The Enslaved

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) faced hostility and violent
persecution In England because of their different religious beliefs. This led many
Quakers to follow William Penn and seek refuge in the Pennsylvania colony, to live and practice their faith. Many of these early immigrants were prominent and wealthy like Penn, and adopted the practice of enslaving and trading in African people. They
considered Africans to be  inferior, and claimed the innocent human beings as their
personal property, to be bought and sold as commodities, for profit, with no legal rights.  Enslavement for Africans was violent, cruel and for life. Fear of separation by
selling away a family member was a constant worry and heartache for the enslaved.
The immorality of holding Africans in bondage and the corrupting effects on
slave owners, eventually led to questioning of slavery among Quakers and a demand
that Quakers cease to participate in this practice. In 1774, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting demanded that all Quakers who continued to enslave Africans be barred from membership. Some Quakers left the Society of Friends rather than comply.

There is therefore a debt that is owed to those people and their descendants. This
project is an effort to make a partial payment against that debt and to repair part of the damage done.

The Project seeks to identify all people enslaved by Quakers in North America
and restore their life stories and their genealogical records down to 1890. This will not be easy and it will not achieve complete success. We understand that. For some
individuals, we may not be able to find any other verifiable records beyond the
manumission document. But the goal is to uncover all the information that we can for as many of the people as we can so that their stories can be told and their descendants can follow the path back to them.

We have begun this project by focusing on the Philadelphia area and the people
whose enslavers were part of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, a geographically
organized unit of Quakerism which at the time included all of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, and parts of Maryland and Northern Virginia. Once we have exhausted all the records in that region and have assembled and processed that information, we will turn our attention to other regions of the country where Quakers also were enslavers.