In 1826 Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy made a nationwide canvas of abolition societies in the United States. He printed the numbers in his anti-slavery paper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Approximately half of these groups, then called manumission societies at the time, were in North Carolina.

Beginning with a handful of Quaker meetings in the central Piedmont meeting in 1816, the North Carolina Manumission Society grew to about fifty local groups. Delegates from these groups met semi-annually, and by 1827 they had raised more than $12,000 to fund training and re-settlement of approximately 2,000 freedmen.

In 1827 many of these activists petitioned the state legislature to grant more freedoms to free persons of color, but the legal response was to further circumscribe both free and slave. Having accomplished the basic task and with little prospect of legal abolition, approximately half of the 600 delegates emigrated to Indiana.

In the historical book BREAK EVERY YOKE, Roger Kirkman tells the story of the North Carolina Quakers who conscientiously opposed slavery through the Civil War and helped many of those in bondage to gain their freedom. In Kirkman’s remarkably detailed history, this story of Southern resistance to the South’s “peculiar institution” is fully chronicled for the first time.

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