Quakers Make Protest Against Slavery to Congress February 12, 1790

There is unmistakable evidence of Negro slavery among the Dutch on the South (now Delaware) River as early as the year 1639. In that year a convict from Manhattan was sentenced to serve with the blacks on that river.

In September and October, 1664, the English defeated the Dutch, and some of the Dutch soldiers were sold in Virginia as slaves. The Negro slaves were also confiscated by the victors and sold. A cargo of three hundred of those unhappy beings having just landed, failed to escape capture.

In 1688 Pastorius, the Op den Graffs (now Updegraffs), and Gerhardt Hendricks sent to the Friends’ meeting house the first public protest ever made on this continent against the holding of slaves, or as they uncompromisingly styled it, “the traffick of men’s body.”

These early residents of Germantown compared Negro slavery to slavery under Turkish pirates, and failed to note that one was better than the other. Their protest said:

“There is a saying that we shall doe to all men licke as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent, or colour they are. And those who steal or robb men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alicke? Here is liberty of Conscience, 113which is right and reasonable; here ought to be likewise liberty of ye body, except of evil doers, which is another case. In Europe there are many oppressed for Conscience sake; and here there are those oppressed which are of a black colour.”

This memorial is believed to be in the handwriting of Francis Daniel Pastorius, and at the date it was written New England was doing a large business in the Guinea trade, the slave depots being located chiefly at Newport, where the gangs for the Southern market were arranged.

All honor is due these honest first settlers of Germantown, who asked categorically: “Have these Negers not as much right to fight for their freedom as you have to keep them slaves?”

They asked, further, to be informed what right Christians have to maintain slavery, “to the end we shall be satisfied on this point and satisfy likewise our good friends and acquaintances in our natif country, to whom it is a fairfull thing that men should be handled so in Pennsilvania.”

The Quakers were embarrassed by the memorial and its blunt style of interrogatory. It was submitted to the Monthly Meeting at Dublin Township, “inspected” and found so “weighty” that it was passed on to the Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting, which “recommended” it to the Yearly Meeting at Burlington, where it was adjudged “not to be so proper for this meeting to give a positive judgment in the case, it having so general a relation to many other parts, and, therefore, at present they forebore it.” So the matter slept.

Very soon thereafter slavery in Philadelphia was not very different from what it was in the South at a later period. The white mechanics and laborers complained to the authorities that their wages were reduced by the competition of Negroes hired out by their owners, and the owners objected to the capital punishment of slaves for crime, as thereby their property would be destroyed.

In 1708 two slaves, Tony and Quashy, were sentenced to death for burglary, but their owners were allowed to sell them out of the province after a severe flogging had been given them upon the streets on three successive market days.

The Assembly of Pennsylvania soon viewed with much concern and apprehension the introduction of so many slaves into the province, but the House would not consider any proposition to free Negroes, deciding that to attempt to do so would be “neither just nor convenient,” but it did resolve to discourage the introduction of Negroes from Africa and the West Indies. It laid a tax of £20 a head upon all such importations. The Queen and Royal Council failed to approve the act, for the British Government was set like flint against any provincial attempt to arrest the African slave trade or tax it out of existence—that trade was a royal perquisite.

114The year 1780 is memorable in the annals of Pennsylvania for the passage of an act for the gradual abolition of slavery in this State. On February 5, 1780, the Supreme Executive Council in its message to the Assembly, called the attention of that body to this subject, and although it was forcibly presented, the matter was dismissed, “as the Constitution would not allow them to receive the law from the Council.”

On March 1, 1780, by a vote of thirty-four to twenty-one, an abolition act passed the Assembly. It provided for the registration of every Negro or mulatto slave or servant for life, or till the age of thirty-one years, before the first of November following, and also provided “that no man or woman of any nation or color except the Negroes or mulattoes who shall be registered as aforesaid, shall at any time hereafter be deemed, or adjudged, or holden within the territory of this Commonwealth, as slaves or servants for life, but as free men and free women.”

The Quakers partly forgot their woes on hearing of an act which they so much approved, as in 1774 the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting had taken a definite and decided stand against slavery.

They proceeded without delay to urge war on the system.

On February 12, 1790, the Quakers made their first formal protest to Congress for the abolition of slavery in every form.

The movement against slavery had been making quiet progress during all these years, and on January 1, 1794, a convention was held in Philadelphia by invitation of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, of delegates from all societies throughout the United States.

At this convention two memorials were adopted, one to the Legislature of Pennsylvania, and the other to Congress, asking for suitable laws to suppress the slave trade.

The petition to Congress was referred to a committee, which made a report recommending the passage of a law against the fitting out of any ship or vessel in any port of the United States, or by foreigners, for the purpose of procuring from any part of the coast of Africa the inhabitants of the said country, to be transshipped into any foreign ports or places of the world to be sold or disposed of as slaves. The law was finally passed on March 22, 1794, and vessels were thereafter liable to heavy fine and forfeiture, and the freedom of the slaves on board.

Thus after the taunt of the early German settlers, the Quakers cleared their own skirts and then led in the movement which abolished slaves from Pennsylvania and were the first to lay this great question before Congress.

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