I know the Pleasants family, at least was [or became] Quaker, maybe
that had a lot to do with it. Has anyone studied the spread of the
Quaker and Methodist faiths in early Virginia and the effects it had
on the freeing of slaves? Were there certain periods of 'revivals',
or was it just a gradual thing? I know my own family were Anglican
but many later became non-slave owning Methodist. There is a letter
from a Cardwell, a carriage maker, who was in Georgia on business in
the early 1800s and wrote back to his business partner with, among
other things, excitement about this new Methodist faith he'd come
across down there. I wonder if he came back and talked it up to some
in the family, and they converted?
Nancy
-------
I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
--Daniel Boone
On Mar 4, 2007, at 4:04 PM, Paul Heinegg wrote:
> Hi Anne Pemberton.
> Yes, I agree. Instead of studying about our leaders who owned
> slaves while acknowledging it was evil, we should be studying about
> people in the late eighteenth century like Robert Carter, Joseph
> Mayo (who left a will in 1780 freeing hundreds of slaves before the
> 1782 law allowed emancipation), the Pleasants family, and the
> hundreds of slaveowners from Sussex, Isle of Wight, Henrico, etc.
> who freed their slaves during their lifetimes with such statements
> as, "Freedom is the natural right of all mankind," or "Agreeable to
> our Bill of Rights and fully pursuaded that freedom is a natural
> right and no law moral or divine gives me a just right or property
> in any of my fellow creatures," or "Seeing such an inconsistency
> betwixt our Declaration of Independence that all men are equally
> born free and our practice of holding a great number of our fellow
> men in the most abject slavery."
>
> We willl have to assume that Robert Carter's cutting off the toes
> of at least one of his slaves that ran away happened before he "got
> religion."
> Paul
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