What arguments did the Quakers make against slavery?

 Quakers were pioneers in identifying that slavery and/or involvement with the slave trade had to be faced as a leading moral issue within their own religious communities, as practised by their members.

In colonial North America and the Caribbean, many Quakers were themselves slave owners. The first step for those arguing against slavery was therefore to eliminate slave-owning within the Quaker community.   In Britain the focus of attention was much more on the transatlantic slave trade, and the goal was to eliminate Quaker involvement in this, as ship owners or investors. 

William Penn himself owned slaves during the four years he spent in Pennsylvania, though they were eventually freed. In Philadelphia in 1756, John Woolman was asked by a dying neighbour to write a will bequeathing his slave to one of his children. He gently declined on grounds of conscience and persuaded the neighbour to free “the young negro” instead. Benjamin Lay, a Quaker 'hermit', known for 'action-statements', stood barefoot in the snow outside a Meeting House in order to dramatise the vulnerability of under-clothed slaves. He was disowned (expelled) from the Society, not for the truth of what he said, but for publishing criticisms of Friends who owned slaves.This was seen as an internal concern to be resolved within the Quaker family.

The struggle within the Quaker communities in America was approached with a quiet insistence on persuasion which deeply affected their several Yearly Meetings. In Woolman’s journal (May 1757) he records how he decided tactfully to insist on embarrassing his Quaker slave-holding hosts on departure by paying the slaves for any services which they had rendered to him. In some cases Quakers bought slaves from each other to establish their freedom, in others they compensated the slaves whom they themselves freed.  Eventually, between the 1750s and the 1770s all the Yearly Meetings had concluded that slave-owning was incompatible with membership as Friends. By 1774, Quakers individually had to choose: it was a matter of disownment - they could no longer be Quakers if they continued to own slaves.

In Britain, Quakers were involved in the lucrative slave trade in various ways. Some were ship owners, some were ship's captains, some were involved in related trades, and some were involved as investors. A well-known example concerns Robert King, a prominent Quaker merchant in the West Indies, who in 1763 purchased Olaudah Equiano, the famous black Abolitionist, though he sold him his freedom three years later. At one time Quaker iron-masters made chains and shackles for use in the slave trade. These Quaker businessmen faced an increasingly powerful groundswell against slavery within the Quaker movement on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-18th Century. They gradually had to withdraw either from their slave-related activities or from Quakerism.

In 1785, eight black African abolitionists, including Olaudoh Equiano, thanked the Quakers for their 'benevolence, unwearied labour and kind interposition, towards breaking the yoke of slavery'.

It took about two generations for Quakers to cleanse their membership from benefiting from the institution of slavery, as owners and/or traders. Nevertheless this was achieved well before the campaigns for its complete abolition in society at large began. In this their position as a religious abolitionist denomination was probably unique. It gave them the moral authority to advocate the abolition of slavery throughout society.  They moved on to raise the moral issue for everyone, both in Britain and in North America. And they were active campaigners for complete abolition on both sides of the Atlantic.

Slavery is not simply a historical phenomenon; It persists to this day in modern forms, such as trafficking. Quakers have opposed it from very early on and still do.

In the first few years after the Quaker movement began in 1652, slavery would have been outside the experience of most Quakers, as it was not much practised in Britain. But in British colonies in the Caribbean and North America it was widespread. Britain was also heavily involved in the slave trade, as many of its merchants brought captives from African countries to the New World to sell to plantation owners and wealthy householders. So as early Quakers and others of like mind travelled across the Atlantic, they saw slavery at first hand, and some became slave-owners themselves. But they soon saw that ownership of one human being by another contradicted their belief in the fundamental equality of all human beings (the testimony to equality).

Quakers were not alone in this, and the key strength of the historical abolitionist movement, in Britain and North America, was the determination of the slaves themselves. Quakers nevertheless made a vital and distinctive input, in five main ways.

They raised slavery as a moral issue as early as the 1670s and 80s. When George Fox and Irish Friend William Edmundson visited Barbados in 1671 they were confronted with the realities of slave labour face to face. Fox immediately appealed for better treatment.  By 1675 Edmondson was condemning slavery outright. The Germantown Quakers in Philadelphia stated that slavery itself was immoral in 1688. Many others raised the moral issue over the years that followed.

They worked for nearly a century to eradicate it from the Quaker community. In 1727, Britain Yearly Meeting forbade owning, and dealing in, slaves.  In North America a long process of persuasion culminated in 1774, when Quakers, involved with slavery, were told to give it up or leave the Society of Friends.

Quakers provided a leadership structure, reliable national network, and significant material resources to the campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1783 Quakers in Britain began active campaigning. They joined forces with William Wilberforce and others. The campaign drew heavily on the extensive Quaker network. The slave trade was abolished in 1807, and slavery itself became illegal in the British Empire in 1833. In North America, Quakers campaigned equally vigorously. Many also broke the law by assisting slaves to escape from the slave-owning states in the South to the freer North. Slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865.

The methods Quakers pioneered constituted an extraordinary model which evolved rapidly and illustrates the key elements still required for such campaigns today: research, committee leadership, logo, publications, petitions, lobbying, produce boycotts, networking, fundraising, legislation and direct action/ civil disobedience.

A remarkable number of individual Quaker men and women gave exemplary leadership.

Thus the evils of slavery were gradually and systematically exposed in what is arguably the first Human Rights movement aimed at securing the fundamental rights of others.  Quakers played a prominent, active, supportive and moral role. They helped to create a moral-political momentum, which attracted allies in other churches and from wider society, making it a mass movement. 

In truth these landmarks in legislation were far from final: slavery has not been eliminated. It has gradually metamorphosed into its contemporary forms – forced and bonded labour, trafficking in persons, the worst forms of child labour, forced child begging, and child soldiers. Descent-based (traditional) Slavery still exists in some places. The distinctiveness of the Quaker contribution has gradually merged with the universal commitment to standards of human rights and justice to which Quakers individually and collectively continue to contribute, as do many others. Quakers are much involved in modern anti-slavery movements.

The British & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1839 and continues to this day as Anti-Slavery International (ASI). Throughout the generations and decades Quaker individuals, families and local Meetings have continued to support this organisation and its work. Current Quaker support at all levels for the Anti-Slavery cause remains a significant bulwark.

Click Britain or the Americas, for more information about Quaker thought and action concerning slavery in these parts of the world.

Quakers were involved in the lucrative slave trade as ship owners, captains, iron-masters, merchants and investors, in ports such as London and Bristol. These Quaker businessmen faced the opprobrium of the powerful anti-slavery groundswell within the Quaker movement in the mid-18th Century and gradually had to withdraw either from the trade or from Quakerism.

George Fox encountered slavery on his visit to Barbados in 1671. He advocated that Friends should 'deal mildly and gently' with their slaves, and that 'after certain years of servitude they should make them free'. His Irish companion, William Edmundson was more radical, and by 1675 he had condemned slavery outright. The culmination amongst British Friends came in 1727, when London Yearly Meeting formally minuted its censure of Friends dealing in slaves.

John Woolman visited from Philadelphia in 1772, and re-awakened the issue. In 1783, Quakers established the Friends Committee to promote the Abolition of the Slave Trade. William Dillwyn and John Lloyd wrote the hard-hitting pamphlet 'The case of our fellow creatures, the oppressed Africans', and James Phillips had 12000 copies printed. 300 Quakers signed a petition, and this went to all MPs with a copy of the pamphlet. This was the first organised campaign on the issue, but it made no real impact, as Quakers were too nonconforming to be influential.

In 1787 they reformed the committee by joining with three prominent Anglicans, and made Granville Sharp its President, and Thomas Clarkson its Secretary. It was this 'coalition' that secured access to Parliament, and the Committee became the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. William Wilberforce, a prominent Anglican evangelical, agreed to be their Parliamentary spokesman. This new committee, 9/12 of whom were Quakers, created a moral-political momentum, and an extraordinary pioneering endeavour of organised national political campaigning. Other Quaker committee members were businessman Joseph Woods, and bankers George Harrison and Samuel Hoare.

The committee met in James Phillips’ printing shop and produced the campaigning literature there. Quakers also made excellent use of their national network of 50,000 Members and 150 Correspondents. They delivered what may have been history’s first direct mail fundraising letters. Two thousand people contributed, from 39 counties.

An anti-slavery bill was put before Parliament in 1791 but was defeated. Attention then turned to other methods, and the Saccharist movement was born. This was a boycott against all sugar produced on slave plantations in the West Indies, intended to undermine the economic case for slavery.

The campaign lost momentum in the mid-1790s, but was revived in 1803, and the Act abolishing the slave trade in the British Dominions was eventually passed in 1807.

It is notable that there were no women on the Committee. Although Thomas Clarkson admired the gender equality amongst Friends, William Wilberforce did not.  Elizabeth Heyrick, Anne Knight and others protested against the exclusion of women, and in 1825 they founded the Birmingham Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves. They argued that the men had been too slow and cautious, and were too influenced by the arguments of the plantation owners. Across the country about 70 more women’s anti-slavery societies were established. In the 1820s they were demanding immediate emancipation and compensation for the slaves. Elizabeth Fry (and her brother Joseph John Gurney) also lobbied extensively.

Slave-ownership was finally outlawed in the British Empire in 1833.  Its after-effects persisted for some while and Quakers continued to campaign against ongoing injustices. Joseph Sturge, a young businessman, visited the West Indies in 1836/37. His book “The West Indies in 1837” made a major impact, with its first-hand evidence of many problems in the ex-slaves’ lives. He purchased property there to help freed slaves to settle independently. He took a prominent role in founding the British & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1839.

Much later, Henry S. Newman (1837-1912) and Theodore Burtt (1863-1944) established an industrial mission on Pemba Island (now part of Tanzania) to show how plantations could be run with free labour, rehabilitating the slaves who had been finally freed in 1897.

Slavery still exists in modern forms, and many Quakers are active as individuals in Anti-Slavery International (formerly the Anti-Slavery Society).  Quaker Michael Rendell Harris (1923-2009) served as its Chair for a period in the late twentieth century.