Marking Pennsylvania History

A Protest Ignored

"These are the reasons why we are against the traffik of men-body, as followeth." So began a protest against slavery signed by four newcomers to the New World, residents of Germantown, Pennsylvania.

The document, dated April 18, 1688, was presented at the monthly meeting for worship held at the home of Richard Worrell. That building, now gone, stood at Germantown Avenue and Wister Street.

Four signers: Tunes Kunders, a cloth dyer; Gerrit Hendricks, Derick op den Graeff, and Abraham op den Graeff, all linen weavers, were led by a fifth, Francis Daniel Pastorius, the likely author. Pastorius, the scholarly, political and religious head of the community, led Quakers from a community in the lower Rhine River Valley to Germantown only a few years before.

"There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men, like as we will be done our selves: making no difference of what generation, descent, or colour they are. And those who steal or rob men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alike?"

The definitive answer to that question had to wait. Copies of the protest were sent to Monthly Meeting, which found the matter "so weighty that we think it not expedient for us to meddle with it here." The Quarterly Meeting recommended it to the Yearly Meeting, for the same reason. Finally, the Yearly Meeting found the protest "not to be so proper for this Meeting to give a Positive Judgment in the case, It having so General a Relation to many other Parts, and therefore at present they forbear It."

Having pushed the document aside, it was subsequently lost for the next century and a half, a period during which some Quaker families, and many others, amassed wealth from economies made lucrative by the institution of slavery.

- Kenneth FInkel, Executive Director of WHYY's Arts & Culture Service

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