Lobster in a Bucket

Research Paper

The big thing I have to show for my first year of graduate school here at Notre Dame is this 30 page research paper. It's based off of archival research I did in Philadelphia over a few weeks last October and this Christmas break. I'm pretty happy with it's progress so far. The next step will be to revise it so that hopefully it get's published in a journal. But after the jump are the first few paragraphs, let me know if you want to read the whole thing.

During the heat of a summer afternoon in Philadelphia, 1748, John Smith, a young member of the prosperous Quaker commercial class sat at the threshold of his door. He looked across the street and watched a bricklayer hit his slave. Fed-up, and desperate to preserve his dignity, the slave, whose name we do not know, ran down to the wharf. Once there, the slave declared that if his master struck him again, he would throw himself in the Delaware River and do his best to drown. The master struck the slave. The slave jumped in the Delaware, and drowned. Smith commented that the “affair affected me very much.”
Smith did not reflect on the experience beyond these few words. But the event illuminates starkly the world in which Smith lived. A slave salvaged his dignity in the only way he believed he could, by taking his own life in response to the ceaseless abuse of his master. The water that met him, and the wooden wharf he left behind carried great meaning to Smith as well. John Smith was a merchant. As such, Smith’s livelihood came from the same water. the same wharf, and from the same slave system that led this anonymous man to his death.
As a member of the Quaker elite, Smith built his considerable wealth out of a system of trade centered on the Atlantic Ocean. Smith sold colonial flour and wood to his factor in London, David Barclay and Sons. Smith, with an empty ship and hopefully a positive credit, would have his ship loaded with goods to sell either in Philadelphia or the Caribbean. Sometimes instead of going through London, Smith would go directly to the Caribbean with Philadelphia goods. From the Caribbean Smith would return to Philadelphia with sugar, rum, and molasses, three of the most valuable, and easily saleable goods in the Philadelphia market. These commodities were completely, and wholly dependent on slave labor for their production.
In this light, Smith was not a passive onlooker to the tragedy of this nameless man’s death. He was directly engaged in profiting from the same system of bondage that he saw at its most ugly; however, Smith did not see things in this way. To the extent that Smith was “affected very much” he did not move towards an antislavery position. Instead during his life he would come to own at least one slave, and would profit from slavery in other ways beyond trafficking in the produce of the slave system.
But eventually, Smith, like many other Quakers of his generation, would decide that slavery was incompatible with the tenets of his faith. This paper will argue that Smith’s development of an antislavery position cannot be understood just through Smith’s individual experience. His class interest, his moral development, and his economic values were not enough either. Instead, Smith’s move to antislavery must be understood within the context of Quaker reform in the middle half of the eighteenth century. Antislavery was one component of this reform movement.