Quaker History / Slavery / Book Review - Bury the Chains

Times Online, UK – February 18, 2005
Mother Jones - February 14, 2005

... These tactics were so effective that Joseph Woods, a Quaker wool merchant and one of the abolition committee’s founding members, wrote that the British ... The campaign succeeded, Hochschild believes, because the abolitionists “mastered one challenge that still faces anyone who cares about social and economic justice: drawing connections between the near and the distant”. This is exactly what his book does, demonstrating that a few dedicated people could
and still can change the world.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1488821,00.html

Mother Jones

....A scholarship student, Thomas Clarkson, won the 1785 Cambridge Latin Prize after devoting two months to researching and writing about slavery. But the winning mattered little, except that it drew attention to the essay and its writer, who would publish it in English as an antislavery tract. The publisher Clarkson found was a Quaker who introduced him to the few others, also Quakers, who not only believed slavery should be abolished but were willing to work for the great unlikelihood that someday it might be.

This chain of encounters and awakenings steered Clarkson away from a religious career into a passionate championing of the rights and humanity of the slaves in the British Empire. He quickly became the most effective activist the movement would have, one who gave the rest of his life -- nearly half a century -- over to the cause. Writing, investigating, talking, riding tens of thousands miles on horseback, he recruited, inspired, and connected the recruited and inspired into a movement. The Quakers who had organized a little earlier to abolish slavery had long needed a mainstream Anglican champion. In Clarkson they found a superb one, in close sympathy with them; he was by the end a Quaker in all but name.....

http://bsd.mojones.com/news/dailymojo/2005/02/liberation_conspiracies.html