The plain style in early anti-slavery discourse: Reassessing the rhetorical beginnings of Quaker and Puritan advocacy

ABSTRACT

The two earliest public protests against slavery in British North America—the Germantown Quakers’ petition and Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph—are primarily discussed as rhetorical failures and have been largely reduced to entries on an anti-slavery timeline. The texts are further diminished for their lack of intensity compared with later abolitionist discourses. This essay reassesses these germinal protests as dynamic texts that engage and challenge two distinct conceptualizations of the plain style. In so doing, the texts and the plain style are both given renewed significance in the rhetorical history of the anti-slavery movement.

KEYWORDS:

• Plain style
• anti-slavery
• Quakers
• Puritans

Acknowledgments

Bjørn F. Stillion Southard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. He thanks Belinda Stillion Southard, Tom Lessl, and Peter O’Connell for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. He also thanks Bradford Vivian for his editorial guidance and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this essay.

Notes

1. Evidence of the texts as a bookend to U.S. anti-slavery history can be found in anthologies, wherein the Germantown Quakers’ petition and Sewall’s pamphlet are among the first three texts printed (another Quaker text came after the petition but before the pamphlet). See Herbert Aptheker, ed., And Why Not Every Man? Documentary Story of the Fight against Slavery in the U.S. (New York: International Publishers, 1970); James G. Basker, ed., American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (New York: Library of America, 2012); and Roger Bruns, ed., Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688–1788 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977).

2. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, paperback ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 309.

3. George H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (New York: D. Appleton, 1866), 82–87.

4. Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 129–30; Alice D. Adams, The Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery in America, 1808–1831 (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1908), 95; Marc M. Arkin, “The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 75–98; Ronald G. Walters, “The Boundaries of Abolitionism,” in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, eds. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 4.

5. Jacqueline Bacon, and Glen McClish, “Descendents of Africa, Sons of ‘76: Exploring Early African-American Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2006): 1–29; Jacqueline Bacon, and Glen McClish, “Reinventing the Master’s Tools: Nineteenth-Century African-American Literary Societies of Philadelphia and Rhetorical Education,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2000): 19–47; Glen McClish, “William G. Allen’s ‘Orators and Oratory’: Inventional Amalgamation, Pathos, and the Characterization of Violence in African-American Abolitionist Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2005): 47–72; Glen McClish, “A Man of Feeling, a Man of Colour: James Forten and the Rise of African American Deliberative Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 25, no. 3 (2007): 297–328; Glen McClish, “‘Pardon Me for the Digression’: Robert Forten and James Forten Jr. Address the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 15, no. 2 (2012): 129–58; Glen McClish, and Jacqueline Bacon, “‘I Am Full of Matter’: A Rhetorical Analysis of Daniel Coker’s A Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister,” Journal of Communication & Religion 29, no. 2 (2006): 315–46; Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990); Patricia Roberts-Miller, “John Quincy Adams’s Amistad Argument: The Problem of Outrage; Or, the Constraints of Decorum,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2002): 5–25; and Bjørn F. Stillion Southard, “Polyvocality and Personae of Blackness in Early Nineteenth-Century Slavery Discourse: The Counter Memorial against African Colonization, 1816,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 2 (2012): 235–65.

6. Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.

7. Stephen Browne, “‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 3 (1994): 278. See also Hariman, Political Style, 4.

8. John M. Murphy, “Inventing Authority: Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Orchestration of Rhetorical Traditions,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84, no. 1 (1997): 72.

9. George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 122.

10. Steven Shankman, Pope’s Iliad: Homer in the Age of Passion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 63–64.

11. Cicero, Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 363. Regarding the influence of the Ciceronian perspective on other Roman rhetorical treatises, see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), 8.

12. Cicero, Orator, 363.

13. Cicero, Orator, 363.

14. Cicero, Orator, 363.

15. [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 267.

16. Cicero, Orator, 363.

17. Cicero, Orator, 357.

18. Cicero, Orator, 379.

19. Čelica Milovanović-Barham, “Three Levels of Style in Augustine of Hippo and Gregory of Nazianzus,” Rhetorica 11, no. 1 (1993): 5. It should be noted that Cicero did not neglect the role of the audience in style, as he believed that a rhetor’s style should attempt to appeal to the emotions or aesthetic tastes of the audience. See Milovanović-Barham, “Three Levels of Style,” 2.

20. This is not to say that these texts should be noted for their mastery of the plain style. Rather, because it is so easy to dismiss the plain style as meager, there is less chance of appreciating the artistry of plainness.

21. Luella M. Wright, The Literary Life of the Early Friends, 1650–1725 (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 27.

22. Martin L. Warren, “The Quakers as Parrhesiasts: Frank Speech and Plain Speaking as the Fruits of Silence,” Quaker History 98, no. 2 (2009): 2.

23. One of the most noted elements of the way in which Quakers addressed others was their pronominal usage. Quakers would not use “you” as second person plural, preferring “thou” or “thee.” As Richard Bauman argues, “At all its levels,” even the smallest grammatical ones, “the mission of Truth was intimately bound up with the use of speech.” Richard Bauman, “Aspects of 17^th Century Quaker Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56, no. 1 (1970): 68.

24. Bauman, “Aspects of 17^th Century Quaker Rhetoric,” 69.

25. J. William Frost, “The Dry Bones of Quaker Theology,” Church History 39, no. 4 (1970): 508.

26. Howard Brinton, Friends for 300 Years (New York: Harper and Bros., 1952), 135.

27. Michael P. Graves, “‘Thou Art but a Youth’: Thomas Chalkley Enacts and Defends the Early Quaker Impromptu Sermon,” in Rhetoric, Religion, and the Roots of Identity in British Colonial America, ed. James R. Andrews (Lansing: Michigan State Press, 2007), 229.

28. Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 137, 139.

29. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 301.

30. Roger E. Moore, “Quaker Writing in the Seventeenth Century,” in Teaching Early Modern English Prose, eds. Susannah Brietz Monta and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Modern Language Association, 2010), 133–34.

31. Katharine Gerbner, “‘We Are Against the Traffik of Men-Body’: The Germantown Quaker Protest of 1688 and the Origins of American Abolitionism,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 74, no. 2 (2007): 161–67. On epistles, see T. Canby Jones, ed. The Power of the Lord is over All: The Pastoral Letters of George Fox (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1989).

32. Herbert Aptheker, “The Quakers and Negro Slavery,” Journal of Negro History 25, no. 3 (1940): 333.

33. Katharine Gerbner, “Antislavery in Print: The Germantown Protest, the ‘Exhortation,’ and the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Debate on Slavery,” Early American Studies 9, no. 3 (2011): 559.

34. Gerbner, “‘We Are Against,’” 153. It is noteworthy that Penn bought and owned slaves at the time of the Germantown Quakers’ petition. See Davis, Problem of Slavery, 304; and Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 10–11.

35. Drake, Quakers and Slavery, 4.

36. J. William Frost, ed. The Quaker Origins of Antislavery (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1980), 11.

37. Gerbner, “‘We Are Against,’” 161.

38. Gerret Hendericks, Derick up de Graeff, Francis Daniell Pastorius, and Abraham up den Graef, “Quaker Protest Against Slavery in the New World,” 18 April 1688, Haverford College Manuscript Collection, HC09-10001.The original Germantown Quaker petition is available to view online at http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/ref/collection/HC_QuakSlav/id/5837. The original text is housed at Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections. All quotations from and references to the petition are from the original, with minor adjustments made in formatting for readability, and are cited parenthetically henceforth.

39. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, vol. 3., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 378.

40. Graves, “Thou Art but a Youth,” 260. See also Michael Graves, “The British Quaker Sermon, 1689-1901,” in Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689–1901, eds. Keith A. Francis and William Gibson, 103–04 (London: Oxford University Press, 2012).

41. Michael Graves, “Ministry and Preaching,” in Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies, eds. Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion (London: Oxford University Press, 2013), 283; and Graves, “Thou Art but a Youth,” 260.

42. Matthew 7:12: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets” (King James ed.).

43. Moore, “Quaker Writing,” 133.

44. Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 79.

45. Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 226.

46. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 27–134.

47. Chaïm Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 16.

48. Quoted in Gerbner, “‘We Are Against’,” 170.

49. Drake, Quakers, 13.

50. Beth Ann Rothermel, “Prophets, Friends, Conversationalists: Quaker Rhetorical Culture, Women’s Commonplace Books, and the Art of Invention, 1775–1840,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2013): 84–86.

51. Elbert Russell, The History of Quakerism (New York: Macmillan, 1942), 12.

52. Ernest G. Bormann, The Force of Fantasy: Restoring the American Dream (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 29.

53. Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 52.

54. Stephen Foster, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), xiv.

55. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–4.

56. Rufus Jones, The Later Period of Quakerism, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1921), 33.

57. For example, drawing from Paul’s epistles, Calvinists, and later, Puritans, heeded warnings against the “allurements of the imagination.” Harold Fisch, “The Puritans and the Reform of Prose-Style,” English Literary History 19, no. 4 (1952): 232.

58. William E. Wiethoff, “The Trials of Anne Hutchison,” in Andrews, Rhetoric, Religion, and the Roots of Identity, 193.

59. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 125.

60. Eugene E. White, Puritan Rhetoric: The Issue of Emotion in Religion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 16.

61. White, Puritan Rhetoric, 16.

62. Frost, “Dry Bones,” 507.

63. Miller, New England Mind, 328.

64. Miller, New England Mind, 334.

65. Fisch, “Puritans,” 235.

66. Ronald F. Reid, “Puritan Rhetoric and America’s Civil Religion: A Study of Three Special Occasion Sermons,” in Andrews, Rhetoric, Religion, and the Roots of Identity, 68.

67. Howard H. Martin, “Puritan Preachers on Preaching: Notes on American Colonial Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 50, no. 3 (1964): 285.

68. Patricia Roberts-Miller, Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 90.

69. Roberts-Miller, Voices, 91.

70. Miller, Puritan Mind, 333.

71. Roberts-Miller, Voices, 40.

72. Roberts-Miller, Voices, 81.

73. Roberts-Miller, Voices, 78.

74. Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 148.

75. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family: Essays on Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston: Trustees of the Public Library, 1956), 109.

76. Morgan, Puritan Family, 112.

77. Morgan, Puritan Family, 112.

78. Cotton Mather, A Good Master Well Served: A Discourse on the Necessary Properties & Practice of a Good Servant in Every Kind of Servitude: And of the Methods that should be Taken by the Heads of a Family, to Obtain Such a Servant (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1696), 38.

79. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory: Or, a Summ of Practical Theologie, and Causes of Conscience (London: Printed by Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1673), 557.

80. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia by The University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 200.

81. Mark A. Peterson, “The Selling of Joseph: Bostonians, Antislavery, and the Protestant International, 1689-1733,” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 3.

82. Moore, Notes, 48–50.

83. Kenneth Davies, The Royal African Company (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 129–52.

84. William Bedford Clark, “Caveat Emptor! Judge Sewall vs. Slavery,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 9, no. 2 (1976): 20–21.

85. Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph a Memorial (Boston: Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1700). Sewall’s pamphlet is available to view online at http://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?old=1&item_id=57. The original text is housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society. All references to Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph A Memorial refer to the original and are cited parenthetically henceforth.

86. The four objections that he refuted were: (1) That Africans were descendants of Cham and thus have the curse of Cham, (2) Africans should be taken from “Pagan Country, into places where the Gospel is preached,” (3) “Africans have Wars with one another: our ships bring lawful Captives taken in those Wars,” and (4) Abraham purchased servants (3–4).

87. Samuel Sewall, Letter-book of Samuel Sewall, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. I, Sixth Series (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1886), 326.

88. Adam was an indentured servant to Saffin. As Adam’s term of service was coming to an end, Saffin made it clear he would not honor the terms of the initial agreement and planned to keep Adam in servitude.

89. Moore, Notes, 252.

90. Moore, Notes, 253.

91. Lawrence W. Towner, “The Sewall-Saffin Dialogue on Slavery,” William and Mary Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1964): 46.

92. Towner, “Sewall-Saffin Dialogue,” 49.

93. David Zarefsky, “Public Address Scholarship in the New Century: Achievements and Challenges,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, eds. Shawn J. Parry Giles and J. Michael Hogan (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 79.

94. Zarefsky, “Public Address Scholarship,” 79.

95. Lester C. Olson uses the term recirculation in a slightly different manner, describing it as “a precise relationship among a body of remarkably similar compositions patterned deliberately after an earlier, almost identical composition.” In the present essay, the recirculated composition is the original text, with new contexts and norms providing new ways of understanding its meaning. See Lester C. Olson, “Pictorial Representations of British America Resisting Rape: Rhetorical Re-Circulation of a Print Series Portraying the Boston Port Bill of 1774,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 1 (2009): 3.

96. Leroy Hopkins, “The Germantown Protest: Origins of Abolitionism among the German Residents of Southeastern PA,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 23 (1988): 22.

97. Samuel W. Pennypacker, “The Settlement of Germantown, and the Causes Which Led to It,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 4, no. 1 (1880): 28.

98. William Hull, William Penn and the Dutch Quaker Migration in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA: Patterson & White, 1932), 299.

99. “Germantown Meeting and Racial Justice: A Long Journey Continues,” Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, accessed June 14, 2014, http://www.pym.org/worship-ministry/2014/06/germantown-meeting-racial-justice-a-long-journey-continues/

100. George W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, vol. 1. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 210.

101. Williams, History, 210.

102. Clark, “‘Caveat Emptor!’” 26.

103. Williams, History, 217.

104. Some examples of the plain style in composition books include, in chronological order: William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, 1st ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1959); Rudolf Flesch, The ABC of Style: A Guide to Plain English (New York: Harper & Row, 1964); Thomas H. Cain Common Sense about Writing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967); John Durham and Paul Zall, Plain Style (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); Martin Cutts, The Plain English Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Christopher Lasch and Stewart Angas Weaver, Plain Style: A Guide to Written English (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

105. Plain Writing Act of 2010. Pub. L. No. 111-274. 124 Stat. 2861–2863 (2010).

106. Ian Barnard, “The Ruse of Clarity,” College Composition and Communication 61, no. 3 (2010): 437; and Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 260.