The Politics of Conversion in Early American Antislavery: Stephen Grellet and Conversionist Antislavery

Stephen Grellet, born in 1773 as Étienne de Grellet du Mabillier in Limoges France, was an aristocratic youth in the elite Horse Guards of King Louis XVI when the French Revolution forced him to flee his native country.  After a wild journey through Europe and South America, Grellet finally reached Newtown, Long Island.  Here the former cosmopolitan disciple of Voltaire converted to Quakerism and committed himself to a life of service.  Grellet took this calling seriously, and explored Quaker networks throughout the Atlantic World and the European continent.  Along the way, Grellet found himself in dank prisons, royal chambers, and even the private residences of the pope, spreading the gospel and fanning the fires of international social reform.  In addition to proselytizing, Grellet attacked the great sin of slavery through targeted encounters with individual hearts and minds but never through organized political action. 

Historians have presented early antislavery as either conservatively elitist or paralyzed due to a lack of political capital.  The antislavery of Stephen Grellet was neither as he cherished an intense optimism in the power of personal persuasion to inaugurate widespread social change.  Grellet and many of his contemporaries did not engage in political antislavery because they shared an ideology that expected that both spiritual and temporal slave liberation would stem from widespread campaigns for conversion rather than political agitation.  Through a close study of Stephen Grellet, we find an ideology of conversion that cut across communities of Quakers and evangelicals, clearing the way for the ecumenical networks of reform that would blossom into the religiously-rooted, radical reform of the antebellum era.