'Our native soil': Philadelphian Quakers and Geographies of Race, 1780-1838

In the early national period, Philadelphian Quakers were on the forefront of antislavery and black uplift efforts, and they also took an early stand on Indian rights and were involved with gradual civilization. This dissertation tells the interconnected story of these two arms of Friends' racial benevolence, bringing the Quaker vision of black Philadelphia alongside their hopes for the Allegany Seneca of western New York. By exploring the groundbreaking possibilities and disheartening limits of these Quaker programs, this project seeks to deepen the conversation about Quaker philanthropy and racial difference in the early republic. Conjoining gradual abolition and gradual civilization narratives highlights broader logics of white supremacy, racial fear, and hope that join together histories that are often told separately. To better understand the theoretical, as well as physical links, between Friends' work with black Philadelphians and the Allegany Seneca, I rely on a geographical framework and study how Quakers, free blacks, and the Iroquois thought about, moved through, and understood spaces in order to uncover the nuances of racial thought. How people read race into debates about growing urban scenes and changing frontier environments gives voice to racial anxieties and hopes that were often left unspoken. Looking at race through geographic expressions, movements, and debates also underscores how the physical environment was used to ground racial thought in the rapidly changing early national period.;This dissertation also traces the shift from the Revolutionary moment into the Jacksonian period, considering the evolution from environmentalism to racial determinism. Spatial analysis highlights the similarities between the rise of racial exclusions in Philadelphia, as expressed by African colonization, riots, and segregation, and the hardening attempts at removal, dispossession, and 'civilization' in the American west. Reading these stories side by side, this dissertation focuses on the period between the passage of Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 and 1838 when the burning of Pennsylvania Hall, disfranchisement of black Pennsylvanians, and the fraudulent Buffalo Creek Treaty underlined a new form of hostile racial exclusion. Quakers interpreted gradual abolition, gradual civilization, colonization and removal, and racial violence through a common geographical framework, reading their own physical, cultural, and personal positions against those of free blacks and Indians. Looking at this shared undercurrent of geographical imagination and conflict, this dissertation seeks to provide a more comprehensive view of early national race, benevolence, and the contested terrain of belonging that encompassed multiple races and places.