Footnotes to The First Friends and Slavery:
Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers (Friends United Press, 1988, 1994), p. 121. (Return to text.)
Douglas Harper, “Slavery in Pennsylvania”, Slavery in the North (on-line document, 2003). (Return to text.)
Unfortunately, in his efforts to ascribe a pro-slavery agenda to early Friends as a body, McNeill confuses the values and attitudes of William Penn the Younger, the Quaker leader and founder of Pennsylvania, with those of his father William Penn the Elder, a non-Quaker British admiral, and with those of his son Thomas, who turned against the Friends and became an out-and-out scoundrel. (Return to text.)
David Brion Davis, Slavery and Social Progress (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 12. (Return to text.)
Antony Andrewes, The Greeks (W. W. Norton and Co., 1967), pp. 140-41. (Return to text.)
Ibid., p. 136. (Return to text.)
Shakespeare, Henry V, Act IV, Scene 1. (Return to text.)
Peter Green, Ancient Greece: An Illustrated History (Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 71. (Return to text.)
As it happens, A. R. Burn, in The Pelican History of Greece, Thirteenth impression, recently revised (Penguin, 1965, 1983), p. 244, gives us a written transcript of a speech by an anonymous Athenian gentleman, circa 425 B.C., who complained to his (evidently non-Athenian) audience of this very thing. This was a speech that was accidentally preserved for posterity by someone who bundled it into a collection of the works of Xenophon. The gentleman, whoever he was, went on to say, “…If you wonder at [the Athenians’] letting the slaves be comfortable, and some of them indeed have quite a high standard of living, there is sense in that…. Where sea-power is important, it is necessary that slaves should work for money, so that we may collect revenue from them, and we must let them be free….”(Return to text.)
Exodus 21:5-6; Leviticus 25:39-55; Deuteronomy 15:16-17. Also see I. Mendelsohn, “Slavery in the OT”, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible Vol. IV (Abingdon, 1962), pp. 383-91. (Return to text.)
Exodus 21:20-27. (Return to text.)
This is my summary of the story as it appears in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book VI. D. Laërtius cites as his sources Menippus and Eubulus. There are somewhat different accounts in other sources, but I find D. Laërtius’s version the easiest to believe.
This is Waterhouse’s 1905 portrait of Diogenes of Sinope, in his barrel in the marketplace before he became a slave. Diogenes is portrayed here as an object of the ladies’ amusement. But in real life, it was usually Diogenes who was the mocker.Epictetus was another slave in the ancient world who doubled as a famous and respected philosopher. (Return to text.)
Luke 7:2-10. (Return to text.)
John 15:15. (Return to text.)
Romans 8:15-17, 23; Galatians 3:26-4:7; Ephesians 1:5-6. Notice, too, that “redemption”, another key idea in Paul’s theology, signifies the act of buying a person’s freedom from slavery. (Return to text.)
Galatians 3:28. Also compare Colossians 3:11. (Return to text.)
Colossians 3:22. (Return to text.)
Philemon 15b-17. (Return to text.)
- Here Paul’s saying in I Corinthians 13:7 — “love bears all things … endures all things” — answers Christ’s “resist ye not evil” in Matthew 5:39. (Return to text.)
Vladimir G. Simkhovitch, “Rome’s Fall Reconsidered”, The Political Science Quarterly (1916); repr. in Simkhovitch, Toward the Understanding of Jesus and two additional historical studies (The Macmillan Company, 1937). (Return to text.)
John 13:3-17. (Return to text.)
After the time of James II and William Penn, the footwashing part of the tradition was discontinued, but the traditional giving of “Maundy money” continues to this day. (Return to text.)
According to Western medieval legend (almost certainly untrue), Christopher was born non-Christian and originally named Offerus. As a young man, grown to great size and strength, he vowed to serve only the strongest and the bravest. (Note the word “serve”.) He bound himself to a powerful king, but found that the king dreaded even the name of the Devil. Then he bound himself to the Devil, only to find the Devil frightened at the sight of a cross. A hermit suggested, common-sensibly, that he offer his allegiance to Christ, and when Offerus agreed, the hermit baptized him.
The hermit wanted Offerus to take up asceticism, but Offerus himself was more drawn to the service of the weak and the poor. After all, Christ himself had taught, “Whatever you do to the least of these my brethren, you do to me.” (Matthew 25:31-46) So as a way of serving Christ, Offerus took up the task (the service) of carrying people across a dangerous stream.
One day a child appeared, needing to be carried; as Offerus struggled across the torrent, the child grew heavier and heavier until it seemed that Offerus was carrying the whole world. The child, of course, revealed himself at the end of the crossing as Christ, and explained that his great weight was due to the fact that he bore the sins of the world. Thus Christopher got his name (literally meaning “bearer of Christ”). And note the parallel to our Quaker language of “laboring under the weight of a concern”!
To prove his identity, the child told Christopher to fix his staff in the ground. The next morning the staff had grown to a living tree. This miracle won many to Christ, but enraged the non-Christian local ruler, who had Christopher seized and beheaded. Thus Christopher was rewarded for service with sainthood, and became one of the most popular saints in the Catholic world. (Return to text.)
Thomas, receiving the gift, thought of it more as a cross than a crown:
Syne they came on to a garden green,
And she pu’d an apple frae a tree:
“Take this for thy wages, True Thomas,
It will give the tongue that can never lie.”“My tongue is mine ain,” True Thomas said;
“A gudely gift ye wad gie to me!
I neither dought to buy nor sell,
At fair or tryst where I may be.“I dought neither speak to prince or peer,
Nor ask of grace from fair ladye:”
“Now hold thy peace,” the lady said,
“For as I say, so must it be.”— F. J. Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, version C
The story of Thomas is movingly retold in Ellen Kushner’s novel, Thomas the Rhymer (William Morrow & Co., 1990). (Return to text.)
Eric Foner, Forever Free (Random House Vintage, 2005). The passage quoted here appears in an on-line excerpt from the book on the Random House web site. (Return to text.)
Jessica McElrath, “Slavery in Colonial Times”, on line at the About: African-American History web site. (Return to text.)
Meeting of “elders and brethren” in the Quaker movement at Balby, Yorkshire, “…Unto the brethren in the North these necessary things following…” (general letter, 1656); as in the copy in the Lancashire Records Office at Preston, from the papers of Marsden Monthly Meeting; on line courtesy of Quaker Heritage Press. (Return to text.)
George Fox, letter 153 (1657). (Return to text.)
Matthew 5:48. When professors of christianity speak of “the counsels of perfection”, they normally mean “poverty, chastity and obedience”; but here I am using the term to refer to the counsels contained in Matthew 5:21-47, the counsels summarized in the commandment “therefore be perfect”. (Return to text.)
- George Fox et al., To the Governor and Assembly at Barbados (1671), in George Fox, Journal: pp. 602-06 in the Nickalls edition. (Return to text.)
H. Larry Ingle, First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 235, citing Fox, Sermon at Thomas Rous’s, October 21, 1671. (Return to text.)
Ibid., p. 345, n. 37. (Return to text.)
Thomas Clarkson, A Portraiture of Quakerism… (1807), Vol. 2, pp. 96-98. (Return to text.)
As regards Friends bringing their slaves to Quaker meetings, we may note that Philadelphia Monthly Meeting positively advised its members to do this in 1698. (See Henry Cadbury, “Negro Membership in the Society of Friends”, Journal of Negro History, Vol. 21 (1936), pp. 151-213, reproduced on-line at the Quaker Heritage Press web site.)
Regarding the more dramatic examples, I would note, for example, the Dartmouth, Massachusetts, slaveholders Ebenezer and John Slocum, who bought and freed Paul Cuffe’s father, educated Paul himself, and helped him build his shipping business.
I would also note Philadelphia Quaker slaveholder Robert King, who bought Olaudah Equiano, educated him, Christianized him, helped him get started in business, and allowed him to purchase his freedom. (Return to text.)
This may be clearly seen in a letter that Penn and his Quaker co-proprietors wrote to the colonists of West Jersey, some years before Pennsylvania was founded. The co-proprietors wrote:
There we lay a foundation for after ages to understand their liberty as men and Christians, that they may not be brought into bondage, but by their own consent; for we put the power in the people … to meet and choose one honest man for each proprietary, who hath subscribed to the concessions; all these men to meet as an assembly there, to make and repeal laws, to choose a governor … to execute the laws…. No man to be arrested, condemned, imprisoned, or molested in his estate or liberty, but by twelve men of the neighbourhood. No man to lie in prison for debt, but that his estate satisfy as far as it will go, and be set at liberty to work. No person to be called in question or molested for his conscience, or for worshipping according to his conscience….
— quoted in Elbert Russell, The History of Quakerism (Friends United Press, 1979), pp. 115-16.
Notice the line, in the above quotation, about “not being brought into bondage, but by their own consent.” As we can see from the letter from Germantown Friends, which I quoted near the beginning of part one of this essay, it out of this same exact concern that opposition to Negro slavery arose a very few years later. (Return to text.)
William C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism, 2nd edn. prepared by Henry J. Cadbury (William Sessions Ltd., 1919, 1961), p. 411.
Braithwaite goes on to tell of the case of John Moone, a notable Quaker minister, who was imprisoned in Bristol in 1682 during the last great wave of persecutions, and accepted liberty on the condition that he emigrate to the Americas. Another Friend who was also imprisoned at the time, John Whiting, wrote Moone a letter in which he remonstrated with him, saying in part, “Not that I am against any’s going thither [to North America], so they go clearly, but only at such a time as this for any to go to shun persecution, believing the blessing of God will not attend any such therein….” Friends wrote afterward that Moone dismissed Whiting’s pleas and emigrated anyway, “but never prospered after.” (Loc. cit.) (Return to text.)
McNeill, on the web page cited earlier, quotes an entry for 1685 from Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania:
“The Penn family receive £40 of the bearer for a lady in England that intends to go over [to Pennsylvania] soon with her family; and many considerable persons are like to follow. She has bought 5,500 acres, and her first 300 must be chosen on the river, next to Arthur Cook’s. She wants a house of brick, like Hannah Psalter’s in Burlington, and she will give £40 sterling in money, and as much more in goods. Francis Collins or T. Matlack may build it. It must have four rooms below, about 36 by 18 feet large, — the rooms 9 feet high, and of two stories height.” (Return to text.)
December 1662 - 14th Charles II, 2:170, Act XII. (Return to text.)
September 1667 - 19th Charles II, ACT III, 2:260. The statute reads:
“WHEREAS some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made pertakers of the blessed sacrament of baptism, should by vertue of their baptisme be made free; It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly, and the authority thereof, that the conferring of baptism doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom; that diverse masters, freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity by permitting children, though slaves, or those of growth if capable to be admitted to that sacrament.” (Return to text.)
October 1669 - 21st Charles II, 2:270, Act I. (Return to text.)
See Hendrik Berkhof, Christus en de Machten (1953), trans. John H. Yoder as Christ and the Powers (Mennonite Publishing House and Herald Press, 1962, 1977); William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience (The Seabury Press, 1964); William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (Word Books, 1973); John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus. Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd edn. (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1972, 1994). (Return to text.)
It may be worth noting here that the word “peculiar”, in the phrase “peculiar institution”, was not intended to mean “strange”. It was derived, by nineteenth-century Southern slavery’s defenders, from the Latin peculium, a belittling term referring to the small property of a poor person. Using it in this context, as defenders of slavery did, emphasized their idea that slaves were mere property, while belittling both the slave and the controversial character of slavery. (Return to text.)
Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, pp. 82-83. (Return to text.)
Fox’s travel diaries for the period are full of passages like this one — “On the 18th day we passed through many tedious bogs, and travelled hard about fifty miles, and came well through the woods to Maryland, to Robert Harwood’s at Miles River, very weary. The next day, the 19th of 7th month, all being weary and dirty through the bogs, yet we went this day to a meeting about a mile or half by water. From thence we passed about three miles by land and one mile by water to John Edmondson’s, and from thence on the 22nd day, three or four miles by water to the First-day’s meeting.” (Journal, Nickalls edn., p. 634.) Note that when Fox traveled only a few miles in a whole day, it was because he was struggling through a trackless wilderness. (Return to text.)
Friends in the Philadelphia Legislature followed through on this recommendation in a more concrete way, in 1711, by passing a civil statute banning the importation of further slaves. Unfortunately, this statute was then annulled by the Crown. (Barbour and Frost, op. cit., pp. 120-21.) (Return to text.)
Statement on the ExplorePAhistory.com web site; apparently from Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (Peter Smith, 1965). (Return to text.)
Historians Douglas Harper and Jessica McElrath are among the many who have noted the more humane approach to slavery prevalent in colonial Pennsylvania. Harper notes that “the [legal] restrictions on slaves were mild, [even] by Northern standards” (though he adds that the restrictions on free blacks were comparatively strict prior to 1780); McElrath notes that Pennsylvania schools and churches were open to the black population. (Harper, op. cit.; McElrath, op. cit., pp. 1 and 2.) (Return to text.)
Wikipedia article Slavery in Colonial America, “The Atlantic Slave Trade to North America”. See also the statistics in Jessica McElrath’s article, cited above. (Return to text.)
Barbour and Frost, op. cit., p. 120, citing J. William Frost, ed., The Quaker Origins of Antislavery (Norwood Editions, 1980), pp. 56-67. (Return to text.)
Ibid., p. 80. (Return to text.)
Samuel Fothergill, letter to James Wilson, November 9, 1756; from George Crosfield, Memoirs of the Life and Gospel Labours of Samuel Fothergill, pp. 281-82. (Return to text.)
Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748-1783 (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), p. 112; Barbour and Frost, op. cit., p. 121. (Return to text.)
Ibid., loc. cit. The pamphlet in question has been reprinted in Frost, op. cit., pp. 82-122. (Return to text.)
Barbour and Frost, op. cit., p. 122, quoting Roberts Vaux, Memoirs of the Lives of Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandiford (Philadelphia: 1815), pp. 26-27. (Return to text.)
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Marietta, op. cit., p. 113. (Return to text.)
See the second part of my report on the witness workshop I led last year at Baltimore Yearly Meeting. (Return to text.)
Fox, letter 116 (1656); William Dewsbury, general letter to Friends (1668); George Fox, letter 264 (1669). (Return to text.)
Daniel Roberts, Some Memoirs of the Life of John Roberts Written by his Son (Philadelphia: Henry Longstreth, 1852); also repr. in William Evans and Thomas Evans, eds., The Friends’ Library: Comprising Journals, Doctrinal Treatises, and Other Writings of Members of the Religious Society of Friends, Vol. 8 (Philadelphia: Joseph Bakestraw, 1844). (Return to text.)
Marietta, op. cit., p. 113, citing David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), p. 330. (Return to text.)
Meeting of “elders and brethren” in the Quaker movement at Balby, Yorkshire, op. cit., item 3; Dewsbury, op. cit.; Fox, letter 264. (Return to text.)
Joseph Pike, Some Account of the Life, Written by Himself, Part II (ca. 1722); repr. in William Evans and Thomas Evans, eds., The Friends’ Library, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Joseph Bakestraw, 1838), p. 377. (Return to text.)
John Woolman, Journal (entry for 1757); pp. 73-74 in the Phillips P. Moulton (Oxford, 1971) edition. (Return to text.)
Ibid.; pp. 61-62 in the Moulton edn. (Return to text.)
Anthony Benezet, quoted in Roberts Vaux, Memoirs of the Life of Anthony Benezet (1817), p. 30. (Return to text.)
“…We came to the governor’s house [of the Carolinas], who with his wife received us lovingly. And there was a doctor that did dispute with us … concerning the Light and the Spirit. And he so opposed it in every one, that I called an Indian because he denied it to be in them, and I asked him if that he did lie and do that to another which he would not have them do the same to him, and when he did wrong was not there something in him, that did tell him of it, that he should not do so, but did reprove him. And he said there was such a thing in him when he did any such a thing that he was ashamed of them. So we made the doctor ashamed in the sight of the governor and the people; and he ran so far out that he would not own the Scriptures.” (Fox, Journal, entry for 1672.) (Return to text.)
Marietta, op. cit., pp. 118-19. (Return to text.)