“A Minute against Slavery, Addressed to Germantown Monthly Meeting”

About the Author

While the antislavery resolutions were intended as a general statement from the Quaker meeting at Germantown to the affiliate Dublin Monthly Meeting, it was signed by four specific members of the group: Gerhard (or as signed in the text, “Garret”) Henderich, Derick Opden Graff (“up de Graeff”), Francis Daniel (“daniell”) Pastorius, and Abram Opden Graff (“Abraham up Den graef”). Pastorius, perhaps the most famous of the quartet, represented the interests of the Frankfort Land Company. The two Opden Graffs were part of the original Krefeld contingent, while Henderich arrived in 1685.

Pastorius, the son of a burgher, was born in 1651 and grew up in an urban and commercial atmosphere. He attended four universities and was well traveled. By the 1680s he was practicing law in Frankfurt am Main. Pastorius was familiar with William Penn even before his arrival in Pennsylvania, having frequently served as the liaison between the residents of Germantown and the colony’s bureaucratic structures. He also became well acquainted with the colony leaders David Lloyd and James Logan, and he shared their vision of Pennsylvania as a commercial and mercantile venture. Similarly, he recognized the value of Pennsylvania as a refuge for western Europe’s most radical Protestant reformers, the Anabaptists. Pastorius encouraged the inhabitants of Germantown to adapt to their new environment. He suggested that his fellow immigrants learn and practice English, familiarize themselves with English laws and systems of governance, and intermingle with the larger English population of the colony. Pastorius played a leading role in the organization and recognition of the Germantown Monthly Meeting and actively encouraged its correspondence and affiliation with others throughout the region. He continued to serve as spokesperson and promoter for Germantown and the larger colony until his death in 1720.

Derick and Abram Opden Graff were two of three brothers who emigrated from Krefeld to Germantown in July 1683. According to the contract negotiated in Rotterdam between William Penn and Jacob Telner, Jan Streypers, and Dirck Sipman on March 10, 1683, the proprietor promised the signers five thousand acres of land each in exchange for a guarantee of settlement. The Opden Graff trio received two thousand acres of land from Telner, after the contract was signed. The third brother, Herman, agreed to act as agent for Sipman, another Krefeld landholder who never ventured to Pennsylvania. Later that summer, Derick, Abram, and Herman Opden Graff, along with thirty other Krefelders closely tied by blood and marriage, immigrated to Pennsylvania. The brothers were among the original membership of the Germantown Quaker meeting organized later that year and housed by 1686 in the Kirchlein, a log meetinghouse.

Gerhard Henderich is the member of the group about which the littlest is known. He arrived in Germantown in 1685 on either the Francis or the Dorothy along with a number of other German and Dutch immigrants. Henderich, accompanied by his wife, Mary, and daughter, Sarah, originated in Krisheim, a community near Krefeld on the Dutch side of the border. Claiming two hundred acres purchased from Sipman upon his arrival, he was by 1688 a substantial member of the Germantown community. As a Dutch Quaker, he, too, aligned himself with the heterogeneous Quaker meeting at Germantown. By 1692, Derick and Abram Opden Graff had parted ways as the consequence of a larger religious controversy, the Keithian schism, which debated the corruption of Quakers in Pennsylvania by secular concerns. Abram, aligning with the Keithians, left Germantown for Perkiomen, the Dutch township. In 1704 Abram Opden Graff, as the last surviving of the brothers, sold the remaining 828 acres of land in Germantown. Of Henderich there is little mention after 1693, when he was recorded on a Germantown tax list.