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The Tireless Abolitionist Nobody Ever Heard of

He was a well-known figure in early America, but the name of Warner Mifflin has all but faded from the nation's memory.
Camden Friends Meeting

Years ago after reading about Warner Mifflin’s appearance before the First Congress in New York City in February 1790 to lobby in support of petitions from Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, I thought that someday time would allow me to look into this Quaker antislavery spokesman. Searching for scraps of information, I found a small mountain of material: hundreds of letters, petitions, and legislative proceedings; court records, newspaper accounts, and essays from his own pen; monthly, quarterly, and yearly minutes of the Society of Friends in Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania; and land records, accounts of his traveling ministries, and family bibles. My goal now was to disinter this remarkable man from the dustbin of history.

Mifflin was the key figure bridging the first wave of abolitionists in Pennsylvania—a thin blue line stretching from the Germantown Protest of 1688 through William Southeby, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet—and an early nineteenth-century second wave of mid-Atlantic antislavery worthies carefully documented in Manisha Sinha’s new book, The Slave’s Cause. From the early 1780s to his death in the yellow fever epidemic of 1798, Mifflin was the most dedicated and tireless abolitionist as the American Revolution wound down and the new nation took form under the Constitution.

Forgotten for his leading role as a part of the post-revolutionary Atlantic-wide abolitionist network, Warner Mifflin has also been overlooked as the pioneer of reparations for enslaved Africans—the radical idea, with roots in Old Testament scripture, that those carried across the Atlantic in chains and consigned to lifelong, uncompensated labor had not only the right to their freedom as fellow humans but some form of restitution from the unchristian pillaging of their bodies and minds. Since the Civil Rights movement of the post-World War II era, the idea of reparations has entered political discourse, but its origins in the conscience of a handful of mid-Atlantic Quakers, as the revolutionary era unfolded, have fallen victim to historical amnesia. Providing reparations through cash payments and land as well as shared crop arrangements for his liberated adult male slaves, Mifflin preached “restitution” on the Eastern Shore of the Delmarva peninsula, making Kent County, Delaware a center of reparationist doctrine.