Archives of Maryland
(Biographical Series)

Third Haven Friends Meeting House
MSA SC 5496-51881
Quaker Meeting House, Talbot County, Maryland

Biography:

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) is a religious movement that was founded in the late 1640s by George Fox in England. Quakers, like many other religious groups, arrived in North America in search of religious freedom. The first house of worship of any denomination built in Talbot County was most likely the Quaker meetinghouse at Betty’s Cove, which was built in the 1660s—this was also probably the first Quaker meetinghouse erected in the United States.1 By 1684, Betty’s Cove Meeting was replaced by the construction of the Third Haven Meeting House.2 The Third Haven Meeting House is one of the oldest Quaker meeting houses still standing in the world and it is still used as a regular place of worship by Talbot County Quakers today. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Third Haven Meeting was central to Quaker life in Talbot County, serving as the administrative and spiritual leader of a network of smaller meetinghouses in the region.

Although slaveholding was eventually outlawed by the Society of Friends, many Quakers in Talbot County owned slaves before the ban.Collective opposition to slavery had the potential to splinter the Quaker community, thus Quaker opposition to slavery developed gradually over more than a century. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, opposed chattel slavery after he visited Barbados, advocating the freeing of slaves after a certain number of years of service.3 William Southeby, who had provided much of the lumber for the construction of the Third Haven Meeting, wrote against slavery from 1696 until his death in 1722.4 According to Dr. Kenneth L. Carroll, there were a number of manumissions made by Maryland Quakers during their early years in the United States, from 1674 to 1710.5 A notable example of this is William Dixon, who freed and provided his slaves with land, property, and livestock in his will in 1708.6 Dixon, however, was the exception. In Third Haven there is a story that in the eighteenth century a black Quaker woman “called upon her fellow Quakers to free their slaves but the slaveholders paid no attention to her message.”7 Nonetheless, abolition became popular among Friends later in the eighteenth century, encouraged by the efforts of reformers such as New Jersey Quaker, John Woolman, who walked down the Eastern Shore in 1766 as an act of protest against slavery. Woolman visited Quaker slaveowners to convince them to give up slaveholding and he called on the Society of Friends as a whole to reject slavery. He attended and spoke to the Third Haven Meeting in the late spring of 1766.8

Quaker opposition to slavery solidified over several years, as the regional Yearly Meetings gradually introduced restrictions on slave owning in the Society of Friends. In 1760, the Maryland Yearly Meeting, which was gathered at Third Haven in Talbot County, declared that “Friends should not in any wise encourage the importation of negroes, by buying or selling them, or other slaves.” In 1762 the Yearly Meeting forbade Quakers from “importing or buying of negroes, nor selling any without the consent and approbation of the Monthly Meeting they belong to.”9 In 1777 slaveholding became a disownable offense.10

Abolition fractured the meetings of the Eastern shore, as many Quakers in slaveholding states left the Society of Friends either by choice or by disownment. In Talbot County, the Friends’ commitment to abolition was tested early on by the case of Quakers Dennis Hopkins and Daniel Bartlett. Hopkins sold a slave to Bartlett in 1766, and when the Third Haven Meeting sent a committee to investigate the case, neither of them would “acknowledge that he had done amiss in that respect.”11 Hopkins claimed that he did not know of the Yearly Meeting’s resolutions against slavery. Bartlett said that he did know that it was “contrary to the mind of the Yearly Meeting.”12 The case stretched over months, and in 1767 Dennis Hopkins made an apology to the meeting for his action and was forgiven by the meeting. Daniel Bartlett was disowned by the meeting for buying the slave.

The same day that the meeting decided to forgive Hopkins and disown Bartlett, Quaker slave owner Joseph Berry presented manumissions for his slaves Abram and Hannah. Berry also presented a statement of intention to free a slave named Philip when he reached the age of twenty one (on the 30th of the 7th month).13 Upon receiving Joseph Berry’s manumissions, the Third Haven Meeting appointed a member of the meeting to keep a book especially to record the names of each person manumitted by members of the meeting.14 Unfortunately, that book has been lost. Joseph Berry’s brothers James and Benjamin quickly followed his example and began manumitting their slaves. In 1774 the Third Haven Meeting established a committee for “the care and oversight of the negroes among us, wither in a state of Slavery or Freedom, & to treat with those who do not do Justice to them.” Joseph Berry, Benjamin Parvin, Howel Powel, and William Edmondson were appointed members of the newly formed committee.15 Manumissions increased over the next several years.

Talbot Friends were active in national and local abolition societies. The earliest abolition society in the United States was founded by Pennsylvania Quakers, the “Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race.” In 1787, it counted six members from Maryland, including John Needles, a Quaker from Talbot County.16 Talbot Quakers were also among the founders of the Choptank Abolition Society, Philanthropic Society, and the Chestertown Abolition Society. Needles was also president of the Choptank Abolition Society. In 1793 it was referred to as the “Easton Society”. Third Haven Quakers were also active in nearby counties, such as in the Chestertown Abolition Society, Joseph Wilkinson and James Maslin were two Quaker leaders of that organization. In the nineteenth century, Ezekiel Cowgill was an elder in the Third Haven Meeting who facilitated the founding of the African American community of Unionville by leasing his land to black veterans and their families.

The process of purging slaveowning from the Society of Friends took place over many years; in 1778, slaveowners were officially disowned, but as late as 1787 the Maryland Yearly Meeting reported that it was attempting to deal with a small number of slaveowners that remained. During the nineteenth century most of the Quaker meetings in Talbot County disappeared due to low attendance, and by 1841 Third Haven was the only remaining meeting in the county. Although levels of opposition to slavery varied in the Quaker community, many members of the Third Haven Meeting were active in the abolitionist movement despite the decline of Quakerism in the nineteenth century. 
1.Kenneth L. Carroll, “Looking Back” Commemoration of First Meeting Held in Old Meeting House, Third Haven Meeting Religious Society of Friends, 13 day 9th Month, 1959,

2.Third Haven Monthly Meeting Minutes 1676-1746, page 66, [MSA SC 2394-1-4].

3.Kenneth L. Carroll, Three Hundred Years and More of Third Haven Quakerism, (Easton, MD: The Queen Anne Press, 1984) 37.

4. Kenneth L. Carroll. "William Southeby, Early Quaker Antislavery Writer." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 84 (October 1965), 416.

5. Carroll, Three Hundred Years, 37.

6. TALBOT COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT (Wills) Liber EM 1 Folio 251. William Dixon.

7. Carroll, Three Hundred Years, 38.

8. Third Haven Monthly Meeting Minutes 1746-1771, page 400, [MSA SC 2394-1-5].

9. J. Saurin Norris, "The Early Friends in Maryland" read at the Maryland Historical Society (March, 1862), 23.

10. Ibid, 24.

11.Third Haven Monthly Meeting Minutes 1746-1771, page 411, [MSA SC 2394-1-5].

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid, 539.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid, 41. 

16. Kenneth Carroll, “Voices of Protest: Eastern Shore Abolition Societies, 1790-1820.” Maryland Historical Magazine, 84 (1989), 350.

17. Kenneth L. Carroll,  Three Hundred Years, 52.

Return to Third Haven Friends Meeting House's Introductory Page

Written by Emily Huebner, 2013.
 
 
 


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