The 1688 Germantown protest and the believers who started abolition

Here is a sentence that makes both ends of the modern argument uncomfortable: the first organized protest against slavery in the English colonies of North America was written by a handful of devout Christians, and the churches that fought them were also full of devout Christians.

Both halves are true. Honest history keeps both. A conservative who wants to honor the religious roots of American freedom should start with the believers who got it right, and then have the nerve to say plainly where other believers got it terribly wrong.

The story starts in a small Pennsylvania village, in the year 1688, on a single sheet of paper.

Definitions first

Two terms before we begin.

Abolition here means the movement to end slavery by law. It includes the early, gradual efforts of the eighteenth century and the immediate-emancipation movement of the nineteenth.

The Golden Rule means the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount that you should do to others what you would have them do to you (Matthew 7:12). Every argument in this post rests on it.

The claim, stated plainly: the religious argument against slavery in America began with a small group of Quakers applying the Golden Rule to the colonial economy, and over a century and three quarters it grew into the mainstream moral argument that ended slavery. I will make it in four steps and then deal with the hardest objection.

The protest of 1688

Germantown was a settlement north of Philadelphia, founded in 1683 by German-speaking families, many of them Quakers and Mennonites, who had come to Pennsylvania seeking freedom of conscience. William Penn's colony offered it.

On the 18th of the second month of 1688, which was April by the calendar of the time as we now count it, four men signed a document and brought it to their local Quaker meeting. Their names were Garret Hendericks, Derick op den Graeff, Francis Daniel Pastorius and Abraham op den Graeff. Their paper has come down to us as the Germantown Protest, and it is addressed to the monthly meeting about the practice of buying and holding people as property, which some of their Quaker neighbors had taken up.

The argument is a model of compression. I will paraphrase it, since the original is in seventeenth-century English and shaky spelling.

1. The Golden Rule. The writers asked what it means to do to others as you would have them do to you. They noted that no one would want to be seized, sold and carried to a foreign country against his will, and that the color of a man's skin cannot change that.
2. The charge of hypocrisy. They set the oppression of Europeans for conscience' sake against the oppression of people "of a black colour" in a colony that prided itself on liberty of conscience, and asked how the two could stand together.
3. The reputation of the colony. They warned that the practice made an ill report in the countries of Europe, where people would hear that Quakers handled men as they handled cattle.
4. The family. They objected to the separation of husbands from wives and children, and they said that some who bought and sold people were committing adultery by separating wives from their husbands.

Look at the architecture. It is not a complaint about economic inefficiency. It is a moral argument from first principles, rooted in the dignity of the person and a command every member of the meeting accepted.

What happened next is the part people forget. The paper went from the monthly meeting to the quarterly meeting, and finally to the yearly meeting. At each stage it met a version of the same response: the question is weighty, we do not feel we should rule on it. The yearly meeting declined to act. The document was shelved for roughly a century and a half, until an antiquarian republished it in 1844, when abolitionists were looking for precedent.

So it did not change the colony in 1688. What it did was plant the argument in a living tradition. And a tradition that has a written argument in its archive is a tradition that someone will eventually act on.

The steelman: the world the protesters lived in

Before we credit the Quakers, state the other side's best case.

Slavery in 1688 was not an American invention. It was an old institution, practiced across the world, and the early Christian church did not lead with a program to end it. Defenders pointed to Scripture: the Old Testament regulated slavery rather than abolishing it, and Paul's letter to Philemon sent a runaway back to his master. Those were serious texts, and serious people thought they settled the matter. A Pennsylvania farmer worried about labor could say, reasonably, that the law of the colony allowed it, the Bible did not forbid it in so many words, and the Quakers were asking him to give up property on a theory.

The answer is the one the Germantown writers gave and every later abolitionist repeated: the Bible's permission of an institution is not its approval, and the Golden Rule judges the institution anyway. The Hebrew Bible also regulates divorce and war without calling either good. The decisive question is whether you would consent to the status you impose on another. Nobody ever has.

There is also the answer of the Declaration of Independence, which was not written for another eighty-eight years but which settled the point on the secular side. Its claim that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, is a theological claim before it is a political one. The abolitionists took that claim at its word. Lincoln made it the center of his case against the extension of slavery. You can read how the founders framed that premise on the Founders page and in Why 'created equal' is a claim about God and not just about politics.

The long Quaker campaign

Move forward. The protest failed in 1688. The argument did not die, because it kept finding people willing to carry it.

John Woolman (1720 to 1772) was a New Jersey tailor and Quaker minister who traveled the colonies, visiting slaveholding Friends one household at a time. In 1754 he published Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, a short tract that argued from the same premises as Germantown: the image of God in every human being, and the sin of holding another person in bondage. His method was personal, gentle and relentless. He did not rage at slaveholders. He asked them, one at a time, to look.

Anthony Benezet (1713 to 1784) was a French-born Philadelphia Quaker and teacher. He founded a school for Black children in Philadelphia and wrote pamphlets against the slave trade. In 1775 he helped found the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, one of the first antislavery societies in the world, which was later reorganized as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

And the institutional change came. In 1758 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting barred members from buying and selling slaves. In the mid-1770s it took the step that Germantown had asked for in 1688: it moved to disown Friends who held slaves and would not free them. Accounts date that decision to 1775 or 1776. That was a costly act of faith. It required families to give up valuable property because a principle demanded it.

The political fruit followed. Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, which the state's historical commission calls the first such legislative enactment in America, was passed in a commonwealth where the Quaker argument had done its slow work on public opinion, though the act itself was drafted by political leaders, not by Quakers. Gradual means it freed no one at once. It said children born to enslaved mothers would become free at age 28, a compromise that left a generation in bondage. But it set the principle in law.

The evangelical wave

The next stage is the best illustration of how religion can move a whole country. In the early nineteenth century the Second Great Awakening produced a new generation of Protestant preachers and reformers, and a large share of them concluded that slavery was a sin which required immediate repentance, not gradual adjustment.

• Charles Finney, the revivalist, belonged to this evangelical current.
• Theodore Dwight Weld trained abolitionist lecturers, and his tract American Slavery as It Is (1839) collected evidence from the slaveholders' own newspapers.
• Lewis Tappan and his brother Arthur, New York merchants, were leading financial backers of the cause.
• Sarah and Angelina Grimké, daughters of a South Carolina slaveholding family who became Quakers, testified from personal knowledge of what slavery was.
• William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator and demanded immediate emancipation on moral grounds. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery himself, became the greatest voice of the movement, and his speeches are full of Scripture.

None of this was secular. The movement filled churches and its language came out of the pulpit. When the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December of 1865, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime, it completed a campaign whose first written document was a Quaker sheet of paper from 1688.

The honest part: churches that defended slavery

Now the hard part. A post that stopped here would flatter us.

Plenty of churches defended slavery, and they did it from the pulpit, with Scripture and with the authority of respectable clergy. Southern ministers wrote long treatises arguing that the Bible sanctioned the institution. They leaned on the curse on Ham, on the patriarchs who owned servants, on Philemon. The great denominations split over it. The Methodist Episcopal Church divided in 1844 over a bishop's ownership of slaves. In 1845 Baptists in the South founded the Southern Baptist Convention after a dispute over whether slaveholders could serve as missionaries. Presbyterians divided in pieces before and during the war.

Two things should be said, and both matter.

First, the defenders were wrong. They were wrong on the text, since the Golden Rule judges every institution, and wrong on the moral law. They read a world they were comfortable with into a book that condemns the stealing of men, which is how Exodus 21:16 treats the stealing and selling of a man, a capital offense. A conservative who respects the Bible should not shrink from saying that the proslavery clergy misused it. Many of those denominations have since said the same about themselves.

Second, this is why the argument has to be won on the merits, not by authority. The proslavery ministers held offices, degrees and followings. They appealed to tradition and to what the experts of their day said. The Quakers and the evangelical abolitionists appealed to a principle that anyone could test against his own conscience. The lesson is not "listen to the clergy." The lesson is that moral claims survive when they can be argued from premises everyone shares, and fail when they depend on who is speaking.

That is also the sound answer to the objection I hear from the other side of the aisle, that religion in public life is a danger because believers can be wrong. They can. So can everyone else. The Constitution's answer is not to silence believers but to guarantee a free argument, and in that argument the abolitionists won.

Premises, in order

Let me put the argument in the numbered form it deserves.

1. Every human being bears the image of God and has a dignity no one may erase. This is the premise of Germantown and of the Declaration.
2. The Golden Rule applies to institutions as much as to individuals. A system no one would accept for himself is not justified by being profitable or customary.
3. Tradition, law and economic interest cannot make a wrong right. They can explain why people go on defending it.
4. The believers who applied these premises to slavery, first a few Quakers and then millions of evangelicals, were using their religion for what it is for, and the nation's founding principles gave them the language.
5. The believers who defended slavery violated the same premises, and their error is a warning against treating any institution's religious endorsement as proof of its justice.

Conservatives are the people who claim that the moral tradition handed down to us matters. It does. Its record deserves honesty about the Quakers who were first and about the churches that were last.

For more on how faith has shaped the country's public arguments, see pulpits, boycotts and the church roots of the civil rights movement and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the church that would not bow to the Reich. For the other side of the church-and-state ledger, read Massachusetts kept a state church until 1833, and the Constitution let it.

The case in brief

1. In 1688 four Germantown Quakers wrote the first recorded protest against slavery in the colonies, arguing from the Golden Rule and the dignity of the person.
2. Their meeting did not act, but the argument stayed alive and was carried by John Woolman and Anthony Benezet until the Quakers moved to disown slaveholding members in the mid-1770s.
3. Nineteenth-century evangelical abolitionists took the same argument to the whole country, and the Thirteenth Amendment completed it in 1865.
4. Other churches defended slavery from Scripture, and they were wrong; the lesson is to test moral claims by principle, not by the prestige of who makes them.
5. A conservative case for faith in public life should honor the believers who were right and admit the believers who were wrong.

What you can do: read the Thirteenth Amendment's one-sentence text in the Constitution, then find out what your own congregation's tradition said about slavery and what it says about that history now.