Writings of Warner Mifflin: Forgotten Quaker Abolitionist of the Revolutionary Era [Hardcover]

InThe Writings of Warner Mifflin: Forgotten Quaker Abolitionist of the Revolutionary EraGary B. Nash and Michael R. McDowell present the correspondence, petitions and memorials to state and federal legislative bodies, semi-autobiographical essays, and other materials of the key figure in the U.S. abolitionist movement between the end of the American Revolution and the Jefferson presidency. Virtually unknown to Americans—schoolbooks ignore him, academic historians barely nod at him; the public knows him not at all--Mifflin has been brought to life in Gary B. Nash’s recent biography,Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist(2017). This volume provides an array of insights into the mind of a conscience-bound pacifist Quaker who became instrumental in making Kent County, Delaware a bastion of free blacks liberated from slavery and a seedbed of a reparationist doctrine that insisted that enslavers owed “restitution” to manumitted Africans and their descendants. Mifflin's writings also show how he became the most skilled lobbyist of the antislavery campaigners who haunted the legislative chambers of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania as well as the halls of the Continental Congress and the First and Second Federal Congresses. An opening introduction and introductions to each of the five chronologically arranged parts of the book provide context for the documents and a narrative of the life of this remarkable American.This volume represents the written record of the America's most under-appreciated abolitionist, a man who became the conscience of the new nation in the aftermath of the American Revolution. In about 150 documents, readers will find the literary record of a man who devoted his life to that newly born nation, which he hoped to rescue from its continued embrace of slavery.GARY B. NASH is a professor of history emeritus and director emeritus of the National Center for History in the lC¥