Warner Mifflin

Warner Mifflin (August 21, 1745 – October 16, 1798) was an American abolitionist and an early advocate of reparations for slavery. Born and raised in Virginia, Mifflin established himself as a planter in Delaware in 1769. As a member of the Society of Friends, he was strongly opposed to slavery and became dedicated to assisting slaves who tried to free themselves, to defending free blacks from abuse, as well as encouraging Quakers and others to free their slaves. Early life and family Mifflin was born in Accomack County, Virginia on the Eastern Shore in 1745, into a slave-holding family descended from Quaker immigrants who arrived in New Jersey in 1677, one of the pioneering families of William Penn's "Holy Experiment". Although often sickly, he grew to be nearly seven feet tall, with a confident, charismatic personality. He was a second cousin of the more famous Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania. The several dozen slaves on the family's plantation produced cereals, flax, fruit, and livestock. The young Mifflin's conscience was troubled as he came to understand that the children he had played with growing up on his father's plantation were slaves. His father, Daniel Mifflin, was one of the largest slaveholders in the county. Mifflin wrote that he became an abolitionist at the age of fourteen, after a conversation with a young man who was one of his father's slaves. He "determined never to be a slave-holder," but in 1767, he married Elizabeth Johns (c. 1749–1786), and her family provided them with a plantation in Kent County, Delaware and several slaves as a dowry. Their plantation's slaves produced many of the same foodstuffs, such as cereals and meat, that Mifflin's father's plantation had. Like his father, Mifflin also eagerly bought more land whenever possible. Elizabeth was a lapsed Quaker who had become an Anglican, which briefly caused the Mifflins problems with the Duck Creek Quaker Meeting they sought to join, but both became reconciled with that meeting and were full members by 1769. After Elizabeth died, probably of cancer, Mifflin remarried in 1788 to Ann Emlen (1755–1815), another Quaker reformer. Of her pregnancies, two sons would survive to adulthood. In total, Mifflin fathered twelve children, six of whom died before they were four years old, and only five of whom survived to adulthood.