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

Impact

The immediate impact of “A Minute against Slavery” was negligible. Those meetings petitioned by the Germantown cohort refused to act on the resolutions, instead passing the petition on to the succeeding affiliate meeting or, in the case of the Burlington meeting, postponing action on the measure. The protest did, however, foreshadow the wider emergence of antislavery sentiments in Pennsylvania’s Quaker communities. By 1750 there would be at least fifteen such Anglo-American statements against slavery, nearly all authored by Quakers. The earliest of these succeeding statements was issued at a 1696 Yearly Meeting wherein the membership strongly discouraged engagement in the slave trade; in 1715 that same Pennsylvania body made participation in slavery an offense subjecting the member to expulsion from the meeting. While such an action had no legal standing, a Friend’s exclusion from Quaker circles in Pennsylvania would have been a serious matter in the colonial era.

What is particularly interesting about the Germantown protest is how accurately the members defined what would become the most politically significant arguments against slavery. They drew on their belief system to construct the condemnation of an institution they considered morally and spiritually repugnant. Germantown’s Quakers asked their fellow worshippers to acknowledge their own beliefs in the brotherhood of all humanity, in the obligation to strive for moral perfection, and in the Golden Rule. They also warned their audiences of the consequences of failure to join them in renouncing the institution of slavery: slave owners and holders invited and would suffer the approbation of their European counterparts, the burdens and temptations of sin, and the threat of rebellion.