Quakers’ Role in the Pennsylvania Abolition Movement

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Pennsylvania was a leader among all the English colonies and the United States in the abolition movement which did not come to full fruition in the United States until the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865. The abolition movement in Pennsylvania started nearly 2 centuries earlier with writings by leaders of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and later coalesced into a formal abolition movement with the formation of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. The Quakers using their religious principles were a major force in the passing of the first anti-slavery law in the United States in 1780. The slave trade did flourish in Pennsylvania when it was founded in the 17th century. The earliest reference to slaves in Pennsylvania was in 1677, and William Penn, himself, held at least 12 slaves and granted a charter to the Society of Free Traders that included a section on treatment of negro slaves (Turner1 –slavery in Col. PA – 141). By the late 1760s “1,500 blacks lived in slavery in Philadelphia. Statewide, there were an estimated 5,600.” (Dribben) Early Quaker leaders debated how to deal with the subject of slavery and reconcile the practice to their religious teachings. In 1671, George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, after observing the slave trade first hand in the West Indies advised all Quakers to treat their slaves kindly and eventually set them free; however, George Fox could not fully embrace abolition outright as this would have “doomed the spread of Quakerism in the South and the West Indies” (Frost) William Edmundson, the founder of Quakerism in Ireland, traveled with George Fox to the West Indies and questioned how holding slaves could be reconciled with Christ’s teachings. In 1675 Edmundson returned to the West Indies and began preaching specifically against slavery. This resulted in the passing of several anti-Quaker laws and the forbidding of negroes to
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