Women engaged in the propagation of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and of slavery itself in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth claimed a voice in public debate mainly by arguing that chattel slavery was a domestic institution. One of the major themes they turned to was the issue of the separation of families that the trade entailed. By tearing apart the family unit as the very foundation on which human society was built, according to them, slavery produced a Hobbesian state of natural war, of (human) nature warring against itself.Footnote 1 One of the most striking characterizations they used was the description of slavery as being like a “poisonous infection,” which reminds the reader of the late eighteenth-century term “contagion of liberty” that described slave revolts, and alluded to slavery as a disease that had the power to affect a whole society.Footnote 2 The term was very fitting to turn the logic of slavery against itself. Using categories related to the concepts of “slavery to passion” and “slavery to sin” from ancient and medieval proslavery discourse to describe the institution’s influence on the slave trader and slaveholder, rather than on the enslaved, British women interpreted this “reduction of man to his animal nature” as a state of de-civilization that turned men into cannibals. They thereby literally pointed to the devouring of the enslaved, to whom was denied the right to their own bodies, as well as the right to their offspring, and with it the hope to improve their social and moral condition, because the effectiveness of slavery rested on the necessity of withholding any means for improvement from them.Footnote 3 Even though the focus of those who advocated for conditional emancipation was very much on education as an imperative to lift enslaved people out of their debased condition, those who embraced unconditional emancipation argued that this was impossible as long as the enslaved remained in slavery. Slavery was a self-sustaining system designed to defend British (American) slave traders’ and slaveholders’ financial interests through the prospect of perpetualizing and expanding the institution within the empire. Eighteenth-century writers praising the liberty and security granted by commercial empire, moreover, defended financial interest as an expression of patriotism.Footnote 4
Since the challenging of Eric Williams’s theory of economic decline, historians of British abolitionism have increasingly turned to other explanations for the rising antislavery sentiment that culminated in the Parliamentarian decrees to abolish the trade first, and subsequently slavery itself in the British colonies.Footnote 5 The most recent studies, notably Christopher L. Brown’s Moral Capital and David Richardson’s Principles and Agents, focus foremost on the abolition of the slave trade. Both emphasize that abolition as an imperial strategy developed in the background of the Napoleonic wars to save Britain’s colonial possessions and make slavery morally acceptable in metropolitan Britain.Footnote 6 This strategy, in my view, expressed itself in attempts by those embracing conditional emancipation to ameliorate/improve slavery and to make it a better instrument for “civilizing” the enslaved. Being regarded as naturally prone to passions and sins, the enslaved were judged incapable of improving themselves due to a kind of inherent dualism between soul and body, which made self-ownership impossible.Footnote 7 Brown’s and Richardson’s thesis has been further strengthened by recent contributions from social, political, and cultural history.Footnote 8 However, as women (as well as men) who were engaged in the antislavery cause, and who embraced unconditional emancipation rather than amelioration, made clear, the very existence of chattel slavery in the British Empire brought with it a potential conflict of interests between the domestic and the public spheres, notably through family separation.Footnote 9
This article will focus on a particular strand of abolitionism that rejected the ameliorist approach. This strand advocated for the immediate abolition of the institution of slavery in the British Empire. The historiographical approach that I am following in my analysis is that of the late Thomas L. Haskell, particularly his concept of a changed perception of the eighteenth-century British consumer. Haskell argued that this changed perception was accompanied by the development of new, or, from an abolitionist point of view, rather old, that is to say natural, uncorrupted, reformed cognitive techniques. My following Haskell’s argument is based on the fact that this changed perception was due partly to the rejection, and partly to the internalization, of the commercial-law maxim caveat emptor taken from Roman contract law. Caveat emptor enabled slave traders to rid themselves of any moral responsibility from slave trading, to put it instead on the shoulders of the purchasers of slaves and of slave-grown products.Footnote 10 Seymour Drescher has characterized Haskell as a lone wolf in the abolition debate, responding to the more established David Brion Davis who stressed British abolitionists’ ties to emerging industrialist networks to deemphasize the moral dimension.Footnote 11 Consumer responsibility and agency, notably through the act of boycotting, however, be they morally motivated or not, were at the very heart of the abolitionist movement from its very inception and were an inherently domestic way of protesting slavery that was open, above all, to women.
During the first wave of West Indian sugar boycotts in the 1780s, the Bluestocking and Clapham sect member Hannah More pointed in her poems to the disruption of family bonds, especially the separation of parent and child, that the trade brought with it, speaking from a gendered perspective that laid no claim to political authority.Footnote 12 The coming of the French and Haitian revolutions, as well as hostility to political radicalism that implied the involvement of abolitionist circles in Britain that were connected to French abolitionist clubs like the Société des amis des noirs, led to a setback for the cause of the enslaved.Footnote 13 The cause of the abolition of the trade and of abolishing West Indian slavery itself would be revived and former strategies would be embraced by a new, more radically minded generation of women and men in the following century, who increasingly advocated for “immediacy.”Footnote 14 The purpose of this article is to investigate how the abolitionist trope of the separation of families as one of British abolitionism’s core arguments developed and what role “immediacy” played, notably in the thought of women.Footnote 15
According to Roman civil law, slavery and enslavement were defensible in two ways: first through the taking of prisoners in warfare following so-called just-war theory, and second through inheritance of the condition following the maternal (and sometimes also the paternal) bloodline.Footnote 16 The latter is the justification in favor of slavery that is of most significance to my analysis of how the principle that was put down in law in the Virginia Act of 1662, partus sequitur ventrem (literally “offspring follows the belly”), which passed down the social status (mostly) through the mother, became successfully contested in abolitionist thought.Footnote 17 The reason why I’m focusing on this particular principle is that, first, in colonial thinking it was associated with the Aristotelian natural-slavery argument of an inherent soul–body dualism that children inherited from their mothers. Moreover, second, partus sequitur ventrem referred to what Brooke Newman has characterized as “fictions of tainted blood” that enabled the exclusion of non-Christians from civic society.Footnote 18 Third, the principle was closely connected to what became known amongst early modern thinkers as the first stage of the theory of the stages of civilization, which was the so-called state of nature. References to the state of nature can be found early on in the writings of canonical seventeenth-century political thinkers like Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. Both of them wrote in a time when Dutch and English involvement in the transatlantic slave trade had just begun and was in need of moral legitimization. Emile Simpson has convincingly shown that Grotius’s outlining of a Dutch imperialist global legal order enabled the legal invisibility of certain groups of colonized people, who were excluded from the human civilized community through their association with the state of nature, in which, according to Anna Becker’s analysis of Hobbes’s global legal order, the condition of partus sequitur ventrem was applicable.Footnote 19 Becker portrays Hobbes, who was an investor in the Royal African Company, as an early propagator of maternal dominium; that is to say, of a mother’s power of life and death over her children, because he underlined the mother’s natural right in the state of nature to abandon her children by withholding food from them. The ownership of the children, according to Hobbes, gets transferred to the person adopting the children by providing the food.Footnote 20 In contrast to Becker, I argue, however, that Hobbes’s intention in the employment of the maxim of partus sequitur ventrem was not the empowerment of mothers in the “imperialistic” state of nature, but in fact their disempowerment by enabling the slaveholder to claim ownership over the children of enslaved mothers, portraying the enslaved mother (and father) as unable (or unwilling) to provide for their children. This was done through the tool of infantilization of enslaved people, who, as Grotius claimed, lived outside human civilization in a state of permanent barbarity which they could never escape from. Slavery as a domestic, as well as an imperial, institution in fact was described by subsequent proslavery writers in Britain and the United States in the following centuries as the very means to improve the social condition and moral character of the enslaved, so that they could become (to a certain extent) part of civil society.Footnote 21 Grotius’s and Hobbes’s theory of the social contract did not include colonized people, but rather excluded them from the legal framework of early modern Europe. Yet, even within the state of nature, enslaved mothers were portrayed as forfeiting their right to their children through their natural “inability” to adequately fulfill their role as caretakers. European Enlightenment writers modeled the theories of the social contract and stages of civilization without any doubt for the purposes of legitimizing the “inclusive exclusion” of colonized people for colonialist goals. Those arguing for unconditional emancipation, therefore, had to resort to other intellectual sources. These sources, as I will demonstrate in this article, are to be found mainly in the writings of Nonconformist women and men in the second half of the seventeenth century, who referred to the concepts of heavenly flesh and universal salvation, and to the doctrine of the woman’s seed taken from the book of Genesis, to reject the concepts of original sin and related ideas, such as the curse of Ham (which according to many eighteenth-century proponents even of monogenesis had marked African people with black skin as a form of punishment). Their ideas were crucial for the later immediatist movement, due to the fact that the concepts of slavery to passion and slavery to sin, which I mentioned earlier and which were built on the Aristotelian soul–body divide, had been used since antiquity to adopt an apologetic stance towards slavery by arguing that enslavement was justified due to the differing and debased social and moral condition (and emotional state) of the enslaved.Footnote 22
Women’s preaching and the construction of the “Mother in Israel” figure
What I identify as my main sources for proto-immediatist thinking has been most recently outlined by Sarah Apetrei in her formidable book on gender and radical theology in the English Revolution, as well as by Hilary Hinds and Naomi Pullin, who both work on early Quaker women’s writings. Apetrei refers to early propagators of the concepts of heavenly flesh (which enabled a connection between soul and body) and of universal salvation, who were associated with the Leveller movement, and to the combination of the two for the purposes of the creation of the “Mother in Israel” figure within the Quaker community.Footnote 23 This title, which alluded to certain figures of ancestral mothers and female prophetesses in the Old Testament more specifically, and to the Israelites as the chosen people of the Hebrew God more generally, was usually attributed to publicly renown Quaker women who combined motherhood with spiritual leadership and caretaking responsibilities. It was female ministers, notably, who, I argue, identified as “Mothers in Israel” and served as role models for later female antislavery activists within the Quaker community. According to Pullin, Quaker women ministers differed from their male counterparts in the way they framed the importance of family connections and female friendships in their autobiographical writings, evoking a spiritual connection to other women through their meditational writings that would enable the development of the abolitionist cognitive tool that was “mental metempsychosis.” Mental metempsychosis was based on the Christian Kabbalistic technique of “thought transference” that was principally grounded in the medieval Aristotelian commentator Averroes’s theory of the unicity of the intellect, enhanced by Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic concepts.Footnote 24 It was made use of in the antislavery writings of the early nineteenth-century Quaker abolitionists Elizabeth Heyrick and of her namesake Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, and was further radicalized within the American immediatist movement on a gendered basis.Footnote 25 It was these women who successfully contested maternally inherited soul–body dualism, family separations, and thereby the principle of partus sequitur ventrem.Footnote 26
During the English Revolution, between the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, preceding the emergence of Quakerism, a radical network formed in London advocating for the political revolution to be accompanied by a spiritual revolution. Members of this radical network included inter-sectarian New Model Army chaplains who openly advocated for female participation in public preaching. Women, who presented themselves as prophetesses and visionaries, confidently identified with the figure of Christ and with the radical doctrine of incarnation through the concept of heavenly flesh. This concept reunited non-dualistic ideas about male–female principles in the deity, and ideas of a restored common human nature, with the idea of divine love as a specifically maternal quality. Chaplains such as William Erbery pointed to biblical precedents for women’s ministry in order to show that it was women connected to Christ who first preached the Gospel to the Apostles. Those female apostles, he writes, did not speak in their own voices, “but with the language of God and the angels.”Footnote 27
The notion of vehiculum dei and its connection to the concept of the celestial habitation of Christ in the flesh of “weak vessels” can be traced back to Paracelsus’s fusion of alchemical ideas with Aristotle’s natural philosophy to describe the theory of the heavenly/spiritual body of the Trinity as analogous to human bodies. Paracelsus’s treatise Liber de Sancta Trinitate (1524) deals mostly with the body of the Virgin Mary, which was, as Paracelsus declares, of a divine nature and made of heavenly flesh. The term “woman’s seed” was very prominent in the writings of early Quaker female leading figures, who continued to advocate for women’s ministry, such as Margaret Fell. Fell referred to Christ as being born from Mary’s heavenly flesh, in order to bring about universal salvation to all human beings through his death on the cross.Footnote 28 Mary was identified as a second Eve, who, in obedience to God’s will, had nullified the first Eve’s transgression, destroyed the original sin that had been inherited by Adam’s posterity, and thereby restored the original equality between man and woman in the figure of Christ.Footnote 29 The Paracelsian tradition and its regenerative outlook, exemplified in the destruction of original sin, was introduced into England mainly through the reception of the Lutheran theologian Jacob Böhme’s writings that embraced early modern Christian Kabbalistic concepts in referring to the possibility of multiple (spiritual) rebirths and to a method of communication over long distances based on “thought transference” which Paracelsus identified as ars caballistica.Footnote 30 Christian Kabbalism dates back further than Böhme, and it was also not inherently Lutheran, but rather of Catholic origin. It was created as a tool for Christian self-conversion in Renaissance Italy by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and his Jewish Christian collaborators. They translated Kabbalistic texts from the original Hebrew into Latin, intertwined them with Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas, and made them accessible to Christian, as well as non-Christian, readers in the centuries to come.Footnote 31 The Catholic background is worth knowing, because of a central feature of Christian Kabbalism that was not very prominent in Lutheranism. That is Catholic mariology, or the cult of the Virgin Mary, which would be of great importance to radical Christian views on gender and the overcoming of soul–body dualism.Footnote 32 It was among the members of Anglican clergyman John Pordage’s Philadelphian Society that this tradition became most popular in late seventeenth-century England, and they carried it to new extremes through the evocation of spiritual penetration, claiming that spirit and body were made of one substance which followed Paracelsus’s trinitarian speculations. Philadelphians like the mystics Jane Lead and Elizabeth Bathurst, as Apetrei points out, identified not mainly with the figure of Christ, but with Saint Mary, and exalted her “virgin motherhood.” A special role they accorded to the divine Sophia, whom they identified with the Holy Spirit within the Trinity, next to the Godfather and Christ, his son. Sophia was portrayed as divine mother, whose spiritual maternity played a vital role in the creation of a new human generation that had left behind original sin through the reunion with the Godhead and the return to a prelapsarian state of pure liberty, which had existed before the Fall. She was, according to William Erbery and John Pordage, the female principle in the Godhead that transcended the spiritual into the bodily sphere, allowing for a positive construction of womanhood as achieving in itself a form of subjectivity and as lifting the curse of female subjection that had come with the Fall.Footnote 33
Early Quaker theology did not go as far as the Philadelphians, it seems, and kept focusing on the “seed of the woman”—that is to say, on Christ—as, according to Böhme, the main agent of regeneration.Footnote 34 However, Christ was accorded maternal qualities and those remained essential for the doctrine of universal salvation to become prominent among the Quakers. Universal salvation was propagated mostly in reaction to high Calvinism.Footnote 35 The purpose behind this universalist outlook, which, as mentioned earlier, had its roots in the theosophy of Christian Kabbalism, was the idea of the overcoming of original sin that was used as a justification for the Calvinist notion of double predestination.Footnote 36 The maternal metaphor of divine qualities, present in certain passages in the Bible, such as in Isaiah 49, inspired Nonconformist women in the revolutionary period to express their criticism of Calvinist dogma. Apetrei mentions Lady Eleanor Davies as one of the first women in the 1640s and 1650s to publish on the idea of universal salvation as a way to deal with the premature loss of two of her children. Davies insisted on women’s suitability to preach universal salvation and pointed, even before Margaret Fell, to the Virgin Mary as first witness to the resurrection, and to her instrumental role in salvation history as mother of Christ, using the term “woman’s seed” in reference to her status as second Eve.Footnote 37 Women’s preaching, to Davies, was a channel to convey the message of universal salvation to the general public, especially to other women, who had similar experiences in mourning deceased infants, and she used it as a motive to embrace general redemption as a way of consolation.Footnote 38 A mother’s unconditional love became the attribute of divine compassion, and thereby also an attribute of Christ as the “seed of the woman.” It was, after all, Mary who, by accepting motherhood of the redeemer, had lifted the curse of sin that had been put on Eve’s offspring, and that was, according to Calvinist logic, transmitted from mother to child as a form of hereditary curse. To many Nonconformist Christians living in that period who embraced universal salvation and free grace as a doctrine that turned the Christian in bonds into a free Christian, Christ’s dual identity as mother and child became an important way of picturing union with Christ and thereby proximity to God.Footnote 39
The empowering concept of (spiritual and actual) motherhood that was embraced by early Quaker women—including female ministers, who were deferentially referred to as “Mothers in Israel,” alluding, notably, to the figure of the prophetess Deborah from the Book of Judges—was crucial for the transformation of paternalistic views on domesticity that existed even within the Society of Friends. Whereas the first generation of Quakers consisted mostly of converts who broke away from their blood families following their spiritual conviction, second- and third-generation Quakers tended to come from Quaker families. The Quaker household thus became integral to the construction of the Quaker community and of the settled Quaker church in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth. Structures like quarterly and yearly meetings were put in place to advise parents on the spiritual upbringing of their children. The role of the Quaker mother as spiritual guide gained increasing importance.Footnote 40 And yet paternalistic views continued to persist and to shape the Quaker imagination of family structure. This family structure included not only parents and their children, but also servants and the enslaved.
During his time at Barbados, the early Quaker leading figure George Fox wrote a pamphlet called Gospel Family Order (1676) in which he referred to plantations as a family structure and modeled it on what he perceived as the Quaker ideal. In this structure the slaveholder exercised a patriarchal role similar to that of the slave-owning Patriarchs of the Old Testament, as benevolent, though dominant, heads.Footnote 41 Even though Fox underlined the original, biblical equality of slaveholder and enslaved, his ameliorist stance on slavery, mainly influenced by ancient and medieval proslavery discourse surrounding the concepts of slavery to passion and slavery to sin, offered a rather apologetic view of Quaker slavery as an institution legitimized by the depraved social condition of the enslaved “heathens” (that is to say, of non-Christian lineage), which had to be improved by the slaveholder for the purposes of Christian conversion “from the outside.”Footnote 42 Fox also belonged to those Quakers in favor of excluding George Keith from the Society of Friends in the 1690s. Keith’s group of dissenting Quakers followed an earlier protest against the institution of slavery, the Germantown petition of 1688, which connected liberty of body with spiritual liberty in a manner highly reminiscent of the doctrine of heavenly flesh put forward by Jacob Böhme’s followers. Together with his associate Robert Barclay, who had written in favor of universal salvation around the same time as Fox wrote his Gospel Family Order, Keith advocated for self-conversion and came to negate the sufficiency of the “light within” to achieve salvation without outward manifestations of living the Christian faith.Footnote 43 Keith spearheaded the so-called Christian Quakers’s Exhortation & Caution to Friends that was published in 1693 in the American colonies, and took a decidedly antislavery stance, even though it was not as radical as the Germantown petition had been.Footnote 44
Contrary to prevailing definitions of second- and third-generation Quakerism as a “Quietist” period in which women compromised their former religious radicalism in order to adapt to more traditional domestic roles as wives and mothers, Naomi Pullin has convincingly argued that they instead used this radical heritage to redefine the female role within the Quaker household. It can be testified that female Quaker ministers successfully remodeled and expanded their maternal roles from the domestic to the public forum within the Quaker community. The establishment of separate women’s meetings in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth additionally testifies to women’s increasing influence in the Quaker church on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in the American colonies. The status of female ministers enhanced rather than undermined their position in the family.Footnote 45 The integration and compatibility of women’s preaching with the fulfillment of their expected social roles in the Quaker household thereby contributed to the destabilization and redefinition of Fox’s Gospel Family Order rather than submitting to it. Female ministers’s testimony consistently drew attention to their identities as wives and mothers, especially to the familial sacrifice they made through their frequent absences from home (during which the fathers and extended family took on child-rearing duties), in order to enhance their spiritual authority, and to women’s regenerative work as second Eves who had left behind the hereditary curse of female subjection that had been transmitted to their offspring. This last attribute, especially, would serve to oppose the principle of partus sequitur ventrem through the abolitionist cognitive tool of “mental metempsychosis” that evoked a spiritual, emotional, and corporeal connection between free and enslaved women by readopting and reappropriating radical theological concepts from the 1640s and 1650s, such as that of heavenly flesh and of universal salvation.
Developing mental metempsychosis
The family unit was at the very heart of Quaker theology. The role of mother within this theology was a constructed role that was not reduced to the blood family, but extended beyond it to the whole community of believers. Theirs was a different sort of lineage that emphasized the spiritual connection above all. Quakers memorialized exemplary wives and mothers who had sustained the movement in print, such as in Joseph Besse’s collection of Quaker sufferings. Dissenting Quaker women (including ministers and missionaries) occupied a special role in Besse’s collection, due to the fact that their persecution was accompanied by much harsher, gendered punishments to account for their standing apart in social attitudes. Whippings, as well as enforced separations from their husbands and children through incarceration, both which would later become important themes in British abolitionist discourse against the cruel treatment of enslaved women, were part of these punishments.Footnote 46 The disruptive consequences of religious dissent on family life and the cruelty of the punishments were portrayed as an important feature of seventeenth-century Quaker women’s sufferings. Preceding Besse’s collection, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the female experience of suffering was probably most effectively illustrated in Mary Mollineux’s Fruits of Retirement (1702), which was a series of meditative poems addressed to Mollineux’s female relatives and friends. Mary Mollineux (born Southworth) was a seventeenth-century Quaker poet who had been educated in classical languages and the sciences. Following her self-conversion from Catholicism to Quakerism, Mary met her future husband, Henry Mollineux, while they were both imprisoned for attending Quaker meetings in the 1680s. Her poetry was collected and edited by her cousin Frances Owen, and was posthumously published by the influential female Quaker publisher Tace Sowle-Raylton in London.Footnote 47 It proved to be popular enough to be republished five times in the eighteenth century by Sowle-Raylton, as well as three times by her brother-in-law, William Bradford, in Philadelphia. Hilary Hinds has reevaluated The Fruits of Retirement as a testimony of second- and third-generation Quakerism’s adherence to the early movement’s zeal for appealing to emotions in order to achieve religious convincement. In the introduction to the collection, Frances Owen offers a defense against Mollineux’s critics by describing her cousin’s poetry as suitable for “carrying moral and divine purposes into the minds,” especially into those of the young, who might not otherwise be reached. Another reason for the popularity of Mollineux’s poems can be found in the fact that many of them reconciled the Quaker ethos with the political, social, and cultural realities of the post-Restoration period by focusing not exclusively on the experience of persecution, but on the “quiet heroism of the Quaker heart and mind,” on moral matters, and on family values.Footnote 48
The most important quality of Mollineux’s poems, however, was demonstrating how the practice of specifically female friendships could be linked to a pious lifestyle, which is why her poetry was especially appealing to Quaker women who were looking for spiritual and emotional guidance in everyday matters. Since Quakers’ style of communication in general was at odds with the standards of politeness in British society, alternative models of sociability had to be found. Mollineux’s poetry offered such a model to Quaker women, in order, in the words of the later antislavery advocate Elizabeth Heyrick, to “gain access to the hearts and consciences of their own sex.”Footnote 49 Whereas the idea of friendships outside Quakerism tended to associate its core values with civic performance in a contractarian way within a highly politicized sphere, Mollineux’s poems rather adopted more universalized Christian notions of friendship within a community of believers.Footnote 50 That expansive interpretation of friendship rested on ideas tied to moral obligation. Mollineux’s main focus was on the spiritual affinity between female Quaker friends, whose souls, spirits, and spiritual bodies “pilgrimaged” together.Footnote 51 The spiritual affinity between herself and her cousin, described by Mollineux, reimagined female friendships in terms of close familial bonds, without blood ties. As Pullin puts it, it thereby “replicated titles, emotions, and supports of the nuclear family,” and extended those to nonfamilial bonds. Mollineux’s poetry circulated amongst Quaker women, especially between ministers and their followers, offering them models for female sociability in practice.Footnote 52 Many female ministers described their followers as a second self, or mirror image, emphasizing that they were guided by one spirit.Footnote 53 Ideas surrounding the concepts of heavenly flesh and of universal salvation that, as demonstrated above, were prominent among Nonconformist women in the 1640s and 1650s who claimed a role as preachers or prophetesses, and which can also be found in Mollineux’s poetry, played their part in enabling this spiritual and emotional connection. During her imprisonment in Lancaster Castle in 1684, Mollineux kept up her correspondence with Frances, describing herself as Frances’s “second self.”Footnote 54 Referring to other women as second selves, or mirror images, was a characterization which later female antislavery advocates would use to refer to enslaved women who were in most cases far distances away from them, and of whose situation and condition British women had a very abstract idea at best.
As has recently been pointed out by social and cultural historians such as Henrice Altink, and as it was suggested at the beginning of this article with reference to Thomas Hobbes, the figure of the enslaved woman, characterized as an “indifferent” or negligent mother, who could not provide for her children and thereby forfeited her right to her offspring, appeared first in British colonialist discourse, before it was taken up in abolitionist discourse and replaced by the prominent image of the “caring,” self-sacrificing mother. Following the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, especially, the enslaved mother became the dominant figure in abolitionist discourse, since her body became the only resource for “reproducing” slave property in the form of her children in the British colonies. Both images, that of the indifferent mother and that of the caring mother, were metropolitan stereotypes, used to measure enslaved women against British norms of womanhood. The colonial project itself was thereby never questioned, but, as Katherine Paugh has outlined, imperial concerns relating to its moral and political economy remained at the center of the debate on reproduction between colonial planters and metropolitan abolitionists.Footnote 55 The figure of the enslaved mother and of enslaved children in pro- and antislavery writings in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth mutually influenced each other in complex ways, in order to justify the shaping of power relationships in slave societies, and to construct British identity. The figure of the enslaved mother was introduced into colonialist discourse mostly in relation to plantation biopolitics and bioeconomics surrounding childbearing and child-rearing practices. The background to this was the decline of the slave population on the West Indian islands, and decreased levels of profits amongst the planter class that ultimately facilitated the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean, as opposed to the North American colonies, in which the slave population grew.Footnote 56 Enslaved men and women were portrayed as emotionally different, notably as unable to form social bonds. In the 1790s it was commonplace for plantation managers to refer to the need of monetary incentives to motivate enslaved women to fulfill their maternal duties, which can be regarded as a projection of planter logic onto these women. Motherhood was in fact a highly respected and recognized social position within the enslaved community, and it was a common practice for enslaved women to adopt children whose mothers had died or had been sold. As can be observed in educational writings, novels, conduct books, and medical treatises of the period, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourse was very much focused on the idea that women had to be instructed in responsibilities tied to childbearing, child rearing, and motherhood. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the construction of motherhood according to metropolitan standards was presented as woman’s main identity and defined her status within European society. It was a self-effacing role, and women who did not embrace motherhood were portrayed as unfeminine.Footnote 57 Within Quaker circles, this was no exception. However, within second- and third-generation Quakerism, as we have seen, motherhood extended beyond blood relations, and beyond child-rearing duties, to include spiritual and emotional motherhood tied to female ministry, which enlarged Quaker women’s sphere of influence from the domestic into the public.
As Moira Ferguson has shown, British women writers have engaged with the mirror image of the enslaved woman since the late seventeenth century.Footnote 58 Immediatism, or immediate abolitionism, as opposed to gradual abolitionism, which was strongly informed by earlier ameliorist approaches to abolition that were more commonly embraced by the British elites before the 1820s (and beyond, as attested by the apprenticeship system that followed the British Parliament’s Abolition Act of 1833), demanded abolition before emancipation could be achieved. Immediate abolitionism developed mostly in opposition to the colonization movement, which was embraced by gradual abolitionists from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth and onwards. Its main argument against colonization was the fact that slavery as an institution would not be eradicated and would still be able to exist or to extend itself within a new colonial framework. This concern grew notably amongst the free black community in the northern states of antebellum America whose members debated whether colonization was desirable.Footnote 59 During the 1820s and 1830s a remarkable consistency can be observed with regard to antislavery writings in Britain that, prior to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, had already paid increasing attention to the issue of physical cruelties enacted against enslaved women and to the enforced separation of families mostly from an ameliorist perspective.Footnote 60 Directed against planters’s claims that they provided better for enslaved parents’ offspring than for the parents themselves, due to the mothers’s “lack of emotional attachment,” British women of all denominations used poetry to address each other, as well as the British public, “in the language of angels.” In that poetry they put themselves in the shoes of their mirror-selves, the enslaved mothers, who in their imagination suffered immense spiritual and emotional pain through the separation from their children, a method which the later American antislavery poet and essayist Elizabeth Margaret Chandler called “mental metempsychosis,” transmitting the Paracelsian ars caballistica into the nineteenth century and thereby taking up Philadelphian ideas on spiritual penetration that were embraced by the followers of Jacob Böhme. These ideas were closely connected to the Christian universalist concept of apokatastasis, which embraced the idea of the restoration, or salvation, of all creatures, and the philosophy of Origen on the idea of Christ’s atonement.Footnote 61 Chandler described mental metempsychosis as a mental transformation into the enslaved person, into his or her spiritual, emotional, and bodily condition, and referred to the experience of family separation.
Let them [the slaveholders] feel the heart-brokenness of being separated from all they love—take the long last glance at all that is dear to them, and while the brain is reeling, and the hot brow throbbing with agony, know that their sufferings excite only the heartless jester, or the brutal curse … let them yield up their hearts again for a while to the gentle influences of affection, till they feel almost as if there was yet something like to happiness in their lot, and then know suddenly that they are to gaze no more upon their beloved objects forever—let them enter into the desolateness of that moment … Would they but endeavour to realize the bitterness of such a lot, surely, surely, they would rush to the rescue of the thousands who are agonizing beneath its endurance.Footnote 62
Chandler identified as an immediatist and was very well acquainted with the writings of British abolitionist women, including Elizabeth Heyrick’s influential Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition (1824), which she republished for an American audience in the “Lady’s Repository” column of the Quaker publisher Benjamin Lundy’s The Genius of Universal Emancipation in the 1820s. Even though Chandler was the first antislavery writer to use the term, the cognitive tool of mental metempsychosis had already been referred to in Heyrick’s antislavery paper The Hummingbird, or Morsels of Information on the Subject of Slavery (1825), in which she described it as a mind experiment that was supporting the right practice of the Christian Golden Rule “to do unto others what you would have them do to you,” by “placing ourselves in the situation, and under the circumstances of the person we deal with.”Footnote 63 According to Heyrick, who elaborated on mental metempsychosis in her subsequent pamphlet Apology for Ladies’ Anti-slavery Associations (1828), “all human beings are bound to each other by divine providence which enforces its laws through immediate and direct revelation,” which enabled British women, such as herself, to speak with authority for the enslaved, especially for enslaved women, who could not speak for themselves, she argued. In the Apology, Heyrick adopted the same strategy as in her Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, to outline the shortcomings of gradual abolitionism by advocating compensation (in the form of unconditional emancipation) to the enslaved instead of the enslaver, as well as, more importantly, to separate Christianity from slavery. Heyrick thereby directly challenged Christian concepts tied to amelioration/gradualism by appealing to the concept of universal salvation. She called Christianity “not a voluminous code of arbitrary commands and prohibitions, but a system of principles, few in number, but of universal application,” which are grounded on the “supreme love of God, each other, and ourselves.”Footnote 64 “Immediate revelation,” as a term taken from Quaker theology that inspired Heyrick’s coining of the term “immediate abolition,” appears here as a process of self-conversion, of “inward enlightenment,” and of the perfecting of the self through the emulation of Christ in body and spirit, as well as the very means of purging one’s own heart of sin in the form of deep-rooted prejudices through “purposeful, reformatory action,” such as the boycotting of slave-grown products. It is deeply rooted in early modern Christian Kabbalistic terminology that was coined by Pico della Mirandola. Abolitionists who embraced the immediatist stance on both sides of the Atlantic would return to this demand of the “refashioning of the self” through emphasis on an intimate connection and non-dualistic relationship between soul and body, over and over again.Footnote 65 The purging of sin from one’s own heart was an experience which female Quaker ministers in their testimonies habitually referred to, and which, according to Robert Barclay and George Keith, was accessible to every human being due to the presence of the so-called “seed” (Christ as the “seed born from the heavenly flesh of Mary”) that was given to all of God’s creation following the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in the New Testament.Footnote 66 Imitating Heyrick’s strategy of encouraging the “self-conversion” of other women to abolitionism by appealing to their domestic roles as providers and consumers of slave-grown products, as well as to their roles as mothers and wives, Chandler used “mental metempsychosis” to draw a spiritual connection between enslaved and free Americans more broadly, focusing, like Heyrick before her, on boycotting as the way to achieve immediate abolition.Footnote 67 In her highly acclaimed poem The Slave Mother’s Farewell, Chandler, as opposed to Hannah More, who had written on family separation in more abstract terms, put herself directly in the shoes of the enslaved mother:
May God have mercy on thee, son, for man’s stern heart hath none! … Oh cling not thus around me in thy grief, thy mother’s arm, thy mother’s love, can yield thee no relief … How may a mother’s heart endure to think upon thy fate, thou doom’d to misery and chains!—so young and desolate! Farewell! Farewell! They tear thee hence … Mine own! Mine own! Yet cruel hands have barter’d thee for gold, and torn thee, with a ruthless grasp, forever from my hold!Footnote 68
The response to this kind of antislavery activism was quite uniform. It followed Hobbes in defining enslaved motherhood as grounded in the satisfying of physical needs only, rather than tied to emotional needs, which strengthened the claim that planters held over enslaved children. Even though family separation initially developed as an argument that was foremost driven by metropolitan concerns and pointed to the cruelties of the transatlantic slave trade, as we can see by the above examples, it continued to be a forceful argument in the 1820s and 1830s. This was due to the economic depression in the West Indies and the development of a vast domestic slave trade within both the British Caribbean and the United States.Footnote 69 Plantation sources suggest that, in the former, families were less likely to be separated during that period due to shifting demands in sugar cultivation that necessitated the moving of large groups. Family separation, however, remained an important abolitionist trope, because the mere status of a slave according to colonial law was that of movable property and separation was always a potentiality. Abolitionists increasingly turned to the trope of family separation to argue for the need for immediate abolition, due to the fact that gradual, conditional manumission involved monetary compensation to the slave owners who could use that money to keep investing in slavery and thereby in separating more families. Gradual abolition was impracticable, because it contributed to perpetuating the system. Immediate abolitionists doubted the effectiveness of gradual abolitionism’s approach to “gradually” ending the system. According to them, for “restorative” justice (in the sense of universal salvation) to be enacted and for God’s retributive justice in form of continuing slave uprisings to be avoided, slaves had to walk free from corporeal and spiritual bondage without any conditions being imposed on them.
Conclusion
The purpose of this article has been to show that radical Christian concepts, rooted notably in Christian Kabbalism, significantly informed and accompanied the intellectual rise of immediate abolitionism through its focus on the contestation of the principle of the inheritance of the condition of slavery through the mother’s womb. This was due to the successful rejection of the commodifying logic that emphasized a form of natural slavery to passion and sin, as well as the inability to create social bonds, symbolized by a dualism between soul and body that enslaved children supposedly inherited from their mothers, in association with the biopolitics of the plantation economy. The article has thereby identified immediatism as a distinctive strand of abolitionism which is to be regarded as separate from gradualism, and which in opposition to immediatism kept up the theory of soul–body dualism.
It was foremost female Quakers in eighteenth-century Britain who developed “mental metempsychosis” as a cognitive tool in order to touch the minds and hearts of other women, and to encourage “self-conversion” to the immediatist logic, before they would, in turn, do the same within their own domestic circles. The first scholar to point out the importance of mental metempsychosis as a tool used by female abolitionists was Gay Gibson Cima. Cima, however, is mistaken in attributing the intellectual sources of this tool to Eastern religious traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism. In contrast to Cima, I hope to have convincingly demonstrated that early modern Christian Kabbalism was the actual inspiration behind the development of mental metempsychosis as a new cognitive technique embraced by early immediatist thinkers who were mostly considered outsiders, even within their very own Nonconformist groups. At the same time, I hope to have shown that Thomas Haskell’s stressing of the need to reconsider the importance of perception in the age preceding the Second Great Awakening, by looking at the development of mental metempsychosis as a cognitive tool to achieve a “spiritualization of the body,” and thereby universal salvation, through the embodiment of purpose (notably in the form of purposeful antislavery action, such as boycotting and other forms of collective activism), was well founded and deserves further engagement. Following the theosophy that was Christian Kabbalism, mental metempsychosis served, after all, the purpose of bridging the gap between divine (spiritual) and terrestrial (bodily) worlds and thereby enabled the formation of a deeply theologized worldview that paradoxically functioned in a secularizing way with regard to salvation. This is due to the fact that in Christian Kabbalism, universal salvation, or apokatastasis, translated as “restorative justice,” is deeply tied to tikkun olam, a concept prominent in Judaism more broadly, which refers to various forms of action intended to repair and improve the world.
Immediate abolitionism’s call for immediacy was highly reminiscent of the apocalyptic language of Nonconformist women in the 1640s and 1650s. By focusing on the enslaved family, and especially on the figure of the enslaved mother, immediate abolitionists also sought to strike at the very root of the slavery system, which was the reproduction of its property through the woman’s body, symbolized by the Hobbesian principle of partus sequitur ventrem. They argued that the development of maternal affection depended on the fact that women owned the children they gave birth to, and that only immediate abolition could provide enslaved women with the natural authority over their children, whereas gradual abolition schemes removed that authority.Footnote 70 By the late eighteenth century, the state-of-nature discourse that Grotius and Hobbes had outlined one century earlier had itself undergone significant changes, and challenges. It had been superseded by the state-of-nature discourse employed specifically in the context of the American Revolution to legitimize resistance against parliamentary supremacy and to call on the royal prerogative as a way to circumvent the British Parliament’s decisions.Footnote 71 Calls for a political reformation of Parliament, where the proslavery lobby was based, were widespread during the imperial crisis of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. The emerging antislavery cause made use of the state-of-nature discourse that developed in the revolutionary context, as well as of mid-eighteenth-century appeals to the royal prerogative.Footnote 72 Just as it had been the case in the revolutionary period of the 1640s and 1650s which saw the intellectual rise of egalitarian concepts, abolitionists called for the political reformation to be accompanied by a spiritual/mental one. Those who did, such as Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, also embraced core ideas of the immediatist stance and argued against the compatibility of the institution of slavery with Christian principles before Heyrick proposed immediate abolition in direct opposition to gradual abolition as an imperial political agenda. Biblical justifications for slavery, however, which kept in line with the so-called monogenist view that all humans descended from fallen Adam and were therefore of “one blood,” such as, amongst others, the “curse of Ham,” remained strong in the emerging proslavery discourse of the late eighteenth century up to the mid-nineteenth, when they gradually became replaced by polygenist arguments. Both monogenism and polygenism enabled the construction of a racialized account of the story of human origin.Footnote 73 Early immediatists in the eighteenth century, like the Afro-British antislavery activist Ottobah Cugoano, sought to fight doctrines like the curse of Ham, by providing a different interpretation of the Old Testament chapters related to explanations for the population of the planet.Footnote 74 Critical readings of the Bible, and especially of the Old Testament chapters on the sacred constitution of the Hebrew state and its system of servitude that did not point to any form of heritable slavery, began to join the arsenal of antislavery advocates in the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in antebellum America, where immediate abolitionists argued for a concept of the history of humankind that was grounded in the mission of restoring man (and woman) to their original (biblical) equality as was done during the so-called “jubilee.”Footnote 75 Female immediatists and early women’s rights activists in the nineteenth century, such as the American Quaker sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, would follow these more radical egalitarian developments by going all the way back to the story of the Fall to argue for man and woman’s equal partaking of the guilt for Eve’s temptation and for the universal salvation of mankind through the redemptive labour of women, in order to defend women’s public engagement in the antislavery cause.Footnote 76 They thereby went a step further than early Quaker women like Margaret Fell had gone in referring to the Virgin Mary as a second Eve in order to argue for women’s ministry. In alignment with Jane Lead and the millenarian imagination of Sophia as female principle in the Godhead, they declared “themselves” rather than the Virgin Mary as second Eves, and as instrumental in the regeneration of fallen (wo)mankind.Footnote 77 They envisioned a regeneration that would not be completed until slavery was abolished and women freed from the bondage in which they had been placed as a scapegoat for the consequences of the Fall.
The idea of a return to the prelapsarian state of equality (the state of nature) in which, according to Thomas Hobbes, women were able to claim or reject absolute ownership of their children therefore did play a role in women’s political thought. To women like the Grimké sisters themselves, however, as their argumentation reveals, matriarchy was not the goal. Their goal was rather to reconcile their role as mothers with that as spiritual and public leaders, such as was described in the autobiographical writings of second- and third-generation itinerant female Quaker ministers who enlarged their domestic roles in public as “Mothers in Israel.” Hobbes, by contrast, projected the patriarchal logic of freedom of choice over life and death of their children onto women, claiming they were willing to leave behind the natural equality that was guaranteed to them in the state of nature in exchange for security, in order to show that a return to the prelapsarian state was undesirable and even impossible. He associated this state with a condition of a perpetual struggle for power between the sexes, whereas women themselves did not see it as such. Their experience over the centuries had been one of systematized disempowerment over their souls and bodies (which were portrayed to women as existing in dualism with each other) through restrained upbringing, lack of self-reflective education, and the constraints of marriage, or in the worst case, of actual bondage in the form of chattel slavery and the constant fear of being separated from their families.
Acknowledgments
This article is the result of new research conducted over the past couples of years, beginning with a short stay at the German Society of Pennsylvania’s Horner Library in Philadelphia in 2022. Since then I have had the honor of presenting this research on multiple occasions, most recently as part of a panel on antislavery thinkers at the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought annual conference at Jesus College, Cambridge, and at the Intellectual History Seminar at the University of St Andrews. I would like to thank the editor, Brandon Byrd, as well as both anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback on earlier drafts.
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