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

Context

The colony in which the Germantown protesters lived was unique in many ways. Pennsylvania, meaning “Penn’s Woods,” owed its existence to William Penn (1644–1718) and his plans for a “Holy Experiment.” Penn, a member of the English elite and the son of Admiral Sir William Penn, became enamored of radical Protestant theology at the University of Oxford and converted to Quakerism at the age of twenty-three under the guidance of Thomas Loe, an itinerant Quaker minister. The Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, had organized in England during the Commonwealth period (when England was governed by Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector rather than a king), around the spiritual teaching of George Fox, to emerge as an identifiable entity in 1652. Similar to other Anabaptist sects appearing in Europe at the same time, the Friends emphasized deep personal and spiritual connections to God, the brotherhood of all humans, pacifism, and the possibility that individuals could achieve grace and perfection of the soul while on earth. Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, Dutch and German Reformists, and pietistic Lutherans, among others, reject Trinitarian doctrines (belief in the unity of three persons in one god), the validity of man-made dogmas and creeds, and an organized clergy. In most places, with the exception of the Netherlands, Anabaptists were deemed heretics and persecuted on that basis.

Penn, who was politically protected by his status and family connections, recognized the vulnerability of those less fortunate than he and sought to provide safe refuge for persecuted believers. In 1681 he used his ties to the British Crown to acquire a proprietary grant for the territory west of the Delaware River in exchange for a debt of 16,000 owed to his father, and on February 28, 1681, Charles II signed the Charter for the Province of Pennsylvania. Penn clearly understood the similarities and common plight of Quakers and other Anabaptist communities in mainland Europe, and he recruited heavily among them for immigrants to his “Holy Experiment.” By 1685 nearly eight thousand religious dissenters had joined Penn’s colonial venture. His plan called for broad-based religious toleration and the disestablishment of the church from the state. This made his colony particularly attractive to radical reformers in the Rhineland region, whence the settlers destined for Germantown originated. The disassociation of faith from the structures of governance—combined with the general lack of religious uniformity and the Quakers’ and other Anabaptists’ emphasis on the Inner Light and independent searching for answers and moral guidance—brought about a colonial system where community morality was adjudicated by civil rather than religious authorities, and individuals were charged with the responsibility of moving their communities toward moral and ethical ideals.

Despite the fact that the residents of Germantown were inhabitants of an Anglo-American colony established by royal charter, the members of their community and their meeting were not English but rather German and Dutch. The immigrants to the community consisted in large part of pietistic Germans recruited by the Frankfort Land Company, established in 1683, and of Germans and Dutch Quakers organized separately from the town of Krefeld, in the Rhineland region, along the border between the German principalities and the Netherlands. The groups’ acknowledged leader, Francis Daniel Pastorius, a pietistic Lutheran, represented the Frankfort Land Company as its legal agent and was the only member of the company to venture to Pennsylvania. He organized and recruited many of the original settlers and collaborated heavily with the Krefeld contingent; he was thus in many ways the architect of the company’s Germantown settlement. They had dual goals for their experiment: They sought both to establish a spiritual and physical haven for other radical religious reformers and to ensure the success of their financial investment.

Between 1683 and 1690 the stable core of the Germantown community consisted of the households of thirteen of the original Krefelders—twelve of whom were Quakers. Earlier scholarship suggested that the composition of this cohort was Mennonite, a version of German Anabaptists, in origin, but more recent evidence indicates that they were not Mennonite at this time; although several would abandon Quakerism for Mennonite ideals after the schism led by George Keith in 1692, during the 1680s they were professing Quakers. Shortly after their immigration to the colony and by the end of 1683, the leaders of the Germantown community organized their own Quaker meeting under the guidance of Pastorius. The group affiliated with the larger Philadelphia Monthly Meeting during 1684 and with the Abington Quarterly Meeting, located in New Jersey and the oldest and superior meeting of the region, by 1688.

When the Quaker meeting at Germantown issued “A Minute against Slavery, Addressed to Germantown Monthly Meeting” in 1688, the group operated within a societal framework that was for the seventeenth century remarkably flexible and heterogeneous. In Germantown alone, there resided individuals hailing from several distinct German and Dutch communities as well as English immigrants. Virtually all of the inhabitants practiced some form of radical Protestantism; there were German Lutheran Pietists, German Reformists, and Dutch and English Quakers.