Early Influences on Abolitionism: The Quakers
The first whites to denounce slavery in Europe and the European colonies were members of the Society of Friends—commonly known as Quakers. Unlike the prevailing idea of the time that blacks were inferior to whites, Quakers believed that all people, regardless of race, had a divine spark inside them and were equal in the eyes of God. These beliefs led them in the mid-18th century to take steps against slavery in Great Britain and the British colonies in North America. The first goal of the Quaker abolitionists was to end slave trading among fellow Quakers because the barbarity of the buying and selling of slaves was more obvious than that of the institution of slavery as a whole. It was also generally assumed that if the slave trade was abolished slavery itself would soon cease to exist. After slave trading among Friends had been stopped, during the 1760s Quaker congregations began expelling slaveholders. Under the influence of Quakers in the American colonies, British Quakers established Britain’s first antislavery society, the London Committee to Abolish the Slave Trade, in 1783.
Related articles
- Early Influences on Abolitionism: An overview (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
- African American History: American Revolution (The Concentration of Slavery in the South) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
- African American History: American Revolution (The Ideals of the Revolution) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
Don’t overlook the Mennonites. The persecutions of the early Anabaptists (which includes the Mennonites) included selling them into slavery, often to the Turks. So they had first-hand reason to oppose slavery.
The first anti-slavery statement in America was drafted in Germantown, Pennsylvania, by a group that had both Mennonite and Quaker connections. The table where the document was believed to have been written, directed to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, sits in the Germantown Mennonite meetinghouse.
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