History Spotlight
Quakers and Abolition Written by Doug Humes
I
’ve spent days searching for records of slaves in Marple and Newtown townships, from the first census in 1790 until 1860, the last census before the Civil War. There was one slave reported in the 1790 census for Newtown. By the next census in 1800, there were no slaves in Newtown. That is the only slave that appears in either township for that time period. Why was that? Beginning in the 1680s, Marple and Newtown were settled by Quakers. Their religion, Quakerism, born in the 1650s, was relatively young, and Quaker thinkers were still exploring what it meant to be Quaker. In 1688, six years after Pennsylvania was founded, Quakers in Germantown presented a petition urging their local meeting to support the abolition of slavery. That was the first protest against black slavery made by a religious body in the English colonies. Generations of Quakers continued the assault on the “peculiar institution” of slavery. They pressured their members to free their slaves, and also worked to eliminate the importing and sale of slaves. In 1775, Quakers led the charge in founding the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the first in the country. The legislature, responding to pressure for change, passed the Gradual Abolition Act in 1780, providing that any child of a slave mother born after that time was free; prohibiting the import of slaves into the state; and placing registration requirements on slave owners. Failure to register resulted in freedom for the slaves. The law was revolutionary: the first time in human history that a democratic government took affirmative steps to abolish slavery, which had existed in the world since the Biblical age and beyond. That law did not immediately eliminate all slavery in Pennsylvania. In 1840, there were still 64 people held in bondage; a law passed in 1847 finally freed
Original Springfield Friends Meeting House Photo courtesy of the Marple Historical Society
Newtown Square Friends Meeting Photo courtesy of the Newtown Square Historical Society
the rest. But the Quakers in Pennsylvania remained active: The Underground Railroad was largely a Quaker initiative in Pennsylvania, and Quakers continued to exert pressure for change on the national level.
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