GERMANTOWN, Pa. (WHTM) — Francis Daniel Pastorius was one of the early movers and shakers of Pennsylvania. A German convert to Quakerism, he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1683, a year after William Penn arrived and laid out the city of Philadelphia. Pastorius arranged the purchase of land to the west of the new city, and founded a community for German and Dutch-speaking settlers. Germantown, as it was called, still exists, as part of Philadelphia. They were prospering in the New Word, making good livings, and free from the religious persecution they had faced in Europe. But Pastorius, as well as many others in their community, were troubled by slavery. In the regions of Germany and Holland where they’d lived, servitude was a punishment for being convicted of a crime. Yet all around them, people were keeping slaves. Worse yet, the slaveholders included about half the Quakers in the Philadelphia area, including William Penn. How, the Germantown Quakers asked themselves, could people who fled Europe because they were persecuted for their religion turn around and persecute others for the color of their skin? In 1688, five members of the Germantown Quakers gathered together to compose “A Minute Against Slavery.” At the heart of their argument against the practice was The Golden Rule. In the very first sentence, they declare “is there any that would be done or handled at this matter? viz., to be sold or made a slave for all the time of his life?” The document is not only a condemnation of slavery, it was also a plea for universal rights, regardless of race or religion. The members of the Germantown Meeting presented their petition to the local Monthly Meeting at Dublin, Pennsylvania (now Abington), held at the house of Richard Worrell. The monthly meeting decided the matter was “fundamental and just”, but needed to be considered by more than one local monthly meeting. So, they sent it on to the Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting, which in turn forwarded it for consideration to the Philadelphia Annual Meeting. The Philadelphia Annual Meeting decided it should be considered by the London Annual Meeting. And there the trail goes cold — there seems to be no evidence the London Meeting ever considered it. The petition then disappeared from sight — literally. It wouldn’t be seen again until 1844. But the Germantown Petition had asked some important questions, which made some Quakers uncomfortable with the status quo. For the next eight decades, the abolition movement in Pennsylvania Quakers grew, culminating with a proclamation issued by the Philadelphia Annual Meeting in 1776, banning Quakers from keeping slaves. In 1780, with strong Quaker backing, Pennsylvania passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, which allowed for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the Commonwealth. As slavery grew in other states, and Pennsylvania became one of the main conduits of the Underground Railroad, many of the “conductors” were Quakers. And when the Germantown Petition was rediscovered in 1844, its importance as the first written protest against slavery in the United States was recognized and became one of the most important documents in the abolition movement. Then almost a hundred years after it was re-discovered, it got misplaced again, to be re-re-discovered in 2005 in the vault at Arch Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia. It now resides at Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections. Text of the Petition in full:This is to the monthly meeting held at Richard Worrell’s:
In October 1683, about eighty German Protestants—Mennonites, Pietists, and Quakers—arrived in Pennsylvania to settle 15,000 acres purchased from William Penn. Francis Daniel Pastorius, a highly educated lawyer from the Duchy of Franconia, led the group. Pastorius had been raised in a prosperous Lutheran family but grew dissatisfied with the church’s cooperation in the oligarchic political arrangements in the German duchies. After joining a Pietist sect of Lutherans in Frankfort, he was recruited to lead the new Pennsylvania settlement. Pastorius traveled ahead of the group, negotiating the purchase of land near the new settlement of Philadelphia, and laying out thirteen family parcels that would be distributed by lot. The new settlement would be called Germantown, and Pastorius would serve for seventeen years as its effective mayor and chief administrator. Pastorius designed the town as a linear grouping of homes along a main street, each occupying a narrow but very deep lot. This arrangement meant that neighbors would dwell near each other yet possess enough land to raise food and livestock. Many of those who settled Germantown were skilled weavers, so Pastorius encouraged the development of the linen industry. He also codified the laws of the town, served as rent collector, clerk, court recorder and bailiff, and authored a pamphlet promoting settlement in Pennsylvania. He was a trusted friend of William Penn and befriended other learned men in the colony. Concerned to gather the knowledge needed by settlers in an untamed wilderness, he bought and borrowed books on a wide range of subjects. He copied and summarized useful information on law, medicine, history, philosophy, gardening, husbandry, and poetics in manuscript commonplace books, creating a 1000-page compilation that he called The Bee Hive. After stepping down as town administrator in 1700, Pastorius became headmaster of a new Friends school established in Philadelphia, then returned to teach at a similar school established in Germantown. When the new managers of Germantown tried to defraud the original settlers of their property rights, Pastorius used his legal expertise to thwart their effort.[1] Pastorius is best known today for leading the first effort by a religious group against slavery in the American colonies, only five years after he founded Germantown. Pastorius drafted a petition, signed by himself and three like-minded citizens of Germantown, urging the local Friends meeting to prohibit slave holding among members. Pastorius wrote that slaveholding was “irreconcilable with the precepts of the Christian religion,” as it violated the Biblical teaching to love one’s neighbor as oneself. At the monthly governance meeting in Dublin, Pennsylvania, the petition raised concerns but failed to gain approval (a consensus of opinion, rather than a majority vote, was required for any action taken by Friends meetings). Already, about half of the British Quakers in the Philadelphia and Germantown area owned slaves. These Friends argued that slavery was a practice recognized in the Biblical narrative and critical to the settlers’ prosperity in the new world. Unable to resolve the question, the local group referred the petition to the Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting. There, the matter was referred to the Yearly Meeting in Burlington, NJ. No action was taken at any level. Given the rule of submission to the will of the community in the Society of Friends, Pastorius and the other signers of the petition had to refrain from further protest while waiting for the “Inner Light” to speak to the whole body of the Friends about the evils of slavery. Yet an internal discussion of the morality of slavery had begun and would continue.[2] In 1776, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting banned the owning of slaves. Soon after, Pennsylvania Quakers founded The Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. In 1785, Benjamin Franklin became head of this group. Shortly before his death in 1790, Franklin would author the petition the group sent to the first Congress, asking it to abolish slavery and act to end the transatlantic slave trade. The protest Pastorius authored was forgotten, then rediscovered by a Philadelphia antiquarian during the rising abolitionist movement of the 1840s. After emancipation finally came, essayist and poet John Greenleaf Whittier memorialized Pastorius’s antislavery stance in his 1872 poem, “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim.” Whittier, who devoted much of his career to the abolition cause, sees the early Quaker hesitancy to condemn slavery as foreshadowing, in the Biblical authority appealed to by both sides, the debate among slaveholding and non-slaveholding American Christians that continued until passage of the Thirteenth Amendment: For all too soon the New World’s scandal shamed And slowly wealth and station sanction lent, And hardened avarice, on its gains intent, Stifled the inward whisper of dissent. Yet all the while the burden rested sore On tender hearts. At last Pastorius bore Their warning message to the Church’s door In God’s name; and the leaven of the word[4] wrought ever after in the souls who heard, And a dead conscience in its grave-clothes stirred To troubled life, and urged the vain excuse Of Hebrew custom, patriarchal use, Good in itself if evil in abuse. Gravely Pastorius listened, not the less Discerning through the decent fig-leaf dress Of the poor plea its shame of selfishness.[5] |