For those interested in the history of early Quaker abolitionism, 2017 was a banner year with the publication of two excellent biographies about significant yet largely forgotten eighteenth-century Quaker abolitionists. In The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, Markus Rediker reintroduced readers to one of the most misunderstood Quaker abolitionists. Lay, who has often been described as eccentric or, even worse, deranged, challenged the proslavery consensus among Quakers in the 1730s. Lay was ultimately disowned for his antics, which included splattering his coreligionists with fake blood at the 1738 gathering of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Beacon, 2017). In Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist, Gary Nash restores yet another key figure in the eighteenth-century abolitionist movement. Mifflin, who was active in the second half of the eighteenth century, benefitted from the early efforts of Lay as well as the activism of the Quaker reformers Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, who have also been the subject of recent biographies (Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009; and Geoffrey Plank, John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Mifflin is an important transitional figure between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionism. Like Lay, he was criticized for his fanatical views. Woolman and Benezet avoided such charges, according to Nash, “because they wrote at a time when even those most heavily invested in chattel bondage regretted the cruel, coercive system, even agreeing they were corrupting themselves as they exploited the enslaved.” Where Woolman and Benezet “penn[ed] screeds deploring slavery,” Mifflin “was different, raising the bar of antislavery commitment,” focusing instead on “lobbying legislatures and pelting them with memorials.” Mifflin “transform[ed] antislavery sentiment into antislavery action” (12). In this way, along with his calls for reparations for freed slaves, Mifflin anticipated the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement.

In his book, Nash extends the discussion he began in the 2015 essay, “Warner Mifflin (1745–1798): The Remarkable Life of an Unflinching Abolitionist” (in Quakers and Their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause, 1754–1808, edited by Maurice Jackson and Sue Kozel, Routledge, 2015). As Nash notes in his book, in writing that essay he discovered that Mifflin had been “hidden in plain sight—that is, to be found in the correspondence of founding fathers, in the newspapers of the revolutionary era, in his other essays published in Philadelphia, and in his extensive correspondence strewn across a dozen repositories stretching from Massachusetts to California” (339). Although Mifflin's inner life proved more challenging to reconstruct, Nash has managed to piece together the story of Mifflin's public and private lives using Quaker meeting minutes, private correspondence, public records, and memorials written after his death, as well as the papers and writings of founding fathers and Enlightenment luminaries such as St. John de Crevecoeur, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, and Thomas Clarkson. As a result of this painstaking research, Nash helps us understand the moral intensity that drove Mifflin, whose commitment to the antislavery cause often came at great cost: “If it was a trial for Warner, wrestling with himself to balance his family responsibilities with his dedication to meeting with Friends in Philadelphia, it was surely even more of a trial for the ailing Elizabeth [Warner's first wife] with her brood of children” (92). Mifflin was, as Nash writes, “a man possessed in the name of Jesus,” a man who worried he would displease God with inadequate efforts on behalf of enslaved and free blacks (189).

Nash persuasively describes Mifflin as a pioneer of reparations for enslaved Africans, the idea that enslaved men and women had the right to their freedom and to some form of restitution for their enslavement. The idea of reparations, which entered political discourse in the era of the Civil Rights movement, is a thorny issue that continues to garner significant public attention (Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic Monthly, August 23, 2014). Nash exposes the eighteenth-century origins of this idea. For Mifflin, the idea of restitution was not merely an intellectual debate, as he had “a hefty pecuniary interest in slaveowning” (104). Mifflin's ideas about restitution evolved as he worked to disentangle himself and other Quakers from slaveholding. While Mifflin's efforts to achieve restitution for freed slaves had mixed results, he “had made restitution an issue and in the process produced a degree of reparationism in mid-Delaware exceeding that of any other part of seaboard Quakerdom” (107). In a regrettable footnote, Mifflin's son Warner Mifflin, Jr., “through passivity or reasons buried in history,” failed to save Elijah Morris, son of Sampson, one of the slaves his father had freed in 1775. Likely forced by financial circumstances, Sampson had indentured his son to the younger Mifflin, who in turn sold the boy's indenture. In a series of subsequent transactions, Elijah “disappeared into the maw of the cotton boom of the Mississippi River” (234–235).

In Warner Mifflin, Gary Nash has made an important contribution to the history of early Quaker abolitionism, continuing his tradition of excellence in early American scholarship. For scholars of abolitionism and Quakerism, Warner Mifflin fills a significant gap in the historiography. Nash's highly readable and accessible book also has the potential to reach a broader audience, introducing new readers to Mifflin and to his calls for both freedom and reparations for enslaved black Americans. And that is perhaps the greatest contribution of this book. By recovering the story of Warner Mifflin, Nash has helped create a more complete story of slavery, race, and reparations in American history.