Note 17 — NOTE

As early as 1657, and before he had come in contact with slavery, Fox addressed a letter of advice from England to all slave-holding Friends. In 1671, seeing for himself the system at work in Barbadoes, he recommended that the holders should free their slaves after a term of service, and should arrange for their welfare when freed. The first documentary protest against slavery put forward by any religious body came from the German Quakers in Philadelphia (Germantown); they had come as settlers from Kirchheim in Germany, where Penn’s teaching had met with an ardent response. John Woolman spent twenty years in ceaseless labour on behalf of the slaves. Throughout the society the work went on; meetings were held, individual protests were made, slave-holding Friends were visited. By 1755 it was generally agreed that negroes should be neither bought nor imported by Friends, and less than thirty years later the society, with the exception of a few isolated and difficult cases, was free of slavery. Many Friends paid their slaves for past services, and in all cases provision was made for their welfare.