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

Audience

The intended audiences of “A Minute against Slavery” were the Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly Meetings of Pennsylvania and New Jersey with which the Germantown Quakers’ meeting was affiliated. In the document itself, the Germantowners address themselves specifically to the “Monthly Meeting held at Richard Worrell’s.” This gathering at Dublin, in Bucks County farther north of Philadelphia, had been settled in the initial movement to the colony, and its residents came primarily from the British Isles. They reviewed the Germantown petition on February 30, 1688, and chose not to act on it but rather to forward it to the Quarterly Meeting with which they were affiliated. Their response, signed by P. Joseph Hart, states, “We find it so weighty that we think it not expedient for us to meddle with it here, but do rather commit it to ye consideration of ye Quarterly meeting.” On April 4, 1688, that meeting, lodged in Philadelphia, agreed on the gravity of the questions raised and in turn referred the protest to the Yearly Meeting to be held in Burlington, New Jersey, on July 5, 1688. The reaction of the meeting at Burlington is ambiguous. They recognize “a Paper being here presented by some German Friends Concerning the Lawfulness and Unlawfulness of Buying and keeping Negroes” and consider it “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.” That is, given their connections, commercial and personal, with slaveholding regions and individuals, they indefinitely tabled the petition.

There also existed a secondary audience for the resolution: those who in the following decades would read or refer to it. While the Germantown Quakers’ immediate readers and listeners in the affiliate meetings might have rejected their petition by refusing to act upon it, the ideas that they put forth could not be permanently ignored.