In 1848, George W. Taylor posted a series of advertisements in the pages of the abolitionist paper, the Pennsylvania Freeman. Headlined ‘Practical Antisla[v]ery’, Taylor’s advertisements notified the ‘consistent friends of the slave’ of the arrival of a new shipment of free labour linens at his store.1 Taylor had purchased the store a year earlier from Joel Fisher, who had in turn acquired the store from Hicksite Quaker Lydia White in 1846. From 1847 through 1867, Taylor operated his free labour store and warehouse on the northwest corner of Fifth and Cherry Streets in Philadelphia, buying and selling goods produced by compensated free labour. He was one of the most prominent supporters of the nineteenth-century transatlantic boycott of slave labour goods like cotton and sugar.2 Writing in 1941, Francis R. Taylor described his great-uncle as ‘the backbone of the Free Produce Movement in Philadelphia and largely in the country’.3

Taylor’s store was the site of a variety of antislavery activities. In addition to selling free labour goods, Taylor edited and distributed newspapers, including The Non-Slaveholder and Citizen of the World.4 From his store, Taylor helped manage the business of the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), a school founded in 1837 to educate people of African descent. As an agent for the ICY, Taylor coordinated the receipt of applications from young Black men seeking apprenticeships in the city.5 Taylor sold print goods such as hymn cards and books, including Wilson Armistead’s highly-regarded A Tribute for the Negro.6 During the Civil War, Taylor’s store served as a collection site for seed, clothing, and other goods that were sent south to aid freed people. His store also served as the meeting site for the Clothing Committee of Friends’ Association for the Relief of Colored Freemen and the Women’s Aid Association.7 Amid all this antislavery and civil rights activity, Taylor also edited and published Quaker literature and served as the American agent for the British Friend and the London Friend, the primary publications for British Quakers. Wilson Armistead and Frederick Tuckett were among the many British Quaker abolitionists who visited Taylor’s store during their tours of the United States.8

Taylor’s store was located near Clarkson Hall, built by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) on Cherry Street between Sixth and Seventh Streets, and the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (PASS), located on Fifth Street just north of Arch Street. The PAS and the PASS reflected in their membership and engagement the breadth of antislavery thought and action. The PAS, organised in 1775, emphasised practical, patient, and orderly measures in the fight against slavery. The gradualists of the PAS, many of them Quakers, aided free Blacks in court, drafted legislative petitions, and established schools, including Clarkson Hall which was built in 1812 by the PAS to serve as a school for the city’s Black children. Named for the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, the Hall also served as the headquarters for the PAS until the building was sold in 1864. The PASS, organised in 1837, called for the total transformation of society. Members of the PASS were immediatists who believed slavery was a sin that had to be abolished without delay. They rejected interim measures such as the colonisation of free Blacks outside the US. In 1847, the leadership of the PASS hired Black abolitionist William Still to assist in the PASS office, which included a bookstore and reading room. From this site, Still sold antislavery literature and free labour goods and distributed the Pennsylvania Freeman (1838–1854). The PASS office also served as the unofficial headquarters of the Underground Railroad helping to ferry enslaved individuals north to freedom. Together, these three sites — Taylor’s free labour store, Clarkson Hall, and the PASS office — helped form the antislavery landscape of Philadelphia.9

People, goods, and news moved freely between Taylor’s store, Clarkson Hall, and the PASS office. In addition to placing ads in the Pennsylvania Freeman, Taylor and his clerk (and nephew) Cyrus Whitson aided Still in his work with fugitive slaves, and Taylor and Still were members of both the PASS and the PAS. In 1862, Taylor joined Still in the fight to desegregate public transportation in Philadelphia. In 1875, Still organised the PAS’s centennial celebration while Taylor was among the guests honoured for their antislavery work.10 The abolitionist and Quaker communities of Philadelphia were critical to Taylor’s entrepreneurial and philanthropic ventures. Indeed, this landscape is, in many ways, a physical manifestation to the transatlantic network Taylor created to support his work.

Taylor played an important role in the abolition of slavery by bringing together a broad spectrum of activists through his free produce work and his membership in the Religious Society of Friends. By emphasising the connection between slavery and the consumption of slave labour goods, Taylor made the marketplace a key site in the fight for the abolition of slavery.11 Taylor’s activism coincided with the utilitarian turn of the abolitionist movement. In the 1840s abolitionists retreated from the millennial spirit of the 1830s and early 1840s and instead turned to politics and other formal arenas through which to consolidate the work of previous decades.12 In the late 1840s and 1850s, abolitionists and free produce supporters like Taylor increasingly emphasised the ‘liberating possibilities’ of capitalism, to borrow a phrase from historian Andrew Diemer.13 Rather than moral suasion, which sought the transformation of the public soul, Taylor stressed moral commerce, which sought the transformation of the public marketplace by targeting slaveholders’ bottom line.

In this article, I explore how Taylor’s identity as a Gurneyite Orthodox Quaker informed his activism and how his story stands in contrast to the radical abolitionism of Hicksite Quakers like Lucretia Mott. To do this, I explore two major divisions among American Quakers, the Hicksite-Orthodox schism of the 1820s and the Wilburite-Gurneyite split of the 1840s. I frame Taylor’s work through two concepts: ‘practical Quakerism’ and ‘practical abolitionism’. Historian Janet Moore Lindman describes ‘practical Quakerism’ as the everyday enactment of faith: plain dress, plain speech, and a holistic sensibility that infused work, home, and community life.14 Abolitionists, meanwhile, spoke of ‘practical abolitionism’, meaning daily acts of resistance: aiding fugitives, consuming only free produce, and voting for antislavery politicians. ‘The South cares very little for abstract resolutions’, wrote the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier in 1841. ‘A discussion, which ends only in discussion, will prove to the poor slave like an invitation to the starving to feed upon air’.15 Taylor embraced this ethos, describing his own work as ‘practical antislavery’. For him, reform was not simply belief but practice — a consistent expression of his Quaker convictions lived out in the marketplace and in service to the cause of truth.

Background

George W. Taylor was born in 1803 in Radnor, Pennsylvania. Located twelve miles west of Philadelphia, Radnor was settled in 1683 by Welsh Quakers attracted to William Penn’s promise of religious freedom, among them Taylor’s ancestor, John Richards. Taylor was the eldest of seven children born to Jacob and Elizabeth Richards Taylor. In 1812, Jacob Taylor purchased one hundred acres of land, a general store, and a tavern and moved the family to New Garden, about forty miles west of Philadelphia. George and his siblings helped with the work of the farm and the store. They attended nearby Quaker schools and, with their mother, attended Quaker meetings for worship and Methodist services. The Methodist services, led by their uncle Thomas Batten, a renowned minister, were so zealous they sometimes frightened young George.16 Despite their Quaker ties, the children were not considered birthright Friends: their grandfather David Richards had been disowned in 1763, leaving the family outside formal membership. In 1817, after years of attending Quaker meeting for worship, Elizabeth Richards Taylor and her children joined New Garden Monthly Meeting.17

Formally joining the Quakers was a transformative moment for Taylor, who soon after adopted the plain dress and speech of the Quakers. ‘There is an advantage in Friends being outwardly known as such’, he claimed. His first plain coat, he recalled, was made ‘of homespun, made of wool from father’s sheep, picked and dyed by my mother with walnut bark gathered in the woods by myself, woven and fulled at home, and the coat made by a neighboring tailor’. Plain language proved more difficult to adopt proving to be a ‘great trial’. But believing it his ‘religious duty,’ Taylor persisted until he grew comfortable with the practice.18 Taylor also read the journal of John Woolman, an eighteenth century Quaker reformer and minister from Mount Holly, New Jersey, whose writings on antislavery profoundly shaped Taylor’s own convictions.

Woolman’s antislavery activism began in 1742 when his employer requested that he write a bill of sale for a woman sold as a slave. Deeply troubled by the task, Woolman told his employer and the woman’s purchaser that slaveholding was inconsistent with Christianity. Over the next thirty years, Woolman developed a broad critique of slavery that targeted the slave trade, slavery, and the consumption of slave labour goods. Woolman lived his testimony: rejecting slave labour products, refusing the hospitality of slaveholders, and wearing undyed cloth as a visible sign of his convictions. He sought to ‘bear testimony not in words only, but to be a sign to the people’, according to historian Geoffrey Plank.19 In 1776, after years of antislavery activism by Woolman and others, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting banned slaveholding by its members and disowned those Quakers who refused to emancipate their slaves. Woolman’s reputation only grew after his death. ‘By the 1820s’, as Plank notes, ‘nearly all public commentary on Woolman exalted him’.20 Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier celebrated Woolman in a series of essays beginning in 1847, portraying him as the most influential opponent of slavery in the eighteenth century.21 Taylor, a close friend of Whittier, would have read these essays and likely discussed Woolman’s ministry with him.22 For Taylor, Woolman’s example remained a lifelong influence, shaping his own commitment to plain living and practical antislavery.23

Taylor, like Woolman, confronted racial inequities at an early age. In his autobiography, he described himself as ‘thoroughly anti-slavery’ since childhood, recalling an encounter that shaped his sense of Christian duty. Based on its placement in his account, Taylor was likely about fourteen at the time. As he recalls, he was on his way to the grist mill when he felt compelled to stop at the home of a Black family. Leaving his oxen in the road, he entered and found the father, a ‘Methodist exhorter’, too ill to support his family. Moved by the family’s plight, Taylor gave them all the money he had with him, about three or four dollars. Later, Taylor returned to the family and gave them several more dollars. He remembered that this small gift was ‘sufficient for their needs until [the father] recovered and was able to work’. Years later, Taylor met the man’s son, now a Methodist minister, a reminder of the enduring impact of that moment. For Taylor, this act of compassion was an early lesson in living his faith.24

In addition to Woolman, Taylor was deeply influenced by Quakers Elias Hicks of Jericho, Long Island, and Enoch Lewis of New Garden. Both urged abstention from slave labour goods. There were, however, significant differences between the two ministers. Hicks, described by historian Thomas Hamm as ‘the most polarizing figure in American Quakerism between 1800 and 1850’, insisted that until Friends renounced slave-produced goods, their hands were stained with blood.25 In 1811, he published the influential pamphlet, Observations on the Slavery of Africans and their Descendants. Hicks described African slaves as prize goods ‘taken in a state of war’. Implicating the purchasers and consumers of slave goods, Hicks concluded that ‘no man who is convinced of the cruelty and injustice of holding a fellow creature in slavery, can traffic in, or make use of the produce of a slave’s labour’.26

Lewis, a beloved teacher, was known for kindling ‘a passionate love of mathematics and the sciences’ in his students, and, as Helen Hole notes in her history of Westtown Boarding School, Lewis’s ‘character and the intensity of his religious life had an intangible but powerful effect’ on his students, including Taylor. Lewis urged compassion for both enslaved and enslaver: ‘While it is our duty to bear a faithful testimony against African slavery, and against the laws that support it, we are not to forget that righteous ends are to be attained by means compatible with the spirit and precepts of the gospel’.27 While teaching at Westtown, Lewis raised funds to free a fugitive slave. Years later, he defended his actions as a moral expedient, not a recognition of ownership.28 For Lewis, abstention was pragmatic: render slavery unprofitable, and emancipation would follow. Taylor studied under Lewis in New Garden and later Wilmington, recalling with gratitude the influence of ‘so capable and good a man’.29

Hicksite-Orthodox Schism

Between 1819 and 1827, tensions increased between supporters and opponents of Hicks. The causes of those tensions were complex. The economic success of Orthodox Friends contributed to the growing divide. Likewise, questions of authority and power, particularly as it was wielded by Quaker elders and members of the Meeting for Sufferings (the yearly meeting’s executive committee), became entwined with theological debates. Hicks claimed Quakers had compromised their unique testimony by ‘forming ties with groups led by evangelical Protestant ministers – Bible societies, missionary societies, moral reform groups’ and, as a result, ‘an influx of un-Quakerly ideas about the nature of Christ and the authority of the Bible’ had infiltrated Quakerism.30 Hicks’s support for free produce exacerbated these debates. Renunciation of slave-labour products was a visible sign that an individual upheld the traditional Quaker testimony on plainness and simplicity and had rejected the temptations of the emerging market economy, an economy based on slave labour. Yet when the Hicksite schism erupted in 1827, advocates of free produce could be found on both sides of the divide.

At the heart of the conflict was a clash between Quietism and Evangelicalism. Hicks, described by historian Thomas Hamm as ‘an extreme Quietist,’ emphasised the inward, mystical experience of the Light, rejecting external authority and ritual.31 Evangelicals, by contrast, stressed discipline through scripture, ministry, and conversion. These theological disputes unfolded against the backdrop of the Second Great Awakening and religious disestablishment, which created a ‘spiritual free-for-all’.32 Revivalism encouraged the growth of voluntary associations, often staffed by paid agents. Voluntary associations, such as Bible and Sunday School associations, were seen as the means by which the world would be made a better place. The expansion of religious benevolence led Quakers to make more explicit their definition of appropriate religious activism. There were many Quakers who welcomed the opportunity to join with other evangelicals in various forms of benevolent activity, including free produce and antislavery societies. Often, though not exclusively, these evangelical Quakers were also more likely to have benefited from the spectacular growth in the nation’s economy, becoming successful businessmen and merchants.

Visiting English Friends such as Elizabeth Robson, George and Ann Jones, and Anna Braithwaite intensified the crisis, warning against Hicks’ teachings. In April 1827, conflict erupted at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting when Hicksites failed to replace the staunchly Orthodox clerk. They walked out, formed a new Yearly Meeting at Green Street, and, by autumn, drew two-thirds of Philadelphia’s membership. This separation forced other yearly meetings, including New York, to decide which body was legitimate.33

During this unfolding crisis, Taylor moved to Flushing, Long Island, to teach mathematics at the boys’ Quaker boarding school operated by Lindley Murray Moore. Taylor had been recommended by Joshua Kimber, who, with his wife Rachel, operated a girls’ school near Moore’s school. Kimber was originally from Chester County.34 Born in Nova Scotia in 1788, Lindley Moore was an intelligent, outgoing, and respected Quaker leader. As clerk of his monthly meeting, he wielded considerable influence, and his daughter remembered him as a Quaker ‘by birth and conviction’, able to cite Scripture with ease, and untinged by sectarianism. Moore welcomed Taylor into the rhythms of his household: daily Bible readings at breakfast, Quaker meetings, introductions to influential Friends, and access to his extensive library. The Moore home was lively, filled with visitors such as his in-laws Adam and Anne Mott and prominent British ministers like Robson and Braithwaite. Taylor generally enjoyed these encounters, but at times he found the theological disputes troubling. Writing to his mother in June 1827 after a visit from Elizabeth Robson, he described conversations filled with ‘public censure’ and ‘ridiculing’ of fellow Friends. Disturbed, he excused himself to put the boys to bed and did not return. These moments reveal both the richness of Moore’s household and Taylor’s unease with divisive theological debates on the eve of the Hicksite-Orthodox schism.35

While the Quaker community in New Garden was strongly Hicksite, Flushing was an Orthodox stronghold. Taylor arrived with Hicksite sympathies, later recalling that ‘partial feeling toward Elias Hicks predominated among most of my intimate friends’. In Flushing, however, he was ‘thrown in among those who were dissatisfied with the doctrines he preached’.36 Whether Moore knew of Taylor’s leanings is unclear, but the strong anti-Hicksite sentiment in Flushing, combined with Taylor’s homesickness, caused him deep anguish. ‘Here entirely amongst Strangers, I have been almost ready to wish I had not given up my School in New Garden’, Taylor confessed to his parents. ‘I have never heard so much spoken’ against Hicks, he wrote. ‘My hands have been every day fill’d with pamphlets relating to the disputes; some of which I read; but I value my time rather too much to take pleasure in reading such stuff — I have therefore laid them down’. Taylor was distressed by the pamphlets given to him because they made ‘Elias a monstrous heretic’.37 This clash between his sympathies and his surroundings marked a turning point, forcing Taylor to confront the sectarian divisions that would shape his eventual Orthodox identity.

With Taylor in Flushing and his family in New Garden, their correspondence offers a window into the unfolding schism. Writing after the Philadelphia separation, Taylor urged reliance on ‘the unchangeable Light of life, the immovable Rock of refuge’.38 His brother Thomas found himself at odds with his local Quaker community. As he told his brother George:

I have a choice in joining the friends as the meeting will be convenient and all our most intimate friends and acquaintances of that side, but this is not the thing in question, friends are charged with denying the Scriptures, and of being followers of E. Hicks, if so, I do not agree with them for I must hold the one and reject the other’.39

The schism touched ordinary meeting life. In August 1827, Taylor described the case of Ellwood Walter, a Pennsylvania Quaker from Green Street Meeting who presented to New York Monthly Meeting his certificate for marriage to Deborah Coggeshall, a New York Quaker. As Taylor told his parents, ‘After some discussion & the remonstrances of the Orthodox, it was accepted, being carried over their heads by numbers’. It was not Walter’s clearance for marriage that was in question. Rather it was because the certificate had been issued by the Hicksite Green Street meeting. ‘The Orthodox opposed it very warmly’, Taylor wrote, ‘as it was acknowledging Green St as a monthly meeting’. In a letter to his sister Elizabeth, written one week later, Taylor shared that the wedding had taken place and that he had dined with the wedding party.40

When Lindley Moore learned that Taylor had not heard Hicks preach, he arranged for Taylor to meet with the minister. In 1827, after Westbury Quarterly Meeting, Taylor dined at Hicks’s home in Jericho, Long Island. Taylor asked Hicks for a ‘private conversation’. Hicks agreed. Taylor asked the minister a series of questions, such as Hicks’ views on the divinity of Christ and the nature of the Bible. By the end of the conversation, Taylor concluded he ‘no longer leaned with the admirers of Elias Hicks’.41 Interestingly, this decisive moment appears only in his autobiography decades later, not in his surviving letters.

Five of Taylor’s six siblings also joined the Orthodox branch. Only Elizabeth joined with the Hicksites. Of the seven Taylor siblings, Elizabeth was the only one who remained steadfast in her sympathy for Hicks. As George began to drift away from Hicks and toward the Orthodox views espoused by Moore and others in Flushing, Elizabeth warned her brother to be more circumspect in sharing his anti-Hicksite views outside the family, writing ‘I would be careful expressing many sentiments that I did not wish exposed to any of thy correspondents in New Garden. [Jeremiah Starr] was telling me that thee was an Orthodox stating what thee had mentioned. Thee [must] be aware of who thee places confidence in’. Elizabeth and George disagreed about a sermon that the British minister Ann Jones had delivered at Rose Street Meeting in New York. Elizabeth described it as ‘dreadful,’ ‘wicked,’ and ‘of great hurt to the cause she says she supports’, while George defended Jones, explaining that he ‘did not consider it so very pointed as some would have it’. In 1828, Elizabeth married Hicksite Quaker Moses Whitson. Despite their theological differences, the Taylor siblings and their families remained close.42

Why did Taylor join the Orthodox? His correspondence between 1826 and 1828 reveals a difficult, agonised decision. Influenced by mentors like Woolman, Moore, and Lewis, challenged by Hicks, and shaped by non-Quaker figures such as his Methodist uncle Thomas Batten, Taylor defined for himself what it meant to be a Quaker and a Christian. His Orthodox leanings during the schism set the stage for his later response to Joseph John Gurney’s evangelical teachings in the 1830s.

Taylor remained at Moore’s school until 1829, then returned to New Garden. That winter, Enoch Lewis invited him to teach at Westtown School. At Westtown, Taylor met Elizabeth Sykes, an Orthodox Friend from Burlington, New Jersey. Born in 1790 in Springfield, New Jersey, Sykes was the youngest of three daughters born to Benjamin and Hannah Sykes Leeds. Benjamin’s father, John Sykes, travelled with John Woolman to Maryland in 1748. After the deaths of her sister Rebecca in 1799, her father in 1802, and her mother in 1814, Elizabeth and her surviving sister, Hannah, took up residence with Peter and Abigail Barker.43

In 1823, Elizabeth Sykes was hired as the boys’ parlour keeper at Westtown. As the lone woman on the boys’ side of the house, she was expected ‘to exert a favourable influence upon them’. Sykes nearly resigned in 1827 after an incident involving several boys who refused to comply with the school’s rules for reading scripture. British Quaker minister Stephen Gould described the event as an ‘insurrection’. Gould wrote that the teachers used every means

by argument & persuasion to convince [the boys] of the impropriety of the course they were pursuing, but they persisted urging their right to freedom of opinion, call the New Testament the ‘Pope’s Book’, till they began to cut up their Bibles & burn the New Testament.

The school’s board condemned the actions of the boys. A visit from the school committee encouraged Sykes to remain at the school.44

The extant correspondence gives no clue as to what drew Elizabeth and George together. Elizabeth was thirteen years older than he — forty to his twenty-seven. A birthright Quaker, Sykes had close relationships with many important Quaker families, including the Allinsons and the Gummeres. In 1831, Sykes and Taylor were married at the Friends meeting house in Burlington. The two shared a close emotional connection throughout their marriage. Their union was framed by the egalitarianism of Quaker marriage and the patriarchal relationship established by American common law that made George Elizabeth’s legal, financial, and political protector. For Elizabeth and George, however, marriage was a partnership of man and woman, ‘joined together, not by lust or economic coercion, but as comrades seeking humanity’s greater good’. Although Elizabeth did not assume as public a role as George did, she was nonetheless a partner with him in his various reform and business enterprises.45

After their marriage, Sykes and Taylor settled in Burlington, where she introduced George to the inner circle of the Burlington Quaker community. In October 1831, George assumed responsibility for the Friends’ Preparative Meeting School. Through Elizabeth, George entered Burlington’s Orthodox community and formed close friendships with Quakers like the Allinson brothers, William J. and Samuel Jr., who were both active in temperance, antislavery, and free produce. These ties later connected him to Joseph John Gurney and John Greenleaf Whittier.46

Gurneyite-Wilburite Separation

By late 1832, exhausted by his duties in running the school, Taylor began to consider other options. He and his brother Thomas discussed the possibility of opening a temperance grocery. A temperance grocery distinguished itself as a family grocery, which might sell liquor but, unlike more nefarious grocers, did not serve it to customers. Black abolitionists William Whipper and David Ruggles operated temperance groceries in Philadelphia and New York, respectively, in this period. After several months of searching without success, the brothers gave up the idea.47 In 1834 George and Elizabeth moved to Philadelphia after George accepted a position as agent for the Bible Association of Friends (BAF). Organised in 1829, the BAF grew rapidly, establishing auxiliaries throughout the U.S. The organisation’s goals were to place a Bible in every Quaker family and to see that every Friend owned at least one copy of the New Testament.48 In addition to the BAF, Taylor worked with Orthodox Quaker-focused organisations, such as the Friends’ Reading Room Association, and published Quaker and non-Quaker newspapers, including the Farmer’s Cabinet, a popular agricultural monthly, and the Friend, an Orthodox weekly that began in 1827. Taylor also worked with Whittier on the Pennsylvania Freeman.49

Beyond his official duties, Taylor and his wife Elizabeth gave Bibles personally to young Quakers, calling it as ‘the best of books’ and offering it ‘as a token of our regards’. They hoped their gift would encourage the recipient to ‘receive the benefits to be derived from reading this precious book’. These acts reflect both their Orthodox emphasis on scripture and their desire to nurture the faith of the next generation.50

In this period, Taylor began what would become decades of service to the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY). Established in 1837 with a bequest from Quaker silversmith, Richard Humphreys, the ICY drew on earlier Quaker traditions of educating free Blacks, dating back to Anthony Benezet in the eighteenth century. Yet the school broke with that tradition in its daily operations: while a white Quaker Board of Managers, including Taylor, oversaw the institution, Black educators directed its classrooms and training.51

As agent for the ICY, Taylor coordinated applications from young Black men seeking apprenticeships in Philadelphia—another example of his ‘practical abolitionism’. In 1842, the Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate urged white reformers to prove their sincerity by apprenticing Black youth, echoing the ICY board’s call for Friends to provide ‘useful trades and occupations’ that would enable graduates to hold ‘independent and respectable stations’. With rising immigration in the 1840s and 1850s, employers increasingly favoured white apprentices, making ICY’s mission even more urgent.52 Alongside trade training, the school emphasised liberal arts, and many graduates went on to teach at ICY and other Black schools. Historian Emma Lapsansky describes the ICY as ‘an important anchor in the black community’, forming ‘the nucleus of the African-American intellectual community that stretched across Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and Canada’.53 For Taylor, this work embodied his conviction that abolition required daily, practical commitments to racial uplift.

When George and Elizabeth moved to Philadelphia in 1834, they entered a city marked by escalating violence. Although interracial organisations worked to advance Black freedom and civil rights, most Philadelphians were openly hostile. Proximity to slaveholding states, industrialisation, immigration, and the growth of the free Black population in the city created a volatile mix. Historian Julie Winch notes that ‘what was unprecedented in the 1830s and 1840s was the scale of destruction,’ with riots sparked by events as varied as a carousel dispute (1834), the opening of Pennsylvania Hall (1838), or a Black temperance parade (1842).54

Taylor witnessed this turbulence firsthand. The August 1834 riot drove African Americans from a carousel on South Street, leaving one dead and many injured. Two months later, violence erupted in Moyamensing, a neighbourhood in South Philadelphia, when Whigs drove Democrats from the polls. Taylor lamented, ‘It is a shame to any human beings, not to mention civilised, to act as some do here’. In 1838, his office in Pennsylvania Hall was destroyed by an anti-abolitionist mob.55

Violence continued into the 1850s. The Fugitive Slave Act provoked clashes such as the Christiana resistance of 1851. In 1855, Quaker Passmore Williamson was jailed for aiding fugitive slave Jane Johnson’s escape. Taylor defended him, insisting Williamson had done ‘nothing worse than [act] out the ‘golden rule’.56 For Taylor, these episodes underscored the moral urgency of abolition and the need for practical, everyday resistance to slavery.

By 1837, when Joseph John Gurney began his American tour, Taylor had already established himself in Orthodox Quaker causes and witnessed firsthand the hostility abolitionists faced in Philadelphia. His reform work unfolded amid the continuing tensions of the Hicksite-Orthodox schism, as meetings on both sides issued statements on slavery, abolition, and free produce that only deepened divisions among Friends.

Within Orthodox Quakerism, a new strand was emerging — later known as Gurneyite Quakerism. This movement gained momentum through Gurney’s influence during his three-year visit to the United States. A wealthy banker with close ties to English evangelicals, Gurney is described by one historian as ‘a charismatic personality, an eloquent preacher, and prolific writer’.57 Gurney’s evangelical Quakerism emphasised three key features. First, Gurney encouraged collaboration with other evangelicals urging Friends to break down barriers and join with non-Quakers in good works such as abolition, education, and prison reform. Second, Gurney called for a reorientation of scripture’s role by asserting the authority of the Bible, rather than the inner light. Gurney never repudiated the traditional Quaker teaching of the inner light; rather he believed the inner light was inferior to the Bible as a source of revelation. Finally, Gurney emphasised justification by faith, an experience he described as usually instantaneous.

Yet Gurney did not abandon Quaker distinctives. He recommended ‘silent worship, private prayer, and daily self-examination’, and argued that ‘other Christians could learn from the Religious Society of Friends for their views on war, slavery, capital punishment, and swearing’. As historian Janet Moore Lindman observes, ‘Gurney aspired to reform Quakerism by extending some traditions, jettisoning others, and solidifying evangelical beliefs’.58 He sought a middle course between Hicksite heresy and Orthodox reluctance to modernise, making Quakerism relevant to contemporary society and capable of speaking to other Christians.

Not all Friends welcomed Gurney’s reforms. Rhode Island Quaker John Wilbur, described as ‘a model of the quietist Friends’, attacked his teachings as unsound. Wilburites emphasised the writings of early Friends as nearly infallible and often refused to read the Bible without a special leading. They stressed disengagement from the world, participating only in Quaker organisations.59

Gurneyites, by contrast, were active in reform and often joined with non-Quakers in causes such as free produce and antislavery. Wilburites warned that such activism reflected self-will rather than divine guidance. Ohio minister Joseph Edgerton described abolitionism as an ‘overactive, restless spirit’ that devoured like ‘the locust, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar’. Indiana Quaker Charles Osborn, however, insisted that good works were essential to Christianity. The Gurney-Wilbur conflict led to separations in New England and Ohio Yearly Meetings and deepened divisions in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.60

Taylor himself spoke of Gurney with approbation. After attending two large meetings in New York in 1838 with his wife Elizabeth, he described Gurney’s ‘communications [as] long and excellent’. Each gathering drew more than two thousand people, underscoring the reach of Gurney’s evangelical message and its resonance with Taylor’s own vision of practical abolitionism.61

In the mid-1840s, as the Gurney-Wilbur division threatened the unity of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Taylor aligned himself with the Gurneyite minority within a body otherwise dominated by Wilburites. This minority resisted severing ties with the wider Orthodox Quaker community by refusing to formally recognise the Wilburites. When Philadelphia Yearly Meeting received epistles from both the small Wilburite group in New England and the New England Yearly Meeting, the men’s business meeting erupted in debate. Some members urged that both epistles be read, while others insisted on choosing one over the other. The dispute was referred to the Meeting for Sufferings, and for the next decade Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sustained what has been described as an ‘uneasy compromise’. That compromise ended in 1857, when the Yearly Meeting cut off correspondence with all other bodies of Friends. Although it continued to receive members from other yearly meetings, it no longer issued or received epistles or maintained official relations.

Within this fractured environment, the Philadelphia Gurneyites emerged as the most active and dynamic members of the Meeting. They spearheaded reform causes such as the free produce movement and, in 1847, launched the Friends’ Review as the voice of Gurneyite Quakerism. As historian Thomas Hamm notes, ‘This talented and articulate minority was strong enough to prevent an official break with the Gurneyite yearly meetings’.62 For Taylor, this alignment reinforced his identity as both a committed Orthodox Friend and a practical abolitionist, binding theological conviction to reform activism.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Taylor’s Gurneyite Orthodox identity expressed itself in multiple arenas. He maintained a long relationship with the Friends’ Review, writing for and advertising in the publication from its founding in 1847 until his death in 1891. He also advanced education through his support of schools such as the ICY and Myrtilla Miner’s School for Colored Girls in Washington, D.C., and through his service on the board of Haverford College.63 In addition, Taylor promoted evangelical outreach by selling and distributing print materials, including hymn cards. His commitments were further reinforced by close collaboration with fellow Gurneyite Orthodox Friends — Abraham Pennock, Samuel Rhoads, Enoch Lewis, Marmaduke Cope, Thomas Wistar, and Lindley Murray Hoag. Yet the most significant expression of his religious identity came through his leadership in the free produce movement. For Taylor, this work embodied the union of Orthodox conviction and abolitionist practice, making reform a lived testimony of faith.

Gurneyite Quakers dominated the free produce movement. In the 1840s, Orthodox Friends in Philadelphia, New York, Ohio, and New England organised free-produce associations. Taylor, Abraham Pennock, and Samuel Rhoads helped organise the Philadelphia Association, drafting its constitution in 1845. Rhoads, praised by William Still for his ‘keen sense of justice and humanity’,64 and Pennock, a founder of the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania in 1827, were central figures. The Philadelphia Association pledged to expand free-labour production, announcing at its first annual meeting the manufacture of ten thousand yards of cloth. Taylor’s store, opened in 1847, was closely tied to this effort alongside Levi Coffin’s store in Cincinnati. Taylor, Coffin, Rhoads, and others organised trips made by Indiana Quaker Nathan Thomas to travel throughout the South locating sources of free labour goods, particularly cotton.65 Taylor and other supporters of free produce viewed the movement through the lens of capitalism, believing that boycotting slave-labour goods could render slavery unprofitable. Taylor believed success depended on securing quality goods and loyal customers. Critics, however, doubted the boycott’s efficacy. As New York abolitionist Samuel J. May quipped, opposing slavery through free produce was like ‘bailing out the Atlantic with a spoon’.66

The abolitionist movement’s utilitarian turn in the 1840s shifted emphasis away from women’s earlier leadership. In the free produce movement this shift reflected the strong evangelical focus of Gurneyite Quakerism, where women were not as active in the public sphere. While women had operated free produce stores and held leadership roles in the American Free Produce Association during the 1820s-1830s, by the 1840s-1850s nearly all free produce stores were owned by men, and the Philadelphia Association’s leadership was exclusively male.67

In closing, George W. Taylor’s life reminds us that abolition was not only fought in pulpits, legislatures, and battlefields, but also in stores, schools, and everyday acts of conscience. As a Gurneyite Orthodox Friend, Taylor embodied ‘practical Quakerism’ and ‘practical abolitionism’, weaving his faith into the fabric of daily life. Through his free produce store, his work with the Institute for Colored Youth, his publishing ventures, and his networks of reform, Taylor demonstrated that resistance to slavery could be lived out in the marketplace, in education, and in community service.

His story also highlights the diversity of Quaker responses to slavery — contrasting with Hicksite radicalism and Wilburite quietism — while showing how Gurneyite convictions energised reform. Taylor’s vision was not abstract; it was tangible, rooted in goods sold, apprenticeships secured, and newspapers printed.

Remembering Taylor challenges us to see abolition not only as a movement of ideas but as a discipline of practice. His life offers a model of how conviction, consistency, and collaboration can transform ordinary spaces into sites of extraordinary resistance. In honouring him, we honour the countless others who believed that faith must be lived, and that justice must be practiced, every day.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

Notes

  1. Pennsylvania Freeman, Philadelphia, PA: 1848 September 28. See also, for example, Pennsylvania Freeman, 1848 August 10. [^]
  2. Nuermberger, R. K., The Free Produce Movement: A Quaker protest against Slavery, New York: AMS Press, 1942, pp. 77, 119; Garrison, W. P., ‘Free Produce Among the Quakers’, Atlantic Monthly 22 (October 1868), p. 486; Pennsylvania Freeman, 1845 December 4 and 1847 April 22. White operated the store from 1830–1846. She was a Hicksite Quaker and a lifelong member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. [^]
  3. Taylor, F. R. to Nuermberger, R. K., 1941 December 13, Ruth Ketring Nuermberger Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. [^]
  4. Friends’ Review, Philadelphia, PA: J. Tatum, 1891 Mar 12. The Non-Slaveholder promoted the free produce movement while Citizen of the World promoted the peace movement. [^]
  5. Conyers, C. H.,A Living Legend: The History of Cheyney University, 1837–1951, Cheyney, PA: Cheyney University Press, 1990, pp. 10–63; McDaniel, D. and Julye, V., Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the myth of racial justice, Philadelphia, PA: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, 2009, pp. 126–27, 136–37; Friends’ Review, 1849 December 29. [^]
  6. Friends’ Review, 1858 May 15; Friends’ Review, 1848 April 1. For Armistead’s significance to the transatlantic abolitionist movement, see Bennett, B., Antislavery in the Dissenting Atlantic: Archives and Unquiet Libraries, 1776–1865, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University Press, 2025, pp. 112–62. [^]
  7. Friends’ Review, 1864 March 26; 1864 November 12. [^]
  8. See for example, The British Friend, Glasgow: Edward Grubb, 1846 January 31. Taylor is the only American agent listed. For Armistead’s visit to the U.S., see The British Friend, 1850 November; 1851 February; 1851 May; 1851 October. For Tuckett’s visit, see Allinson, W. J., to Taylor, G. W., 1849 September 10, Taylor Family Papers, MC.HC-1233, Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College, Haverford, PA (QSCHC). [^]
  9. Diemer, A. K., Vigilance: the life of William Still, father of the underground railroad, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022; Tomek, B. C., Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2019; Faulkner, C., Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: abolition and women’s rights in nineteenth-century America, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011; Newman, R. S., The Transformation of American Abolitionism: fighting slavery in the early republic, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. [^]
  10. Diemer, Vigilance, pp. 229–54; Centennial Anniversary of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race, Philadelphia, PA: Grant, Faires, and Rodgers Printers, 1876. [^]
  11. See Holcomb, J. L., Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016, p. 193. [^]
  12. Ginzburg, L. D., ‘”Moral Suasion is Moral Balderdash”: women, politics, and social activism in the 1850s’, Journal of American History 73 (December 1976), p. 603. [^]
  13. Diemer, A. K., ‘The Business of the Road: William Still, the Vigilance Committee, and the management of the underground railroad’, Journal of the Early Republic 42 (Spring 2022), p. 89. Diemer argues that the ‘explicit embrace of the language of the marketplace’ by the Underground Railroad reflected the utilitarian turn identified by Ginzberg and ‘represented the promise of capitalism’. See also Holcomb, Moral Commerce; Everill, B., Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020; Brown, K. M., Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023, pp. 164–206. For the business strategies used by the American Anti-Slavery Society, see Goddu, T. A., Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. [^]
  14. Lindman, J. M., A Vivifying Spirit: Quaker practices and reform in antebellum America, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022, p. 6; Lindman, J. M., ‘”The Pleasures of Traveling in Liberty Plains”: practical piety and childhood education through material culture in the American community’, Quaker Studies 27/1 (2022), p. 48. [^]
  15. Liberator, New York, NY: 1841 January 1. [^]
  16. Taylor, G. W., Autobiography and Writings of George W. Taylor, Collins, J. (ed.); Philadelphia, PA: 1891, p. 9. [^]
  17. One family history suggests Elizabeth Richards was disowned by Friends when she married Jacob Taylor in 1802. However, I have not found any record of such a disownment in the Quaker meeting minutes. It is important to note that disownment was not the same as excommunication. As I explain elsewhere, ‘Within the Society of Friends, disownment meant that the individual could not participate in the business meeting or serve on committees. Those who had been disowned could still attend meeting for worship. Disownment also meant that the children of the disowned were not considered birthright Quakers’. Because Elizabeth Richards Taylor did not seek Quaker membership until 1817, after her children were born, her children were not considered birthright Quakers. Holcomb, J. L., ‘Women in the World of George W. Taylor: the public and private worlds of Orthodox Quaker women’, in Quaker Women, 1800–1920: studies of a changing landscape, Healey, R. R. and Spencer, C. D., (eds.), University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023, pp. 60–61. [^]
  18. Taylor, Autobiography and Writings, pp. 17–18. [^]
  19. Plank, G., ‘The First Person in Antislavery Literature: John Woolman, his clothes and his journal’, Slavery and Abolition 30 (March 2009), pp. 68–70; Cadbury, H. J., John Woolman in England: a documentary supplement, London: Friends Historical Society, 1971, p. 96; Fox, G., Journal, 2 vols., London: J. Sowle, 1709, 1: 363. [^]
  20. Plank, G., ‘Selecting from the Writings of John Woolman: “On Christian Moderation”’, Quaker Studies, 28/2 (2023), p. 174. Woolman’s journal has never been out of print since it was first published in 1774. [^]
  21. Plank, ‘The First Person’; National Era, Washington, DC: 1847 April 8; April 15; and April 22. [^]
  22. Taylor, G. W. to Whittier, J. G., 1890 January 25; Whittier, J. G. to Taylor, G. W., February 17, 1890, Taylor Family Papers, MC.HC-1233, QSCHC. Francis R. Taylor claims Taylor ‘suffered with Whittier in the burning of Pennsylvania Hall, in 1838, their desks being side by side’. Whittier was editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman. The newspaper’s office was located in Pennsylvania Hall. Two letters written by John Greenleaf Whittier to George W. Taylor and annotated by Francis R. Taylor, typescript, Taylor Family Papers, MC.HC-1233, QSCHC. See also Woodwell, R. H., John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography, Haverhill, MA: Trustees of the John Greenleaf Whittier Homestead, 1985, pp. 105–19. [^]
  23. In the 1880s, as he worked on his autobiography, Taylor took care to note the connection between his first wife Elizabeth Sykes and Woolman. Sykes’s grandfather John Sykes had travelled with Woolman in the 1740s. See Taylor, Autobiography and Writings, p. 38. [^]
  24. Taylor, Autobiography and Writings, pp. 14–15, 18–19, 21–22. [^]
  25. Hamm, T. D., Liberal Quakerism in America in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1790–1920, Leiden: Brill, 2020, pp. 14, 19. [^]
  26. Hicks, E., Observations on the Slavery of the Africans and their Descendants, New York, NY: Samuel Wood, 1811, pp. 7, 19. [^]
  27. Friends’ Review, 1850 October 26. [^]
  28. Lewis, E., ‘Redemption of Slaves by Purchase’, Non-Slaveholder, Philadelphia, PA: Pennock, A.L., Rhoads, S., and Taylor, G. W., November 1853. [^]
  29. Taylor, Autobiography and Writings, pp. 17, 22. [^]
  30. Hamm, Liberal Quakerism, p. 19. [^]
  31. Hamm, T. D., ‘Hicksite, Orthodox, and Evangelical Quakerism, 1805–1887’, The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013. [^]
  32. See Abzug, R. H., Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994. [^]
  33. H. Larry Ingle’s work is the standard account of the Hicksite-Orthodox schism. Ingle, H. L., Quakers in Conflict: The Hicksite Reformation, Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications,1998. [^]
  34. Taylor, Autobiography and Writings, pp. 23, 26. [^]
  35. Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, J. and E, 1827 January 11, 1827; Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, J. and E, 1826 November 5, 1826; Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, T. B., 1827 January 18, Taylor Family Papers (MC.HC-1233), QSCHC; Mott, A. to Mott, A., July 1828, reprinted in Cornell, T. C., Adam and Anne Mott: Their Ancestors and Their Descendants, Poughkeepsie, NY: A.V. Haight, Printer, 1890, p. 147; Ingle, Quakers in Conflict, p. 35; Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, E., 1827 June 28, Taylor Family Papers, MC.HC-1233, QSCHC. [^]
  36. Taylor, Autobiography and Writings, p. 28. [^]
  37. Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, J. and E, 1826 November 5, 1826; 1827 January 11, Taylor Family Papers, MC.HC-1233, QSCHC. [^]
  38. Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, J. and E, 1827 April 20, Taylor Family Papers, MC.HC-1233, QSCHC. [^]
  39. Taylor, T. B. to Taylor, G. W., 1828 Feb. 8, Taylor Family Papers, MC.HC-1233, QSCHC. [^]
  40. Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, J. and E, 1827 Aug. 2; Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, E., 1827 Aug. 9; Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, T. B., 1827 Aug. 11, Taylor Family Papers, MC.HC-1233, QSCHC. [^]
  41. Taylor, Autobiography and Writings, pp. 29–30. [^]
  42. Whitson, E. T. to Taylor, G. W., 1826 November 30; 1826 December 8; 1828 January 3; 1828 January 27; George W. Taylor to Jacob Taylor, 1828 January 10, Taylor Family Papers, MC.HC-1233, QSCHC. See also Holcomb, ‘Women in the World of George W. Taylor’. [^]
  43. Plank, G., John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: a Quaker in the British Empire, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, p. 117; Woolman, J. The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, Moulton, P. P., (ed.), Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1971, pp. 95–96; Burlington Monthly Meeting, Minutes, 1798 August 6; 1799 May 2; 1802 April 27; 1814 April 3, Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College (FHL). See also Holcomb, ‘Women in the World of George W. Taylor’. Abigail Drinker Barker was the niece of Philadelphia Quaker Henry Drinker. [^]
  44. Gould, S. to Thompson, T., 1827 April 16; Westtown Boarding School, Minutes, 1827 April 4; Sykes, E. to Allinson, S., 1824, October 8, Westtown Boarding School Archives, West Chester, PA; Hallowell, B., Autobiography of Benjamin Hallowell, Miller, C. H., (ed.), 2nd ed., Philadelphia, PA: Friends’ Book Association, 1884, p. 86; Smedley, S. and Brown, A. H., Catalog of Westtown Through the Years, Officers, Students, and Others, Fifth Month 1799 to Fifth Month 1945, Westtown, PA: Westtown Alumni Association, 1945, p. 378; Hole, H. G., Westtown Through the Years, 1799–1942, Westtown, PA: Westtown Alumni Association, 1942; Hogan, M. A., The School house and the Schism: The Influence of the Hicksite Schism on Friends’ Central School, Friends Select School, and Westtown Boarding School, 1827–1845, BA thesis, Swarthmore College, 1992, pp. 70–96. [^]
  45. Richard, H. to Coates, B., [1830] November 9, Families of Philadelphia Papers, 1700–1942, HC-MC 1184, QSCHC; Allinson, W. J. to Allinson, B., ca. 1831, Allinson Family Papers, HC-MC 968, QSCHC; Marriage certificate, George Taylor and Elizabeth Sykes, Taylor Family Papers, HC-MC 1233), QSCHC. See also Taylor, Autobiography and Writings, pp. 31, 36–38; Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, pp. 37–38; Perry, L., Childhood, Marriage, and Reform: Henry Clarke Wright, 1797–1870, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 255. [^]
  46. Taylor, Autobiography and Writings, pp. 36–38; Nuermberger, The Free Produce Movement, p. 84; Taylor, G. W., ‘Select Boarding for Boys’, 1831 September; Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, T. B.,1831 November and December 24, Taylor Family Papers, HC-MC 1233, QSCHC; Taylor, G.W. to Taylor, J. and E., 1832 November 4, Taylor Family Papers, HC-MC 818, QSCHC; ‘Select Boarding School for Boys, Members of the Society of Friends at Burlington, New Jersey’, Friend, 1832 May 5. See also Gigantino, J. J., The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2015. [^]
  47. Taylor, E. R. to Taylor, T. B., 1833 January 5, 1833; 1833 September 13; 1832 February 18; Taylor, E. R. to Taylor, T.B. and J., 1833 January 25, Taylor Family Papers, HC-MC 818. See also Lobel, C. R., Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 76; Horton, J. O. and Horton, L. E., In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 204, 222–23. See also Holcomb, ‘Women in the World of George W. Taylor’. [^]
  48. Bronner, E. B., Sharing the Scripture: The Bible Association of Friends in America, 1829–1879, Philadelphia, PA: Bible Association of Friends, 1979. [^]
  49. Holcomb, ‘Women in the World of George W. Taylor’, pp. 69–70. [^]
  50. Taylor, G. W. and E. to unknown, April 24, 1842, Taylor Family Papers, HC-MC 123, QSCHC. [^]
  51. Favors, J. M., Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Foster Generations of Leadership and Activism, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019, pp. 18–48; Conyers, A Living Legend. [^]
  52. Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate, 1842 March 3, reprinted in Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery and Emancipation, Ripley, C. P., (ed.), Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993, p. 120. [^]
  53. Lapsansky, E. J., The Black Presence in Pennsylvania: ‘Making it Home’, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania Historical Association, 2001, p. 22. [^]
  54. Winch, J., ‘Self-Help and Self-Determination: Black Philadelphians and the Dimensions of Freedom’, in Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love, Newman, R. and Mueller, J., (eds.), Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2011, p. 84; Porter, W. A., ‘John Bannister Gibson as a Lawyer, a Legislator, and a Judge’, in Roberts, T. P., Memoirs of John Bannister Gibson, Late Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, PA: Joseph Eichbaum and Company, 1890, pp. 143–44. Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, T. B., 1834 October 16, Taylor Family Papers, HC-MC 1233, QSCHC. [^]
  55. See note by Taylor, F. R., transcript of two letters from John Greenleaf Whittier to George W. Taylor, undated, Taylor Family Papers, HC-MC 1233, QSCHC. [^]
  56. Citizen of the World, 1855 December. See also Whitson, M. Jr. to Taylor, G. W., 1855 November 10, Taylor Family Papers, HC-MC 1233, QSCHC. [^]
  57. Hamm, Liberal Quakerism, p. 49. [^]
  58. Lindman, Vivifying Spirit, p. 116. [^]
  59. Hamm, T. D., The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 28. [^]
  60. Hamm, T. D., The Quakers in America, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 48–50. [^]
  61. Taylor, G. W. to Taylor, T. B., 1838 June 4, Taylor Family Papers, HC-MC 1233, QSCHC. [^]
  62. Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism, p. 34. [^]
  63. Pacheco, J., ‘Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner — champions of Black education’, Contributions in Women’s Studies 47, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. 97–219; Taylor, G. W. to Myrtilla Miner, M., 1854 December 11, Taylor Letterpress Book, vol. 1, HC-MC 975-02-023, QSCHC; Hewitt, A. B., to Taylor, F. R., 1936 January 6, Taylor Family Papers, HC-MC 1233), QSCHC. [^]
  64. Still, W., The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c. Narrating the Hardships, Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom, Philadelphia, PA: Porter and Coates, 1872, p. 719. [^]
  65. Holcomb, Moral Commerce, pp. 147–87; Brown, K. M., Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023, pp. 196–199; Nuermberger, The Free Produce Movement, pp. 60–82. [^]
  66. May, S. J. to Estlin, J., 1848 May 2, Samuel J. May Papers, Anti-Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library. [^]
  67. Brown, Undoing Slavery, pp. 189–93, 201. According to Brown, ‘Taylor’s failure to incorporate [into his organisation] these zealous supporters of free produce [the American and British Quaker women who supported the movement at the local level by running stores and purchasing free labour goods] appears to have been a structural weakness’. Citing the lack of women on the board of the Free Produce Association of Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, despite an explicit invitation, Brown argues the organisation’s ‘reliance on a transatlantic business model’ and ‘its roots in a self-consciously conservative cohort of Quaker society’ limited the reach of free produce in the 1840s and 1850s. Indeed, ‘Taylor’s main relationship with his supporters was as retailer-consumer rather than a fellow member of a moral community, making it difficult for him to win over consumers on the basis of enthusiasm for the free produce goods themselves’. [^]