Notes |
- The author of an autobiography.
On his marriage, he writes:
"On the 9th day of the 3d month 1826, I was married in Friends' meeting house in Alexandria, to Elizabeth, daughter of John and Elizabeth Janney. Her parents had been residents of Alexandria, but were both deceased, and she lived with her stepmother Ann Janney. My wife and I were distantly related; our grandfathers being first cousins. We had known and esteemed each other for many years, and our friendship gradually ripened into a warmer and more tender affection, which being sanctioned and confirmed by the holy rite of matrimony, has resulted in a union that I regard as the greatest of all my temporal blessings. In prosperity and adversity she has been a safe counsellor, a sympathizing companion and a helpmeet steadfast in love and devotion.
Soon after our marriage we went on a tour to the Falls of Niagara, thence to Montréal and Québec, returning by way of Lake Champlain and through several of the New England states. It was a season of unalloyed enjoyment."
According to Mangus, "Mirroring the nation's populace at large, Loudoun County Friends differed over slavery. In 1853 Samuel Janney, a member of the Society of Friends, proclaimed that slavery was nonexistent among his fellow Quakers in Loudoun County (Life of George Fox 466-72). Janney's claim regarding the Quakers and their ownership of slaves was delusory. Throughout the early nineteenth century, elders dismissed numerous Friends from Loudoun County's two meetings for owning slaves. Quaker minutes commonly listed notations such as ‘reported as holding slaves' or ‘extreme cruelty to a black boy & girl' as reasons for dismissal. The property tax records of Loudoun County in 1860 listed Janney, himself, as owning a slave with William Holmes, a fellow Quaker. Why Janney owned this slave is unclear. Perhaps he purchased the slave from an abusive master, similar to his acquisition in 1856 of a slave woman and child. Perhaps warm memories of the slave woman who cared for him as a young child motivated Janney to own this slave. Whether the minister violated Quaker precepts against slavery is unclear. What is clear is that slavery was a very divisive issue among the Quakers of Loudoun County." (Some references have not been included in this quotation). Immediately after purchasing the two women in 1856, Mangus adds in a note, he immediately gave them their freedom, but did not file paperwork for a while to this effect. Therefore it is possible that the slave in 1860 was the daughter he had purchased in 1856, and that the mother had died in the meantime. His opposition to slavery is well attested, and his home was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Mangus's article does not focus on slavery, but on what Quakers did in Loudoun during the war, and how they were affected and treated by Union and Confederate forces (esp. Mosby's Rangers) during it. Friends did join the Confederacy and the Union, he contends, in much greater numbers than previously noted; which side they joined was aligned with whether they owned slaves. [1, 4, 5]
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