I. ‘His Eye Kindled as if Eager for the Conflict:’ Burleigh’s Early Abolitionist Career

Charles Calistus Burleigh’s religious perspectives, including a strong predisposition towards religious tolerance, were shaped by his upbringing in northeastern Connecticut. His parents, Rinaldo and Lydia Bradford Burleigh, were mainstays of their Congregational Church in Plainfield, Connecticut. His father, a Deacon, was prominent in the community as the head teacher at the prestigious Plainfield Academy, and his mother was a powerful moral force, beloved by her reformist children.⁸ A lineal descendant from William Bradford, she took her Pilgrim heritage as a rugged challenge to focus on truth-seeking rather than self-congratulation.⁹ Charles Burleigh proudly continued his mother’s mission of moral urgency, but drew from an ever-broadening set of sources. He also had a remarkable set of siblings, all six of whom worked with him at various times in Abolition and other reforms.¹⁰

As a young man, Charles Calistus Burleigh trained for the legal profession, but chose instead to spend his entire adult life as an indefatigable worker in the Benevolent Empire of nineteenth-century reform movements. Best known as a radical Garrisonian Abolitionist in the titanic struggle to end slavery, he connected all the causes for justice, making important contributions to women’s rights, peace, non-violence, racial equality, temperance, opposition to Native American removal, and authored a significant full-length treatise against capital punishment.¹¹

Burleigh’s prominent career in Immediate Abolitionism constituted a life lived with integrity and energy. His theology and philosophy always articulated the spiritual equality of all human beings. He lived the consequences and dangers of his moral choices at the tactical level, where he exemplified non-violent peace principles under the constant threat of provocative mob violence directed against him and his coadjutors. Burleigh’s constant advocacy of equal justice for all people meant that every day brought the risk of violence, and with it another opportunity to viscerally demonstrate the viability of non-violent practice.

Charles and three of his siblings — Mary Frances, John, and William — participated directly in support of the famous Canterbury Female Academy for Black Women, that took place from 1833–1834 in the town adjacent to their native Plainfield.¹² This school, taught by birthright Quaker-turned-Baptist Prudence Crandall (1803–1890), was a bold move for educational equality and citizenship across all races and genders. She had led a ‘select academy’ for women with the support and blessing of the town’s selectmen. After her household helper, a Black Bostonian woman named Maria Davis, started supplying Crandall with copies of the Abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, the White teacher reset her moral compass. She came to understand the pervasive nature of racism, and how ‘the prejudices of the whites…was deep and inveterate’.¹³ This prepared Crandall for the moment when a local African-American resident, Sarah Harris, asked to be admitted to the Academy in 1832. When Crandall agreed to accept Sarah as a student, the White leaders of Canterbury were outraged. So Crandall recalibrated once again, re-opening her Academy — which offered the highest level of education available to women at that time, roughly equivalent to Advanced Placement high school classes now — exclusively for Black women, in the spring of 1833. The Burleighs were one of the few local White families that rose to support Crandall and the Black teenagers attending the school. The four eldest Burleigh siblings and their parents joined newly-created local anti-slavery societies — the Plainfield Anti-Slavery Society for the men, and the Brooklyn [Connecticut] Female Anti-Slavery Society for the women. While John lectured locally on Abolition, Mary and William actually joined the faculty of the school, which meant that they spent their days in an inter-racial environment of mutual respect, a markedly daring break with social convention.¹⁴

Charles’s support of the Canterbury Academy came through his ‘calling’ to edit what became Connecticut’s first Immediate Abolitionist newspaper, The Unionist. Two of Crandall’s endorsers — Unitarian minister Samuel J. May and New York financier Arthur Tappan — felt that an Abolitionist newspaper dedicated to telling the truth about the school was necessary to turn the tide of local opposition. Recalling an editorial that Burleigh had written, May went over to the Burleigh farm to ask him to edit the paper:

At the hard, hot work of haying, he was not attired in his Sunday clothes, but in his shirt-sleeves, with pants the worse for wear; and, although he then believed in shaving, no razor had touched his beard since the first day of the week. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Samuel of old saw, in the ruddy son of Jesse, as he came up from the sheepfold, the man whom the Lord would have him anoint, more clearly that I saw C.C. Burleigh the man whom I should choose to be my assistant in that emergency. So soon as I had told him what I wanted of him, his eye kindled as if eager for the conflict.¹⁵

Burleigh’s editing of The Unionist was decisive for his life’s direction. While he did finish his legal studies and pass the bar, he never practiced law, preferring to use the close argumentation skills he had learned to make the case against slavery and for human equality.

The religious eclecticism that would mark Charles C. Burleigh’s life can be seen in miniature in this meeting between Tappan, a staunch evangelical Baptist, May, who at that time was Connecticut’s only Unitarian minister, and the Congregationally-imbued but open-minded Burleigh. Similarly, Crandall’s Academy, and the students within it, represented many different forms of Protestant Christianity: Baptist, Congregational, Quaker, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian, at the minimum. The growth of eastern Connecticut’s Quaker community — of which Crandall’s parents were a part — forms another strand of neighbours and associates whom Charles Burleigh would have come into contact with during the school’s life. While Crandall had become a Baptist in 1831, she still had been shaped by Quaker culture. This included her education at the New England Yearly Meeting Boarding School in Providence, her plain dress and disregard for fashion, and her forthright character in general. Human equality took precedence over denominational purity in the community where Burleigh commenced his Abolitionist career.

Burleigh’s editorial voice and tone combined wit and clear reasoning with staunch adhesion to principles. Consider this commentary on women’s participation in anti-slavery, preceding by four years the controversy on that issue that would lead to schisms within the Abolition movement:

The Unionist will be taken, (says our neighbor,) by all the ladies in the county. We hail the omen with joy. The patronage of the ladies we should value highly, both from the exalted opinions we entertain of the correctness of their taste and judgement, and from a knowledge of the great influence they exert. ‘Woman is strongest,’ said (and proved) the young Israelite to Darius, ‘but above all things Truth beareth away the victory’. Having both on our side what have we to fear.¹⁶

Whether accidentally or deliberately, Burleigh reads the Biblical riddle of strength, and Zerubbabel’s encomium to truth, to be a positive and accurate portrayal of women. He welcomes women subscribers based on his previous experience (presumably with his mother, his sister, and likely Prudence Crandall and the Black women students), to assert that if his work is bolstered by both women and truth, the reform movements will be unstoppable. Burleigh seemed always ready to listen to women, and included their voices and perspectives; once the Woman’s Right movement started, he attended many of its conventions, where he was a respected speaker.¹⁷

An explicit Quaker influence on Burleigh at the launch of his career came through the writings of the English Quaker linen-draper philosopher, Jonathan Dymond (1796–1828). Dymond endorsed ethical absolutes as incumbent upon Christians, and championed the results of women’s education and ministry within the Society of Friends. Northeastern Connecticut, specifically the Windham County Peace Society, of which Samuel J. May was an officer, constituted the beachhead of Dymond’s American readership.¹⁸ This means that Charles C. Burleigh was an early reader of this significant articulation of the Peace Testimony — writings powerful enough that they were prized by Channing, Garrison, Thoreau, and Tolstoy among famous pacifists.¹⁹ Dymond’s moral absolutism calls for an Imitatio Christi which takes its direction from the Passion narrative and Jesus’s rejection of violence during his arrest at Gethsemane (Mt. 26:52). Dymond asks ‘if, in defence [sic] of himself from the hands of bloody ruffians, his religion did not allow the sword to be drawn, for what reason can it be lawful to draw it’?²⁰ Charles C. Burleigh is among the first newspaper editors in the United States to publish lengthy extracts from Dymond’s work, which appeared in 1834 as lead articles in The Unionist.²¹

American Abolitionists frequently faced mobs determined to silence them; acts of violence against their persons and property were frequent, leading Henry B. Stanton to recall that ‘Abolitionists were compelled…to study the science of mobs’.²² Their forbearance was not accidental; it was a conscious, increasingly refined and articulated theory of Non-Resistance to violence.²³ Its credible theory of non-violence wavered but held until wrecked on the shoals of the Civil War.²⁴ Matthew’s fifth chapter is the New Testament source that forms the foundational theological and philosophic ground for Christian non-resistance. The nominal inspiration from Mt. 5:39 reads ‘But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also’. This quote occurs within the Beatitudes in Mt. 5, so not resisting evil sits astride Jesus’ calls to ‘love thine enemies (Mt. 5:44) and ‘be ye therefore perfect’ (Mt. 5:48), as well as the general benediction upon ‘the peacemakers’ (Mt. 5:9).

Historically, once Christian non-resistance and non-violence were eschewed following the Constantinian incorporation of Christianity into the sinews of the Roman Empire, and Augustine’s deft baptising of violence under ‘just war theory’ and the ‘two cities’ doctrine, Christian non-resistance barely survived until the rise of the historic Peace churches from the fifteenth century on.²⁵ The life and example of the early Friends, growing directly from, but in opposition to, the Puritan Revolution’s explicit violence, was especially influential in the English-speaking world.

The first outstanding American exemplars of Christian peace practices were the Moravians, Germanic Anabaptists, and Quakers, all of whom had moved to North America to escape persecution. They were thus already aware of the ultimate risk of non-violence: martyrdom. America had its first such martyrs in the execution of Mary Dyer and the four male Boston martyrs by Massachusetts Colony in 1659–1661, and the reprehensible massacre of Mohican and Lenape Moravians at Ohio’s Gnadenhutten settlement, where 96 people were put to death by American forces during the Revolutionary War in 1782. From these early sources and examples, the theory and practice of non-violence reached the Abolitionists, who already lamented the abundance of martyrs held in the thralls of slavery. To this, they proved willing to add their own bodies and lives. While rooted in Christian ideals, Abolitionist theory and practice of non-violence always went beyond denominational bounds, diffusing into and shaping American liberal religious and radical political thought.²⁶ Thus, the Abolitionists, writ large, are a vector of the universalisation of a moral practice with strong Quaker roots.

Non-violence was never an abstraction for active Abolitionists. Most Abolitionist agents and editors proved their mettle in constant confrontations and threats of violence. Once he had finished absorbing Dymond’s moral absolutism, Charles C. Burleigh’s principles were put to the test immediately. Between 1834 and 1838, he was a central player in three of the most patently terrifying incidents of violence against Abolitionists – the late-night attack on the Canterbury Female Academy in 1834; the mobbing of William Lloyd Garrison in Boston in 1835; and the destruction by arson of Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hall four days after its opening in 1838. In each of these cases, Burleigh was directly involved in rescuing who and what he could from the wrath of the mob, writing first-hand accounts of the violence, and editing the newspapers that reported on them. He also wrote of the steadfastness of the women threatened in these attacks, without any chauvinistic chivalry, but on the basis of their own manifest bravery.

The attack that closed the Canterbury Female Academy in September of 1834 took the form of a loud, coordinated attack on the schoolhouse in the middle of the night, resulting in every window in the structure being broken. Some students sleeping on the ground floor were in immediate danger from broken glass, as well as from the not-so-veiled threat of sexual assault. While there are no extant issues of The Unionist past April of 1834, and no known published extracts from it past July of 1834, evidence points to Charles C. Burleigh being in the Plainfield area, as he was completing his legal studies under local Judge Joseph Eaton.²⁷

Charles C. Burleigh likely went to the Academy the day after the attack, where he would have witnessed the fear and disappointment of the Black women students, provoking the reckoning with racism that all White activists had to face. When White Abolitionists had to viscerally confront the magnitude of racism which their African-American friends endured, it was a sobering moment. While Charles C. Burleigh’s reflections on the day are lost to history (for now),²⁸ the comments of his coadjutor and life-long friend, Samuel J. May, are worth repeating:

The pupils were called together, and I was requested to announce to them our decision. Never before had I felt so deeply sensible of the cruelty of the persecution which had been carried on for eighteen months, in that New England village against a family of defenceless females. Twenty harmless, well-behaved girls, whose only offence against the peace of the community was that they had come together there to obtain useful knowledge and moral culture, were to be told that they had better go away, because, forsooth, the house in which they dwelt would not be protected by the guardians of justice, the men of influence in the village where it was situated. The words almost blistered my lips. I felt ashamed of Canterbury, ashamed of Connecticut, ashamed of my country, ashamed of my color. Thus ended the generous, disinterested, philanthropic, Christian enterprise of Prudence Crandall.²⁹

From this scene of Black women’s courage in the face of status quo White supremacy and vigilante violence, Charles C. Burleigh’s experience with mob violence continued the next year when he moved to Massachusetts. He was working for the Abolition movement as a speaker and editor; his insights and dedication to the cause were especially prized by William Lloyd Garrison at the offices of The Liberator. Thus he was present at the attempted mobbing of Garrison on October 21, 1835.

Burleigh was at the Liberator offices for virtually that entire day. The threats of violence stemmed from a publicised meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. A mob gathered in opposition because they thought a ‘foreigner’ – British Abolitionist, George Thompson — was going to address the women’s meeting. But Thompson was not present, so the mob vented their invectives on the women; their comments were especially malevolent because the meeting was racially integrated. When the bullies tried to force their way into the meeting, the president of the Female Anti-Slavery Society, Maria Weston Chapman, stood up to them and confronted them verbally. She guaranteed the safety of all the participants leaving the building, unaware that Garrison was still trapped in the office (she would suffer pangs of guilt about that after the fact).³⁰ Burleigh witnessed all of this, and spoke of it in his public appearances, such as this speech from 1837 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania:

[Burleigh] spoke of the women of Boston— the intrepid band of females— who, amidst them, persevered in their duty with holy firmness. He spoke of the prayer of its devoted President, rising amidst the howls of the banditti around her, calm, untremulous, and full of forgiveness, and the spirit of the martyr.³¹

After the women had left, the mob nearly caught Garrison, who had to be hustled through back doors, and rescued by being placed in protective custody in the jail by the Mayor. The danger to Garrison’s life being too great for him to stay in Boston, Charles C. Burleigh was tasked with writing The Liberator’s account of the attack. He was clear and accurate. His final panegyric on the Abolitionists’ behaviour speaks to his non-violence:

The Abolitionists, so far as I could observe, and I believe generally, remained true to their principle, of rather suffering wrong than doing wrong. Not one raised his hand to repel violence by violence, though they were sufficiently numerous and possessed enough of physical power to have wreaked bloody vengeance upon their injurers had they acted on the common principles of retaliation. But they do not, and I trust never will, act on those principles. They have a higher and a better standard of morality—the peaceful principles of the gospel. Their forbearance was not owing to a want of courage. There were men among them—yes, many men—ready to lay down their lives, had duty required the sacrifice. Nothing which looked like fear could be discovered in their conduct or their language. If ever men have manifested courage—the best of courage—that which opposes meek endurance, but unflinching perseverance, to brutal outrage—the Abolitionists have manifested such courage. Can such men be crushed? Wait the event and see.³²

The third major event of violence was the arson destruction of Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia, mere days after its opening, May 17, 1838 (Figure 2). The building was planned as a general meeting place for all the reform movements, with the Abolitionists leading the way. The Hall featured book stores, a free labour store, nascent archives of abolitionist newspapers, and meeting rooms for conventions and local organisations, with seating for up to 3,000 people.³³ The Abolitionists dubbed it a ‘Temple of Liberty’.³⁴

Figure 2

Destruction by Fire of Pennsylvania Hall. Illustration from Pennsylvania Hall Association, History of Pennsylvania Hall.

Burleigh spoke from the podium on the 15^th, the second day of the Hall’s functioning existence, addressing the injustices of Native American removal, and reading John Greenleaf Whittier’s Pennsylvania Hall poem.³⁵ He continued to be present each day in the audience, including on the fateful final day of May 17, when the Requited Labor Convention, and the Antislavery Convention of American Women were meeting.³⁶ The gathering mob outside of the Hall drowned out some of the speakers, and as the sessions continued, those inside realised that ‘we were entirely abandoned by the civil authorities to thousands of lawless assailants’. In this emergency, five women from the conference put non-violence to the test:

At this crisis a magnanimous act was performed which was more than manly, it was womanly. Five females came voluntarily out of the Convention to speak to the mob, passed through the guard and went into the midst of the crowd, into the streets. Then separating themselves from each other they took up different positions, and stood firm to their purpose like so many monuments of virtue in the midst of corruption; pleading with them for the right to hold their meeting peaceably, and for the liberty of the slave. Sometimes the mob would hear them, at others a scream would ascend as though the great fountain from beneath had broken up. True, I have never seen the face of an angel, but when they returned to the house their appearance was somewhat superhuman — I shall call it angelic. Two of them I knew well, Harriet Burleigh and Mary Grew.³⁷

Harriet Burleigh was Charles’s sister-in-law, married to his brother William; one assumes Charles and Harriet discussed her actions. He also likely witnessed the spectacle of the women departing the Hall, when the anti-racist sisterhood of women ensured that the White women walked arm-in-arm with the Black women to protect them. The women were ‘perfectly collected’ — unmoved by the threatening tempest. ‘The cause which they were assembled to promote, is one that nerves the soul to deeds of noble daring [,] these “American Women” passed through the whole without manifesting any sign of fear, as if conscious of their own greatness and of the protecting care of the God of the oppressed’.³⁸ The day after the destruction, Charles Burleigh helped James and Lucretia Mott to move their belongings to safety from the still infuriate mob.³⁹

The Pennsylvania Hall Association presented Burleigh with an engraved copy of the memorial history they wrote. Their salutation to him is succinct yet touchingly comprehensive:

Charles C. Burleigh

the able advocate of

The rights of man,

not only of the slave, but also of the red man

—of all that are oppressed.

To caste, to sect, or color unconfined

Free as the sunshine, and the chainless mind.⁴⁰

In Canterbury, Boston, and Philadelphia, Charles C. Burleigh had witnessed inter-racial groups of women practicing non-violence under genuine duress from dangerous mobs. There were Quaker women present in each of these taut encounters, but the groups were decidedly multi-denominational.⁴¹ In Canterbury and Philadelphia, women from his own family (his sister Mary and sister-in-law Harriet) played crucial roles, implying that non-violence was a practice discussed within the family. Three prominent instances, all with the same result: women modelling an America that could overcome racial prejudice and sexist dismissal of women’s strength and intelligence, facing down violent opposition. Furthermore, especially in Boston and Philadelphia, Burleigh himself was a participant, and stood his non-violent ground without wavering. His bravery was recognised by Garrison in Boston, and by the Pennsylvania Hall Association in their thanks to him. Burleigh’s sustained commitment to Black civil rights and to Women’s rights owes much to the strong women he witnessed.

II. ‘The Greatness of the Issue at Stake is Life’: Increasing Quaker Influences

Charles C. Burleigh relocated to eastern Pennsylvania in 1836, combining extensive anti-slavery lecturing tours with comprehensive editing work. He first assisted the veteran Quaker anti-slavery stalwart, Benjamin Lundy, in his work on the National Enquirer and Constitutional Advocate of Universal Liberty (1836–1838), and then worked with the famed Quaker poet, editor, and activist, John Greenleaf Whittier, from 1838 when Whittier assumed the editor’s chair and renamed the paper The Pennsylvania Freeman. While Whittier and Burleigh shared a good deal of mutual appreciation, the factional drama within the Abolitionist movement drove them apart in 1840. Whittier resigned his editorship in March of that year, and by April, Charles C. Burleigh was officially in charge of The Pennsylvania Freeman.⁴²

Despite The Pennsylvania Freeman being the organ of an ecumenical body of Abolitionists (the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society), the change of editorship to Burleigh did not result in changing Whittier’s Quaker dating conventions in numbering months and days of the week. Burleigh’s sympathy with Friends can also be seen in his reprinting of James Nayler’s dying testimony, a famed piece of Quaker rhetoric, with the following introduction: ‘There is more of true eloquence in the passage below, which at the request of a friend [lower-case sic] we most willingly publish, than in many a long speech of modern times’.⁴³

Charles C. Burleigh’s religious trajectory across the decades reveals a progressive liberalisation,⁴⁴ consistently intertwining political and spiritual dimensions. His embrace of Abolitionism served as an ersatz religion, along with his aforementioned non-denominational adoption/adaptation of Dymond’s morality. When he moved to Pennsylvania, the influence of Quaker lifeways had an effect, yet he never joined the Society. The reasons for this at a personal level are not clear, but during this time frame (from the late 1830s onward), Garrisonian Abolitionists, including Burleigh, were increasingly frustrated by, and critical of, the complicity of religious institutions with slavery’s status quo. This extended to the Quakers, especially those quietists and isolationists who shut their meeting house doors against reform speakers. Charles Burleigh encountered this at Elias Hicks’ meeting house in Jericho, Long Island, in April of 1842. In a letter to his brother George, Burleigh uses sarcastic exaggeration to express the refusal of the Quakers to let him hold a Temperance lecture in their Meeting house:

I have an appointment to talk Temperance to the Jericho folks….The pious Quakers — I mean a knot of the piousest of the meeting, for I believe the majority, have no objection, - are too good by a great deal, to let their meeting house be opened for such an unholy purpose, for don’t the scripture say ‘Israel shall dwell alone’, & hasn’t Geo. F White, (quite as high an authority, doubtless,) declared that to teach Total Abstinence from all intoxicating drinks, is blasphemy, & don’t the ‘hireling priests’ — some of them — favor the temperance cause, & therefore isn’t it all of the fold, & the advocates of it, all children of the devil, & those who enlist in it, all going to the devil?…But reason or no reason, the door is shut against the mg.⁴⁵

Likewise, Burleigh remained interested in, but wary of, utopian experimentation like that of Adin Ballou’s Hopedale. He admired Abby Kelley Foster and the practice of Come-Outerism, but didn’t join in that confrontational tactic. However, he was sufficiently confident in his own anti Sabbatarianism that he was arrested for distributing pamphlets on the Sabbath — in Pennsylvania.⁴⁶

Yet despite not being a member of the Society, Charles C. Burleigh continued to contribute to a universalisation of Quaker principles. This universalisation is a tendency Jonathan Dymond had foreseen. In an 1826 letter to his friend Susan Balkwill (of which Burleigh would have been unaware), Dymond noted that the ‘Cause of Peace is surely gaining ground’ and proudly declared that

the principles of Quakerism are the principles of unchangeable Truth. To many this may now be the language of bigotry. Be it so….I am inclined to hope that (after the approaching day is passed when slavery shall be abolished) the attention and the labours of Friends will be more conspicuously and publicly directed than they have hitherto been, to the question of War …. I doubt not that now is the time for Anti-slavery exertion. The time will come for anti-war exertion.⁴⁷

Dymond practiced this developing universalising in his own life, as he worked with non-Quaker peace organizations to expand the peace testimony outside of denominational boundaries.⁴⁸

Just over a decade later, the Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child sensed this dynamic, albeit in a more critical way, while standing outside of the Society of Friends:

When I remember what a remarkable testimony the early Friends bore…I could almost find it in my heart to weep at the too palpable proofs that little now remains of that which was full of life. I was saying this last winter, to George Ripley, a Unitarian minister of Boston. He replied beautifully, ‘Mourn not over their lifelessness. Truly the dead form alone remains; but the spirit that emanated from it is not dead, the word which they spake has gone out silently into everlasting time. What are these Temperance, and Peace, and Anti-Slavery Conventions, but a resuscitation of their principles?’

Child then added

every word and act that a human being sends forth lives forever. It is a spiritual seed cast into the wide field of opinion. Its results are too infinite for human calculation… Has not the one idea that rose silently in Elizabeth Heyrick’s mind spread, until it has almost become a World’s idea?⁴⁹

Elizabeth Heyrick (1769–1831), an outstanding British Quaker, had been the first to publish a fully articulated rationale of Immediate Abolition, in her 1824 pamphlet, ‘Immediate, not Gradual, Abolition’, that influenced Benjamin Lundy and radicalised William Lloyd Garrison.⁵⁰ As the American Female Anti-Slavery Societies repeatedly extolled Heyrick, she became a key conduit of the diffusion of Quaker ideas into America’s Benevolent Empire.

These two quotes — from Dymond and Child — are especially intriguing when placed next to each other. They point to a dialectic tension: when some Quaker meetings in the United States went quietist, the inspiration of the Society of Friends in the long history of anti-slavery became ever more crucial to many non-Quaker Abolitionists. One centrifugal direction saw some prominent Quakers in the Abolitionist and ‘sisterhood of reform’ movements⁵¹ — such as Prudence Crandall, Sophia Little, Abby Kelley Foster, and Elizabeth Buffum Chace — leave the Society of Friends to better enable their activism. In another direction — as in Child’s touchstone in Elizabeth Heyrick — the legacy of the Quakers was alive, even if it was no longer housed (exclusively, or even primarily) within the denomination. Charles C. Burleigh’s lived practice of Non-Resistance partakes of the spirit expressed here by Dymond, Ridley, and Child: infusing Quaker principles into the world. Pacifism and non-resistance were thus taken outside of sectarian religious divisions, but with substantial credit to the Quaker roots of these principles.

The outstanding luminary unifying this dialectic tension in America was Lucretia Mott. She stayed within the Society of Friends, while also fully engaged in multi-denominational reform projects, and consistently bringing Quaker principles into wider frameworks (as she does from Seneca Falls in 1848 to her defence of the Modoc people of California in the early 1870s). Charles C. Burleigh became a close friend and associate with Lucretia Mott. Charles refers to visiting Lucretia and James regularly; he also maintained a strong friendship with Mott’s daughter and son-in-law, Maria and Edward Davis, even naming his first child after Edward. In a letter to the family back in Plainfield, Charles conveyed Lucretia Mott’s thanks for knitting yarn that Lydia Burleigh had sent her.⁵²

An even more intimate Quaker alliance was forming for Burleigh. In 1842, Charles married Gertrude Kimber, a birthright Quaker and youngest daughter of Emmor Kimber (1775–1850), an abolitionist and educator since the final years of the 18th century, and Susannah Jackson Kimber (1773–1854).⁵³ A Burleigh family friend described her as ‘one of the gentlest and most beautiful of Quaker women from Chester county, Pennsylvania; in the completest sense, the high ideal of a spiritual helpmeet’,⁵⁴ and another pointed to her ‘rare mental gifts and brave consecration to reformatory movements’.⁵⁵ At the time of her courtship and marriage, Gertrude and her sister, Abby Kimber, were teaching at their father’s Kimberton Academy in Chester County, Pennsylvania. This near-contemporary description of the Academy indicates a commitment to peace principles (and good pedagogy):

The school was taught by Mr. Kimber and his accomplished daughters, and was conducted on principles somewhat different from those of most seminaries, there being no code of penal laws or rules in force. The plan of government was based upon the Golden Rule, — ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’, — and as Mr. Kimber and his daughters had the faculty of governing without any visible exercise of authority, the school stood very high, was prosperous, and had many scholars from other States and the West Indies.⁵⁶

Some students later recalled how Emmor Kimber, despite extending hospitality to Charles C. Burleigh on his Abolitionist speaking tours, was initially opposed to the marriage on the grounds ‘that Charles C. Burleigh was rather a drifter’ with consistently uncertain finances.⁵⁷ Somehow the couple overcame his objections, and the resulting marriage proved an enduring love match.

Neither father nor daughter raised religious difference as an obstacle to the marriage, though. Instead, Gertrude voluntarily resigned from the Uwchlan Monthly Meeting in September, 1842, writing that she was

[i]ntending marriage, with one not in membership with friends, and therefore having no desire longer to sustain my birthright, and wishing to enjoy the company of my new relations and friends, I hereby, though still retaining my attachment to the valuable principles of the society, do resign my right of membership therein.⁵⁸

Gertrude specifically says that she is not renouncing the ‘valuable principles of the society’, which, indeed, she does retain. In this sense, Charles and Gertrude started their married life sharing Quaker principles, even as they deemed membership in the Society superfluous. These principles included equality of the sexes. Like many abolitionist couples, Gertrude and Charles had a more equalitarian marriage than was the norm at the time; she conducted a small business early in their marriage, and spoke in her own right at Abolitionist and Temperance meetings.⁵⁹

A few years after his marriage, Charles Burleigh produced his longest written work, Thoughts on the Death Penalty, an extensive essay against Capital Punishment, published in Philadelphia in 1845. Within it he delivers an encomium to the moral influence of Quaker culture. After asserting that members of the Society of Friends are almost never arraigned for murder, he makes an interesting observation:

[Quakers] have been educated to regard the life of man as too sacred to be destroyed even in personal or national self-defense. Were the same sentiment which pervades that Society, as carefully instilled into the general mind, it would doubtless be stronger everywhere than it now is among Friends.⁶⁰

This simultaneous critique and compliment — that even the Quakers themselves could feel the sacrality of life more keenly than they already do, despite being cultural leaders in this regard, demonstrates the universalisation that Burleigh was aiming for — a universalisation that would be ever-expanding in its embrace of our shared humanity. Indeed, in the early pages of Thoughts on the Death Penalty, he eloquently elaborates on the humanity that is too often reduced (even now) to an anodyne formula that ‘every criminal on death row is someone’s child/spouse/parent’:

the greatness of the issue at stake [is] Life!-a brother’s life!-is what we have to deal with. Life!-with all its awful sanctity, with its solemnly mysterious relation to the Great Central Life whence it was breathed into man in the day when he became a living soul! A brother’s life! with all the trembling, eager hopes and warm desires and social affections which link it to surrounding life, and reach forth toward the thronging blessings of this godly world, its pleasant sounds and sights of beauty, the converse of friends, the bliss of home with its clustering comforts and domestic love, whatever can give joy in the contemplation, or thrill the soul with keen delight in the enjoyment; its lofty aspirations stretching their earnest gaze far forward and upward along the track of unending progress, amid the glorious destinies of eternity; and on the other hand its fears, a ghastly train, which gird it round with visions of terror, and drag it downward to the brink of that appalling gulf, whether of annihilation or of everlasting anguish and despair….That this most sacred gift of the Creator may be deliberately wrested from our brother, at the bidding of our penal law; that this emanation of His very life may be placed at the disposal of blind and fallible human judgments; that it is our right—nay, that it is our duty—to cut off a fellow-man in the midst of his days, blast his hopes and prospects here.⁶¹

To dismiss this hortatory appeal as mere nineteenth-century hyperbole would be unfair, because Burleigh’s intent was precisely to magnify the depth of spiritual and moral worth of every person, even those accused of crimes. If Burleigh had been a Quaker, the Inner Light in each person might have been named explicitly. Instead it is present in an immanent, even neo-Platonic or Transcendentalist form, when Burleigh writes that each person is an ‘emanation of His very life’. This rhetorical cry of the heart for recognition of humanity is lodged within a larger work that notes such sophisticated dimensions of the death penalty as class and racial disparities, opportunism by accusers and prosecutors against their enemies, and the demonstrable fallibility of this irrevocable punishment. Burleigh also does not neglect to recommend, as part of his own ground, Dymond’s ‘truly excellent work’ on moral principles.⁶²

Thoughts on the Death Penalty gave Burleigh an opportunity for clarity on issues of (literal) life and death, and on what makes life meaningful. It therefore provides a key to his moral principles. Within it he universalises Quaker ethics of non-violence, and the ontological value of the individual, while both praising the Society of Friends and goading the world (and the Society) to go even further than they already had. What he is suggesting is a revolutionary approach, combining philosophy, activism, practice, and history.

III. ‘The Demon-deity’ vs. Freedom of Thought

Charles Calistus Burleigh likely gave over 1000 public speeches in his lifetime.⁶³ Every public appearance prior to 1865 carried with it the threat of harassment and violence. His rhetorical skills — combining the precision of a legal mind with the passion of a reformer — included a calm delivery and self-assurance. However, the very existence of a voice like his — a White man arguing for Black civil rights, a man arguing for the heroism and intellect of women, a man willing to share the podium with people of colour and women, and a man whose appearance violated the gender and sartorial norms of his time — meant that his exercise of free speech would be challenged. Charles Calistus Burleigh didn’t merely assert the doctrine of non-violence. He lived it at risk to his own person, and believed in its effectiveness from experience.

We have an apt touchstone of this from his pen at a time when another Abolitionist violated the principle of non-violence. In 1837, Abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy died while attempting an armed defence of his printing press in Alton, Illinois. Burleigh articulated the ambivalence felt by pacifist Abolitionists:

I felt exceedingly grieved, not merely by the sad catastrophe, but by [Lovejoy’s] departure from the peace principle in attempting to defend himself by force…. I do feel firm in the belief, that as long as good men keep to the truth in principle, and the right in practice, the fury and malice, and violence of wicked men will only help to work out the more speedy overthrow of the wrong, and the more signal triumph of the right… But though Lovejoy erred…still he was a noble man…and has fallen a martyr to a good cause. I hope that … this event will…arouse [our countrymen] to … the importance of speaking out loudly and unitedly for order, peace, and freedom of thought and expression.⁶⁴

There is a palpable tension here, since Burleigh is troubled by the abandonment of principle by Lovejoy, yet also understands that Lovejoy’s martyrdom will encourage others to speak ‘out loudly and unitedly for order, peace, and freedom of thought and expression’. It is interesting that Burleigh doesn’t mention speaking out against slavery, even though that is what provoked the attack on Lovejoy’s printing press.

What he does champion is ‘freedom of thought and expression’, which ultimately formed the ground of his philosophy. He was opposed to slavery in all of its horrors. But he was also opposed to the limits placed on his Black friends and allies by racism, to the silencing of women by sexism, to the foreclosure of all speech and thought through murderous violence, whether in war or in capital punishment. ‘Freedom of thought and expression’ defined his own life’s course, and became a sacred principle — freedom of spiritual seeking. This freedom is quintessentially American, thriving now, for instance, in its ‘spiritual, but not religious’ manifestation.

Despite his tireless lecturing, Charles C. Burleigh’s profile remains stubbornly obscure. His frequent relocations mean he is not lionised as a local hero in any one place. His written work, buried in newspaper columns and a handful of treatises, deploys an elaborate logic that is not particularly amenable to twenty-first century sound-bite culture. Yet he is an important figure for us to rediscover. Charles and Gertrude were anti-racist in their words, actions, and life. Charles’ career as an anti-slavery advocate started with his newspaper, The Unionist, in support of Connecticut’s Canterbury Female Academy for Black Women, taught by White teacher Prudence Crandall. He went on to consistently share the podium with Black luminaries like Frederick Douglass, Charles Redmond, and Sojourner Truth. He called out White racism in print, and in reality, as when he and his lecturing companion on a tour, the free Black Presbyterian minister Stephen Gloucester, were ousted from a river boat for choosing to eat together at the same table in 1839.⁶⁵ He defended the desire for freedom as a universal human impulse that was not only inalienable, but unimpeachable. And freedom always had to be freedom of thought and the ability to speak freely. His friends in the Pennsylvania Hall Association summarised him accurately when they extolled his range as ‘To caste, to sect, or color unconfined/Free as the sunshine, and the chainless mind’.⁶⁶ Indeed, Charles C. Burleigh saw that all of the prejudices — and therefore all the struggles for freedom — were interconnected. He supported women’s rights, Native American struggles for justice, and religious coexistence. He saw that a complete vision for a liveable human future was needed, for which freedom of thought and speech was a prerequisite.

But he would not be the man described herein, if all of this talk of freedom of thought and speech remained abstract. Burleigh concretised his principles, both in reporting how his detractors violated them, and enshrining these principles in a community of fellow seekers. So when he, Gertrude, and their associates in Florence, Massachusetts, organised the Free Congregational Society on May 3, 1863, their statement of purpose read

The resident speaker is not, like the minister or pastor of most religious societies, pledged to advocate and defend a formal statement of faith. He is under no intellectual bonds. He is at liberty to express freely his latest thought. It is understood that he speaks only for himself, and that his utterances, like those of any other member of the society, are at all times open to criticism.⁶⁷

The Society, perhaps ‘the first religious body in the United States to organise on a platform of entire freedom of thought and speech’, was formed as an extension of the principles of the Northampton Association, a brief-lived but crucial utopian experiment. As a result, membership and the speakership were always open to all, with ‘no distinction…on account of sex, or color, or nationality’.⁶⁸ The ‘resident speaker’ for the Free Congregational Society’s first decade was Charles Calistus Burleigh.⁶⁹

As the resident speaker, Charles Burleigh invited many Abolitionists, Woman’s Rights, and other Reform leaders to address the Free Congregational Society (Figure 3). While one of his associates compared Burleigh’s perspective to the Unitarians,⁷⁰ I think that the explicitly political nature of ‘freedom’ across Burleigh’s life as an Abolitionist speaker epitomised religious liberalism while taking it beyond the bounds of piety or theology, to an activist reformism.

Figure 3

Cosmian Hall, drawing by Charles Calistus Burleigh, Jr., ca. 1875. This building, completed in 1874, was the home of the Free Congregational Society of Florence, which Charles Calistus Burleigh and his wife Gertrude Kimber Burleigh helped found, and which Charles Calistus Burleigh served as their “first resident speaker.” Charles Calistus Burleigh, Jr. (1848-1882) was the second son of Charles C. and Gertrude Kimber Burleigh, and painter whose work is still admired. Collection of Historic Northampton (Massachusetts).

The Free Congregational movement — a rarely-studied small splinter movement in the schismatic times prior to the Civil War — is a confusing subject, because the word ‘free’ can be used to describe congregations that no longer charged fees for pews, or it can mean freedom from any ecclesiastical control (which is a deeply held principle with Congregationalism generally), or it can be used to mean ‘free thought’. Charles Burleigh’s participation reveals much about the ‘free thought’ option, since he served not one, but two Free Congregational churches, thus revealing that they had a small free-thinking network. A few years after Gertrude’s 1869 death, Charles spent a year in Bloomington, Illinois as the preacher for their Free Congregational Church in 1873 — and dubbed anything from explicitly religious topics such as ‘Divine Incarnation’ and ‘The Unit of the Universe’ to Abolitionist reminiscences and temperance lectures as ‘sermons’.⁷¹ The blending of political struggles with spiritual seeking that characterised Burleigh’s life, and his work with the Free Congregationalists, anticipated activist dimensions of twentieth-century liberal American religion, such as Unitarian and Quaker engagement in protest movements around the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement.

Burleigh was assuredly not a secular person; no matter how much he eschewed existing Christian structures, he had taken to heart Dymond’s dictum that Christianity ‘wants men who are willing to suffer for her principles’.⁷² In fact, he may well have been modelling himself on Christ —imposing and memorable in his physicality, but relying more on his moral strength than any physical power. His contemporaries noted this aspect of Imitatio Christi in him. Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled a time ‘when Charles Burleigh was charged with blasphemy, because his flowing locks and handsome untrimmed beard was thought to resemble — as very likely he intended — the pictures of Jesus Christ’.⁷³ Even bullying hecklers recognised the comparison, threatening to ‘shave that tall Christ’!⁷⁴ His Northampton associate and friend Seth Long probably came closest to the truth when he noted that Charles’s life had been a conscious imitation of ‘the life of Jesus recorded in the New Testament’.⁷⁵ So if Long is correct, then it is no surprise that Burleigh spent his final decade building a new religious movement, an open-ended one based in free speech, that drew from multiple sources, including but not giving pride of place to the Quakers.

While Burleigh was always a partisan — for abolition, for ending capital punishment, and for non-violence — his notion of free speech and free thought made him tolerant of difference. Seth Long, in his tribute to Burleigh, wrote that he ‘ably defended the broad principles of religious freedom laid down in the platform of the Free Congregational Society’.⁷⁶ In this he fits the mould of Roger Williams: doggedly committed but also always searching. His mind retained a laser focus on freedom. He lived a life of reform that syncretised the political and spiritual in a manner neither inward-looking (as in privatised Quietism) nor institutionally committed. The Free Congregational Society in Massachusetts enabled him to create a place that was Biblically-rooted and religiously open-ended, with minimal organisation.⁷⁷

In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, he faced down yet another mob, in Westfield, Massachusetts. He once again demonstrated non-violence in the face of an angry mob, with the ultimate result being safety for all in attendance — much as he had helped facilitate at Canterbury, Boston, and Pennsylvania Hall.⁷⁸ Burleigh was scheduled to lecture in the local schoolhouse, but pro-slavery protestors objected to this use of a public facility. They launched olfactory assaults by burning pepper and scattering tobacco smokers through the audience. They shouted to keep Burleigh from being heard, during which time, he reports he ‘stood a silent spectator of the tumult for a few minutes, then accepted the invitation of the occupant of a dwelling-house nearby, to go and…lecture in that’. But as he moved ‘toward the door, a small specimen of a man’ assaulted the tall Burleigh, ‘rudely seized my arm, gave me a push more spiteful than forcible, and said something about tar and feathers’. Burleigh ‘walked on as if he had not been in the way’. The next night, despite official permission to hold the meeting in the schoolhouse, the ‘disturbers’ returned, and a ‘scene of wild confusion followed; struggling and pushing and blows, swearing and threats and defiance, making altogether a tumult in which it was, of course, useless to try to proceed’ with a lecture. Once again Burleigh ‘stood looking on in silence’. The rioters upended the corner stove, and tried to destroy Burleigh’s books and papers. But then, most strangely, a warrant was issued for Burleigh’s arrest, on charges of assault! Charles Burleigh knew when to utilise his legal skills, and inquired as to the person who had made the accusation. It was the man who had assaulted Burleigh the previous night!: ‘The man was called out, and stood forward, not — I thought — with the greatest alacrity or an air of the utmost confidence, and I subjected him to a brief cross-questioning which he evidently did not enjoy; although, of course, with his instigators and backers about him, he still stood to his lie, and they echoed it. But he soon slunk back among the crowd’. The lawsuit was never pursued.

The lecture could not happen that evening, because too much time had been lost in the struggle with the angry mob. But that tipped-over stove ended up having dire consequences. While attendees thought they had gathered all the coals, some embers had slipped through the cracks, because a few hours after the scheduled meeting, Burleigh and his Abolitionist hosts saw that the school-house was lighting up the night, fully engulfed in flames. Burleigh’s bitter comment suggests that the antinomy of non-violence/violence is mirrored in free thought/caged thought:

the school-house was made a whole burnt-offering to the demon-deity whose worship is the suppression of free speech for freedom. And what could be in better keeping? If thought is to be stifled and utterance choked, in order that slavery may go unrebuked, what is the need or use of school-houses? Why should not ignorance go with barbarism?

The account of the Westfield school fire, written by Burleigh, was printed in the Liberator in January of 1861, dated in Quaker mode as First Month, proving once again that Charles C. Burleigh was, at the very least, ‘Quaker adjacent’. But I find that label insufficient. The man was (quite literally and lovingly) in bed with Quakerism, flush with its ideas, yet never held within it, because thought should not ‘be stifled’ but ‘unchained’. Another Quaker echo here comes from the hastily written notice that John Greenleaf Whittier had appended to the issue of The Pennsylvania Freeman that was supposed to contain the normal reports of the meetings held in Pennsylvania Hall, but had to instead announce the baleful news of the Hall’s destruction:

Pennsylvania Hall is in ashes! The beautiful temple consecrated to Liberty, has been offered a smoking sacrifice to the Demon of Slavery.⁷⁹

The continuity of the metaphor, that places of free speech and open learning, must be destroyed to satisfy the ‘demon-deity’ of limitation — confirms that, from all the sources available to him, including the Quaker tradition and his friends in the Society, Charles C. Burleigh had constructed a religious and philosophic vision based on freedom of thought, on the ‘chainless mind’ (and the unchained body of those wrongly enslaved), engaged in struggle with a demon of destructive close-mindedness.

IV. Conclusion: An ‘Eye of Calmed Fire’

In 1875, Charles C. Burleigh was back East, and, not one for a restful retirement, had accepted a task to resume lecturing, this time to stump for the Prohibition Party in Pennsylvania. Never one to stay on a single subject, though, he also gave religious sermons, launching this sojourn in his old haunts with a lecture on ‘Free Religion’.⁸⁰ A few days later, in early February, he attended the Concord Quarterly Meeting in West Chester, a mere 25 miles south from where he met Gertrude in Kimberton. This meeting was Hicksite in character; those inspired to speak included (Joseph) Darlington Hoopes, Martha Travilla, and Elizabeth H. Plummer.⁸¹ Hoopes spoke approvingly of the ‘spread of Christian principles, and of the habit of free thought’, in which ‘people are inquiring for themselves, seeking the Light, and if nothing is lost but the peculiarities [of Quaker lifeways], he could not but rejoice’. Travilla followed by maintaining that all who love God and truth ‘will be accepted by him’ and hoped that Friends’ ‘great testimonies, against Intemperance, against War, against Capital Punishment…may be more promulgated and may prevail…throughout the world at large’. Dymond’s prediction in his letter to Susan Balkwill, that the principles of the Quakers would spread into wider public circles, had been realised.

Charles C. Burleigh was clearly inspired by what he had heard (the record does not state if he was following the dictates of the Inner Light), proclaiming that

he felt in full unity with the truths which had been given. Men speak in many dialects and languages, using different words to express the same thing. Everywhere, in my own experience, I have seen an uprising of people, not it is true, conforming to the rule of the society assembled here, but all earnestly seeking the truth and living by their best light, though perhaps not even conforming to any society.

The article’s author, in a trope common to observers of Charles Burleigh, took the moment to describe him physically – but also spiritually:

Charles Burleigh, with his tall, spare, but strong form, his bold features, his long white beard and curled locks, his clear and impressive voice, his eye of calmed fire, appears as an old Patriarch revisiting the people of a later generation; a man of peace, yet capable still of dealing lusty blows in the cause of Truth.

With his consistent emphasis on freedom of speech and thought, Charles C. Burleigh remained open to change – including amending or enriching his own thought. In this, we can distinguish how Burleigh’s practice of non-violence and non-resistance drew more from Quaker roots than it did from John Humphrey Noyes’ perfectionism (as mirrored by Burleigh’s close friend and ally William Lloyd Garrison).⁸² Burleigh was not aiming for the alleged perfection of man, but for an ever-developing understanding of human freedom: he was more of a revolutionary than a utopian, who (in his own words) ‘devoted my future efforts to the over-throw and extinction of all Slavery…and I cannot work for aught less than complete and universal freedom’.⁸³

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of a General Conference on Reforms, ‘If there was not parliamentary order, there was life, and the assurance of that constitutional love for religion and religious liberty’ that characterises America.⁸⁴ Charles C. Burleigh, with his unusual appearance and embrace of peace principles under repeated duress, caused some to assume he was a Quaker.⁸⁵ But what he was, was simpler and more complex than that, far closer to Emerson’s description. Charles C. Burleigh was alive, enjoying that full social and spiritual life that he described so movingly as the truth of human existence in his death penalty treatise. He embraced his own quirkiness as a form of freedom but imposed it on no one.

Burleigh dedicated his life to ending slavery and having seen that accomplished, did not rest, but kept reforming the world for greater openness. He had learned from watching the moral strength and bravery of women in exercising non-violent moral suasion, of African-Americans in their resilience, of working and residing with Quakers in Pennsylvania, and he took all those lessons and universalised them as much as he was able. At the 1853 Conference on Woman’s Rights, for instance, he stated:

If I understand aright the principles of liberty, just here is the point of controversy, between the despot and the champion of human rights, in any department. Just when one human being assumes to decide for another, what is that other’s sphere of action, just then despotism begins. Tyrants always say it is not safe to trust their subjects with freedom. Austria says it is not safe to trust the Hungarian with freedom. Man says woman is not safe in freedom, she will get beyond her sphere.⁸⁶

He never undertook to consign another unique individual to a predetermined role.⁸⁷ His view of religion had room for all who were honestly seeking truths while making the world increasingly congenial for such searchers. That qualifies as a ‘refracted Quakerism’, that provides both inner, and outer, light.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.