quakers and obviously Black Resistance to Quaker Enslavement is the title, so tell us about some of that resistance and some of the shifts that started happening among friends.

Jim Fussell

Well, for many years, friends have liked to honor the prophetic early voices of, like the Germantown Declaration of 1688 or Benjamin Lay and later Anthony Benezet and John Woolman and seen them as forerunners of Quaker abolition.

That narrative of individual Quaker conscience that eventually is heard by the whole of the Quaker community, that’s been our go-to narrative. And in that, that’s tended to be centered on the Delaware River Valley in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

My first reframe as I entered this research was looking at the Chesapeake Bay region. And that’s where there were many more enslaved people, including larger populations of captive Africans and descendants of captive Africans owned by— the claim that were presumed to be owned by —Quakers. And so, for example, in the estimated populations in Pennsylvania in 1780, it’s around two and a half percent people of African descent, whereas in Virginia, it was around 40 percent. So the context is quite different. And that’s what first drew me to this area. I was looking at voices against White Quaker voices against enslavement in this area.

And then I began finding examples of Black resistance. And I thought, this is going be part of my larger presentation or paper. And then I kept finding more examples of Black resistance and then I realized this is the presentation. So basically: engagement with the historical newspapers and court records and documentation, decentered the Quaker voices and refocused on the agency actions and spoken confrontations of people who Quakers held in bondage.

Martin Kelley

So tell us a little bit of stories. What kind of resistance was there? You think of slaves not having that much choice. They’re in chains. They can, I guess, escape. But what things can they do to resist their enslavers?

Jim Fussell

Well, the stories I have in the article that appeared in Friends Journal this month focus in three areas: verbal confrontation, escape, and arson. But there are other examples. I limited the scope of what I was focused on to the period

Basically John Woolman was active from the 1740s to the 1760s. And so I was looking for Black resistance that would likely have been known by Quaker communities as they were wrestling with ending Quaker enslavement. There are other examples from earlier and later. For example,a Quaker in 1809 who was poisoned by the person he enslaved, but with arsenic. But that happened at a later period, so it didn’t fit in my time period, so I’ll tell that on another occasion. But that’s not in the article. In fact, though, my perception is a spectrum.

Back resistance from everyday common resistance, which would have been so frequent that it would probably not have created written records. all the way to insurrection, in which case the example I came across, which is not in the article, I think was in 1637 in Antigua, where an absentee Quaker and slaver living in Newport, Rhode Island.

There was a rebellion there, mostly from enslaved people from Ghana or from that region. So that’s where you had an insurrection. But the focus of my article is on insubordination and defiance, where it did create records and oral histories, including court records. So that’s where the focus of my article is.

Martin Kelley

Well, share a few of those stories from your article for the people who haven’t read it yet. Give them a taste of what is in there.

Jim Fussell

I begin with an account from Third Haven Meeting [in Easton, Md.], which is one of our oldest Quaker meetinghouses, where I’ve worshiped, built in the 1680s, I believe, a wooden meeting house with no heat or electricity still to this day. And in that same place, in the oral history of that meeting as reported by historian Ken Carroll on the meeting’s website and in his published writings. A “Black Quakeress” is the term that is used, perhaps because she was in plain dress, spoke and confronted the people present about enslavement.

And they remembered this, but they did not write it down. They did not write her name. They did not record the year it happened, just that it did happen. notably, Third Haven was one of the, what should I say, the early adapters to Quaker antislavery at a time when other meetings across the Chesapeake Bay were quite resistant or obstructing Quaker antislavery.

But Third Haven in around 1767 began taking strong actions and having manumissions more frequently and disciplining those people who were continuing to buy and sell captive Africans.

Martin Kelley

Maybe the words of this Black Quakeress, as she was termed, was part of that. Obviously there must have been some sort of respect if that’s what they were calling her. That feels to me like a sign of respect to say that she is a Quaker, despite her ethnicity.

Jim Fussell

With hindsight, perhaps she was accorded some respect and we don’t know exactly that. But that’s one example. I have other examples of verbal confrontation between teenage boys, enslaved and free. But the category where I was able to find the most records was escape.

And that’s where I found an example from the Pleasants family, which was perhaps one of the largest or the largest Quaker and slaver in Virginia was a man named John Pleasants. And I found an example of someone who escaped from him. And he perhaps succeeded because the so-called runaway notice that was printed in the Virginia Gazette appeared again two weeks later, suggesting that he wasn’t apprehended, at least not immediately, or if ever. I speculate that he may have gone to the Great Dismal Swamp and that he escaped. I was able to look on that it was the darkest night in the middle of winter in February.

Martin Kelley

So he picked his time to leave!

Jim Fussell

He may well have been planning that for months or even years, choosing the moment of greatest likelihood for success. And that theme of intentionality and deliberateness in terms of Black resistance is one that developed as I immersed myself in multiple stories.

Martin Kelley

I imagine the middle of winter also would be a good time to cross swampy areas. They’d be all frozen over. So yeah, that does seem like a smart thing to do. And so these notices would appear in the local newspapers. Am I correct with that? And this gives us our documentary evidence.

Jim Fussell

Yes, and there’s often not just the name and the date of the person’s escape, but often a description of, of their appearance and what they’re wearing, any scars they had and, and their height and, and, and so forth. and, and not in the cases that I found in, in, my research of Quakers, but sometimes it noted if they could read or write or recite Bible passages or even if they were Black preachers. So the notices are very descriptive and they also have a sense of betrayal on the part of the slaver who feels like this person deceived me, I trusted them and then they ran away.

That theme runs through a lot of the notices for people in denial of their complicity in the captivity of this person.

Martin Kelley

Tell us, one of the stories also was arson, which seems to be yet another step forward in terms of not escaping, but shutting down the whole process that’s keeping slavery going and the economics of the farmer, so the slave holder. So how did that happen? Tell some of those stories.

Jim Fussell

Well, arson was not an uncommon crime. There’s someone who’s written an entire dissertation tracking arson by enslaved people in New England and finds that it’s a crime, especially often committed by women. The mechanism probably would have been to throw hot coals on a windy night on top of sawdust or straw and allow it to ignite. The case that I have is two women named Grace and Jane. And we don’t know if they were mother and daughter or friends or partners or, well, we don’t know their sisters. We don’t know their relationship, but what we know is that on September 1st, 1750, is that they burned down an entire tobacco barn at around nine o’clock in the evening. So it wasn’t at a time when people would be cooking. It wasn’t in the kitchen where it might have may well have been an accident. Again, we see deliberateness in this. Right after the tobacco harvest, the barn is burned.

Martin Kelley

So it was full.

Jim Fussell

Basically, and htting the Quaker enslavers economic well-being. And these two women were hanged for having done this. And there’s court records and after they were hanged, their Quaker enslaver was received compensation from the colony of Maryland for their presumed economic value.And there’s documentation of all of that. So this is a really compelling story. Their enslaver died only a year and a half later, and so his will documents the survivors of this event, around 19 people who may have been the parents, the names and their ages.

And so these may have been Grayson Jane’s family or friends or community who likely gathered to bury Grayson Jane after their executions. Another notable thing is the daughter of this slave whose family name was Galloway. His daughter married a Pemberton from Philadelphia and the Pemberton and moved to the Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and eventually ceased to be Quakers and so retained their attachment to enslavement rather than Quakerism. And their, I think, great-grandson became a Confederate general named Pemberton in the US Civil War.

I was always curious how that Pemberton prominent Philadelphia Quaker name had ended up in the Civil War history. And this is the link. so, Grace and Jane’s action in 1750 was four years before Philadelphia Yearly Meeting made its first statement in September 1754 against enslavement. It was after John Woolman’s first visit to Maryland, but before his later visits, which were where he may have been less learning and fact finding and doing more vocal ministry.

Martin Kelley

But he probably would have heard the story. He might have heard the story of the burning and it still would be something I would assume people would be talking about just four years later.

Jim Fussell

There are these absences in John Woolman’s Journal that you wonder why, like for example, John Woolman in, I think in 1765 attended a marriage in the manner of friends by a newly freed African man, William Bone, and his wife, and John Woolman’s wife was at this memorial service, and they both signed the wedding certificate and yet the whole event was not included in John Wilman’s Journal.

Woolman’s journal is a spiritual Journal and it was focused on his inner life. There are details of his life or the events occurring around him, that he might’ve chosen to include. we know that in Britain, they, they, published a highly edited version of John Woolman’s journal in the 1770s, but I think the U.S. edition was complete.

So it’s not there, these events. One thing I haven’t yet been able to find is letters or journals which comment on Black resistance. Instead, I’m finding a public record. So we only have the cumulative correspondence of Black resistance with Quaker decision-making to end Quaker enslavement. We don’t have those kinds of direct actions. With one exception, another story I haven’t told yet, and that is in 1763, there was a group escape in August of that year, led by an enslaved man named Nace. And at least two other people went with Nace, maybe more.

Nace’s enslaver was a former Quaker man named James Lee Jr. whose mother and siblings and family were still part of Deer Creek eeting. And Deer Creek was, I believe, a preparative meeting under Gunpowder Meeting. In the search party or posse that chased Nace and the others in the group escape, three young Quaker men armed themselves and joined thatsearch party. And that search party shot Nace dead, John Lee Jr. shot Nace dead and wounded two other Black men. And apparently the shooting of Nace was done in a way not to stop him from running away. He was already apprehended, because John Lee Jr. was indicted for manslaughter by the colony of Maryland. And for six months, he was under court proceedings until the governor of Maryland pardoned him. And then John Lee Jr., about a decade later, went and killed someone else he enslaved a second time. these events, something that I did was I took the Quaker records of the disciplining of these three young men and melded the story with the court records. And I think those, until my research, those had been considered separate narratives.

But they’re only a couple months apart and they’re clearly, they’re about the same event. So this group escape by, by Nace was occurring at the same time as there were rebellions in the northern part of South America in Dutch colonies and in the English colonies in Jamaica. Major rebellions that went on for many months. so Black resistance was more and more in the minds of people in the English-speaking world, including Quakers.

Another element of Nace’s group escape is that there was another man from an adjacent Quaker-owned plantation named Peter, who escaped 10 months before on horseback and was said to have gone to western Pennsylvania. And I also speculate that Peter, either the fact of Peter’s escape or Peter may well have returned and helped to facilitate the group escape. The enslavers of Nace and Peter were uncle and nephew in relation to each other, both named Galloway.

Martin Kelley

What effect did all of these have to do you think you can see ties to these escapes and burnings and all sorts of resistance to Quakers changing their their tune and becoming abolitionists?

Jim Fussell

Quakers took an incremental step-by-step approach to ending Quaker enslavement that unfolded over about a decade and a half, depending on how you count. And these were occurring alongside the acts of Black resistance. And a whole other category of Black resistance would have been on board ships. There were uprisings on ships of captive Africans in ships that had left from Newport, Rhode Island or Philadelphia or Annapolis, Maryland, where there’s Quaker involvement.

I think Anthony Benezet and others were saying that the Quaker testimony against war, what we now call the peace testimony, is clearly incompatible with human enslavement. that considering human beings as property without looking at how wars and violence were involved in their captivity and Quaker and English, British colonial involvement in the slave trade based on creating wars on the African continent. That was maybe the first way that Quakers were realizing that this was untenable, but in another way is just the inherent violence of human enslavement in all of its up to and including executions of Grace and Jane, but also routine beatings and floggings and all manner of withholding of food and separating of families and using that as a threat to hold over people.

The separation of families especially is devastating.

Martin Kelley

Yeah, tragic when you hear some of stories.

Jim Fussell

And the links to which newly free people went to try and reconnect with lost family is just extraordinary. Sometimes succeeding, but often not.

Martin Kelley

Well, important part of our history here to remember. Thank you, Jim, for sharing these stories and for researching these stories and making the links that were maybe hiding in archival records, but were never connected together into stories. So I hope you continue this research. It sounds like you have a whole lot of stories that you haven’t even been sharing yet. So bravo and keep them coming.

Jim Fussell

I’ll just have to say that in the times we’re living through now, we have to consider the testimony of the verbal and physical resistance at that time as how it speaks to us in our situation today. The urge to dominate and control and have power over others is not something that is of the past. we need to look at the eloquence of people’s words and actions when they do engage in resistance and consider whether we would join them in that resistance when it’s appropriate.

Martin Kelley

Well, thank you. Well, once again:  I’m talking with Jim Fussell and the article is “Black Resistance to Quaker Enslavement” in the August issue of Friends Journal and welcome everyone to read it and share in the comments. The article is getting read quite a lot. So we’re very happy to be helping to spread this message. Thank you, Jim.

Jim Fussell

Thank you, Martin.