In this guest series written by my mom we’re looking into what can be found in the archives of colonial America about people’s attitudes toward slavery. Today’s post is about the Quakers.

The Quaker View of Slavery

The Great Awakening of the mid 18^th century in the Presbyterian, Methodist and Anglican churches of America had certainly shone a new light on the spiritual lives of both white people and black. Those affected by the revival gained a new awareness of the need to evangelize slaves. However, it seems that only the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers), outside the mainstream of revivalism, made any concerted effort at anti-slavery activism. They had begun to do so quite a few years earlier.

In searching the document record, we find that in 1688 some Pennsylvania Quakers and Mennonites made a slight protest against slavery. This was followed by the publication in 1693 of “An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes” by George Keith. This was the very first American anti-slavery tract, emphasising that slaves were victims taken by violence, clearly against the pacifist beliefs of the Friends.

Around 1720 the opposition to slavery as a social evil began to gain momentum, but the movement really took off during the 1750s. Men such as John Woolman and Anthony Bezenet worked hard to convince Quaker families and merchants to boycott the slave trade in all its aspects, from slave ownership to consuming slave-produced merchandise such as cotton fabric and sugar. The topic began to be discussed at the Yearly Meetings where numbers of Quaker congregations met for mutual support. Woolman’s booklet “Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes” was published in 1754 with the funds and endorsement of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and five years later Bezenet published his “Observations on the Inslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes”.

These tracts inspired the Yearly Meetings in Philadelphia (1755), Baltimore (1759), New York (1762), North Carolina (1772), and Virginia (1784), to be increasingly emphatic against slavery, as they forbade Friends from importing or purchasing slaves. Many freed the ones they already owned. Before long, as discipline against masters was enforced more frequently, the ownership of slaves was eliminated among the Quakers long before it was illegal in most states. Their abolition efforts did not end there, but continued vigorously until the Emancipation in 1863.

Featured image: Anthony Bezenet