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Warner Mifflin book cover
Warner Mifflin
Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist
2017
First Published
5.00
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Warner Mifflin—energetic, uncompromising, and reviled—was the key figure connecting the abolitionist movements before and after the American Revolution. A descendant of one of the pioneering families of William Penn's "Holy Experiment," Mifflin upheld the Quaker pacifist doctrine, carrying the peace testimony to Generals Howe and Washington across the blood-soaked Germantown battlefield and traveling several thousand miles by horse up and down the Atlantic seaboard to stiffen the spines of the beleaguered Quakers, harried and exiled for their neutrality during the war for independence. Mifflin was also a pioneer of slave reparations, championing the radical idea that after their liberation, Africans in America were entitled to cash payments and land or shared crop arrangements. Preaching "restitution," Mifflin led the way in making Kent County, Delaware, a center of reparationist doctrine. After the war, Mifflin became the premier legislative lobbyist of his generation, introducing methods of reaching state and national legislators to promote antislavery action. Detesting his repeated exercise of the right of petition and hating his argument that an all-seeing and affronted God would punish Americans for "national sins," many Southerners believed Mifflin was the most dangerous man in America—"a meddling fanatic" who stirred the embers of sectionalism after the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. Yet he inspired those who believed that the United States had betrayed its founding principles of natural and inalienable rights by allowing the cancer of slavery and the dispossession of Indian lands to continue in the 1790s. Writing in beautiful prose and marshaling fascinating evidence, Gary B. Nash constructs a convincing case that Mifflin belongs in the Quaker antislavery pantheon with William Southeby, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet.

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Author

Gary B. Nash
Gary B. Nash
Author · 14 books
Gary B. Nash received his B. A. from Princeton University in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1964. He earned the position of Director of the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught colonial and revolutionary American history since 1974. Nash has been the Director of the National Center for History in the Schools since 1994 and co-chaired the National History Standards Project from 1992-1996. His past positions include: Dean of Undergraduate and Intercollege Curricular Development, University of California, Los Angeles; President, Organization of American Historians; Dean, Council on Educational Development, University of California, Los Angeles; Assistant Professor, Department of History, Princeton University. He has received research grants from the University of California Institute of Humanities and American Philosophical Society and fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial and American Council of Learned Society. Nash was elected member of American Antiquarian Society, Society of American Historians, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as winning the University of California Distinguished Emeriti Award and the Defense of Academic Freedom Award, from the National Council for Social Studies. Nash is the Founding Member and has been on the Board of Trustees of the National Council for History Education since 1990 and was Vice-Chair in 1992. He was also President of the Organization of American Historians, from 1994-95, the Primary History Consultant for the Schlessinger Production series in United States History, from 1996-97, he was on the University of California Bicentennial Committee, from 1975-76 and was an Historical Consultant and Writer for "Lights of Liberty," sound and light tour, Philadelphia, PA, in 1999.
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