Charles Osborn
Charles Osborn was a notable abolitionist born in Guilford County, North Carolina, in the late 18th century. He became a Quaker minister around 1794 and actively opposed slavery throughout his life, influenced by his religious convictions and the Quaker community's values. Osborn organized the Tennessee Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves in 1814 and, alongside fellow abolitionists, initiated the publication of antislavery newspapers such as the Philanthropist in Ohio. His journal reflected his strong belief in the unconditional freedom of enslaved individuals, and he was critical of colonization efforts that aimed to remove free blacks from the United States.
Throughout his life, Osborn faced challenges, particularly from more moderate Quakers, which led to a significant split within the Quaker community in Indiana when he and his allies formed a new anti-slavery meeting in 1843. He was also involved in the Free Produce Association, advocating for the use of goods produced without slave labor. Osborn's activism continued until his later years, including opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. His contributions to the abolitionist movement have been recognized posthumously, emphasizing his dedication to social justice and equality for African Americans.
Subject Terms
Charles Osborn
- Charles Osborn
- Born: August 21, 1775
- Died: December 29, 1850
Abolitionist, born in Guilford County, North Carolina, the son of David Osborn and Margaret (Stout) Osborn, and grandson of Matthew Osborn, an immigrant from England. He became a Quaker minister in Knox County, Tennessee, around 1794, and later traveled in that capacity throughout the United States, Canada, and Britain. He married Sarah Newman in 1798, and they had seven children. After Sarah’s death in 1812 he married Hannah Swain, with whom he had nine more children. Osborn’s Quaker profession, convictions, and milieu encouraged a militant opposition to slavery, which characterized groups of Quakers living within the heart of the South. Meeting at the house of his father-in-law, Elihu Swain, in December 1814, he organized the Tennessee Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. With the help of John Rankin and others, he reorganized the society in 1815, with support from such ex-slaveholding Tennesseans as Elihu Embree. Rankin, Embree, and Osborn were to begin antislavery newspapers. In Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, Osborn published the Philanthropist from 1817 to 1818. Many Quakers had flocked to this part of the country, and it was an appropriate area for early abolitionist agitation. In his journal Osborn developed the demand for the unconditional freedom of the slaves. He was one of the early opponents of slavery who perceived schemes for colonization of blacks to be disruptive to their cause. In the Philanthropist he attacked the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, which became the American Colonization Society, for helping to perpetuate slavery, expatriate free blacks, and other actions he felt were destructive. Goods made by slaves, Osborn argued in accordance with Quaker beliefs, were stolen, as slave labor was stolen by the masters.
He moved to Wayne County, Indiana, for most of the period from 1819 to 1842; then he migrated to Cass County, Michigan, and, in 1848, to Porter County, Indiana, where he lived out his life. In 1832 he became involved with William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist leader, who had become influential in dissuading his readers of the value of colonization. Osborn was instrumental in 1842 in the formation of the Free Produce Association of Wayne County, Indiana, and helped to create the agitational newspaper, the Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle. Osborn suffered a setback from more moderately abolitionist Quakers who wanted to limit antislavery agitation within the Friends Meeting. Wresting control of the Indiana Yearly Meeting, these Friends ousted Osborn and his cothinkers from the governing committee of the organization. He was among the 2,000 radical Quakers who seceded in 1843 and formed a new Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-Slavery Friends. He remained an active abolitionist, opposing the Fugitive Slave Law in his last days. The Journal of that Faithful Servant of Christ, Charles Osborn was published posthumously (1854) by the Friends. Moved partly by his religious background and views, Osborn was a significant early abolitionist who anticipated that antislavery activists would break away from the colonization idea, and who early took an unqualified opposition to the southern labor system; his own early experience in the South may have contributed to his perceptions of the needs of the antislavery struggle.
Minutes of the Manumission Society of North Carolina are in the Guilford College Library; minutes of the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-Slavery Friends are in the Earlham College Library. Biographical material includes D. Du-mond, Anti-Slavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (1939); R. A. Ketring, Charles Osborn in the Anti-Slavery Movement, The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, no. 7 (1937); W. Edgerton, A History of the Separation in Indiana Yearly Meeting (1856); L. Coffin, Reminiscences (1876); G.W. Julian, “The Rank of Charles Osborn as an Anti-Slavery Pioneer,” Indiana Historical Society Publications, vol. 2, no. 6 (1891); S. B. Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery; P. M. Sherrill, “Quakers and the North Carolina Manumission Society,” Trinity College Historical Society Papers (1914); and A. E. Martin, “Anti-Slavery Society in Tennessee,” Tennessee Historical Magazine, December 1915.