Mifflin, Warner and Anne Emlen Mifflin

MIFFLIN, WARNER (1745-1798) and ANNE EMLEN MIFFLIN (1755-1815). In the generations-long movement to bring an end to slavery in the American colonies and then the newborn United States, two important leaders of the second wave of abolitionist leaders were Warner Mifflin and his wife Anne Emlen Mifflin. Both have gone largely unnoticed with Anne especially a victim of historical amnesia. Warner was the key protagonist between early and mid-eighteenth-century antislavery Quaker heralds--most notably Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet--and the more religiously varied reformers, Black as well as white, who embraced abolitionism in the antebellum decades.

Among the accomplishments of first-wave abolitionists was convincing the Quaker leadership in Philadelphia to ban trafficking in slaves and then by 1775 to declare out of unity with the Quaker faith any Friends who would not release enslaved men and women who toiled under them as human property. They also founded the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1775, the first of its kind, and were instrumental in passing the first legislative hammer strike against slavery, the Pennsylvania gradual abolition act of 1780. But progress was limited mostly to the North.

After independence the most important among those carrying the torch of antislavery was Warner Mifflin. Descended from one of the early Quaker families reaching the shores of the Delaware River in the early 1680s, he was born in Accomack County, Virginia on the slave-rich plantation of his father. Mifflin’s contributions to abolitionism were threefold: practicing and preaching the doctrine of reparationism; developing lobbying strategies to move legislative bodies to end the slave trade and slavery; and creating a skeletal underground railroad from his Kent County, Delaware home long before its famous rise in the nineteenth century.

Going beyond Quakers who believed that liberating their enslaved people had fulfilled their obligation and cleansed themselves from sin, Mifflin preached that justice could be done to those released from bondage only when they were compensated with land, tools, plow animals, or crop sharing arrangements that would fulfill the Old Testament scripture that told that the manumitted should not be sent empty-handed into a cold and forbidding world. Through his efforts, many members of his Quaker meeting submitted to the judgment on the amount of reparations to be paid, often in consultation with the freed people themselves. Though his success was limited beyond mid-Delaware, Mifflin deserves the title of the father of American reparationism.

Moving outward from his Delaware home, Mifflin became a tribune of the natural rights of African Americans as he developed lobbying strategies that foreshadow modern politicking. Haunted the doorsteps of legislative assemblies in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina to buttonhole lawmakers, pressing antislavery tracts into their, visiting them in their boarding houses to appeal to the Christian principles of universal brotherhood and the natural equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence, providing talking points to legislative committees appointed to consider petitions dealing with slavery and the slave trade were his stock in trade for several decades. In 1782, his intense lobbying helped bring about a Virginia law that allowed slaveowners to free their slaves without the explicit legislative approval that had blocked liberation efforts for years. In 1790, Mifflin was the key lobbyist who brought national attention to the antislavery petitions that Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society submitted to the first federal Congress functioning under the newly ratified Constitution. Though facing insurmountable odds, Mifflin and his fellow lobbyists were able to preserve the right of petition on matters relating to slavery and the slave trade that southern Congressmen tried to extinguish.

Thirdly, Mifflin was the leading figure on the Delmarva Eastern Shore in offering temporary refuge to runaway slaves fleeing the internal slave trade carrying bondspeople south to the new cotton lands opening up in the Lower South. Funneling them northward in trying to stanch this massive coerced migration that was tearing slave families apart, he was often taken to court by enraged slave owners. In addition, he stood frequently as “next friend” in freedom suits where free blacks, snatched up by kidnappers for sale south, appealed for their stolen freedom. All of this made Mifflin a marked man, called “a meddling fanatic” in newspapers and. On the floors of legislative assemblies.

Mifflin died in October 1798 after attending the annual meeting of the mid-Atlantic Friends in Philadelphia. Struck down by the yellow fever sweeping through the city, he was carried to the grave in the Quakers’ burial ground near Camden, Delaware by four of his “afflicted African brethren.” Speaking at the graveside about his unceasing antislavery efforts was Anne Emlen Mifflin, his second wife and mother of two sons.

Anne Mifflin was an unlikely activist, for she was born amidst great affluence as the sixth child of Ann Reckless Emlen and George Emlen III. Beautiful and liberally educated, she spurned many suitors and, becoming deeply religious, believed she was suited only to serve her Lord. During the Revolution she moved to the edge of radical Quaker pacifism. Refusing to traffic in Continental currency issued to finance the war, which she regarded as blood stained, she moved from her mother’s house, opposite the Statehouse where Congress was conducting the war, in opposition to her widowed mother’s payment of war taxes.

Anne’s period of activism moved from passive resistance to militant activity on a number of fronts. After her marriage to Warner Mifflin in 1788 she moved to his Chestnut Grove plantation in Kent County, Delaware. From there she began to fulfill her role as a minister--called a “Public Friend” by Quakers--traveling thousands of miles as far south as North Carolina, as far north to Nantucket Island in offshore Massachusetts, and even to the further-most outposts of migrating Friends across the Allegheny Mountains to Ohio and the small hamlets along the Canadian shores of Lakes Simcoe and Ontario. These long trips in the service of what the most steadfast Quakers called the militant church were undertaken to stiffen the resolve of post-revolutionary Friends whose commitment was often compromised by their distance from settled Quaker meetings and their bitter experiences during the Revolution when Quaker became pariahs for their neutralist position dictated by their founding principles.

Anne took up her husband’s abolitionist cause, convinced that a slaveowning nation would not escape the notice of a watchful God, who would punish a people declaring themselves dedicated to inalienable universal freedom and Christianity but continuing their iniquitous practice of owning slaves while waging war against native peoples.

Foreshadowing the Free Produce reform movement of the 1830s, in 1791 she urged Quakers to boycott indigo-dyed material. In this way she hoped to end the exploitation and untimely death of slaves whose lives were severely shortened by exposure to toxic reagents used in the brutal processing of the indigo plant. This was the first time Friends explicitly took a stand against the enormously popular dye that wove blue into all manner of apparel and household fabrics at the cost of thousands of enslaved Africans. Four years later, setting historical precedent, she was the first woman, along with her sister-in-faith Mary Berry, to present an antislavery memorial to a legislative body, in this instance the Maryland State Assembly. In Annapolis, they petitioned for the “speedy abolition of the inhuman commerce in slaves,” thus pre-empting the succeeding generation of male and female abolitionists by some thirty years and breaking through the gender protocol that forbid women to enter the public sphere.

Decades before the formation of women’s anti-slavery societies emerged in the 1830s, Anne was the first woman to speak out with a plan for a state subsidized voluntary return of free African Americans to their ancestral home in Africa. She took this case, or tried to, all the way to the mountain plantation of the Sage of Monticello, while traveling through Virginia trying to persuade slaveowners to free their human property. In Philadelphia, she lent her support for volunteer organizations providing free education to poor white and black children.

Toughened by seasons of travel and committed to self-sacrifice, Anne shifted her attention in 1802-03 to what she called “the laudable work of improving our brethren the natives.” In the first of two strenuous trips on primitive roads she reached the Brothertown and Stockbridge peoples domiciled on Oneida reservation lands on the New York-Canadian border. There she worked with native women to learn spinning, weaving, and the rudiments of the English language. In 1803, in company with other Quakers, she traveled over stony, rutted roads through rugged mountainous country to reach the Seneca villages on the New York-Pennsylvania border where she parlayed with Handsome Lake and Cornplanter as she spent weeks working with native women to teach them the domestic arts that she and many native leaders deemed crucial to their survival. In both trips, she returned with long reports filled with ethnographical details of native life.

Anne spent the last decade of her life conducting her “gospel labours” among Quaker settlements spread over a vast part of the mid-Atlantic region. She died at the Emlen ancestral home in Philadelphia.

Nash, Gary B. Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

Nash, Gary B. and Michael R. McDowell. Writings of Warner Mifflin, Forgotten Quaker Abolitionist of the Revolutionary Era. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press with University of Virginia Press, 2021.

Nash, Gary B. and Emily Teipe. Our Beloved Friend: The Life and Writings of Anne Emlen Mifflin. State College: Penn State University Press, 2021.

Sinha, Manisha Sinha. The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.