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, which 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.”