In The Writings of Warner Mifflin: Forgotten Quaker Abolitionist of the Revolutionary Era Gary B. Nash and Michael R. McDowell present the correspondence, petitions and memorials to state and federal legislative bodies, semi-autobiographical essays, and other materials of the key figure in the U.S. abolitionist movement between the end of the American Revolution and the Jefferson presidency. Virtually unknown to Americans—schoolbooks ignore him, academic historians barely nod at him; the public knows him not at all--Mifflin has been brought to life in Gary B. Nash’s recent biography, Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist (2017). This volume provides an array of insights into the mind of a conscience-bound pacifist Quaker who became instrumental in making Kent County, Delaware a bastion of free blacks liberated from slavery and a seedbed of a reparationist doctrine that insisted that enslavers owed “restitution” to manumitted Africans and their descendants. Mifflin's writings also show how he became the most skilled lobbyist of the antislavery campaigners who haunted the legislative chambers of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania as well as the halls of the Continental Congress and the First and Second Federal Congresses. An opening introduction and introductions to each of the five chronologically arranged parts of the book provide context for the documents and a narrative of the life of this remarkable American.

GARY B. NASH is a professor of history emeritus and director emeritus of the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught since 1966. He has published many books and essays, including Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681-1726; Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America; andThe Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution.
 
MICHAEL R. MCDOWELL, for more than fifteen years, has researched eighteenth-century Delaware Quaker Warner Mifflin’s antislavery activism using primary documents, including Mifflin’s extensive correspondence. McDowell has published articles on Mifflin and an early Delaware Quaker antislavery petition in Delaware publications. 

WARNER MIFFLIN (August 21, 1745–October 16, 1798) was born in Virginia to a slaveholding Quaker family. He moved to Delaware in 1769 and later established himself as a prominent abolitionist.