Germantown Quakers Write the First Formal Antislavery Protest in the Colonies
Nearly a century before organized abolitionism, four Pennsylvania Quakers argue slavery violates the Golden Rule
Quick facts
- Date
- 1688 (dated February 18 by some sources)
- Location
- Germantown, Pennsylvania
- Author
- Francis Daniel Pastorius, with three fellow Quakers
- Rediscovered
- 1844, then again in 2005
What happened
In 1688, Francis Daniel Pastorius, a German-born attorney who had founded Germantown, Pennsylvania five years earlier, drafted a formal antislavery resolution together with three fellow Quakers living in the settlement. The petition argued from the Bible's golden rule, that people should treat others as they would wish to be treated, and asserted that every human being, regardless of belief, color, or ethnicity, held rights that slavery violated. The Germantown Meeting passed the petition up through the Quaker organizational hierarchy, to the Monthly Meeting at Dublin, the Quarterly Meeting in Philadelphia, and finally the Yearly Meeting in Burlington, New Jersey, which declined to take a position for or against slavery and set the petition aside. The document was effectively forgotten until it was rediscovered in 1844 and embraced by the American abolitionist movement then gathering strength, only to be misplaced again and rediscovered a second time in 2005 in a Philadelphia meetinghouse vault.
Why it matters
The Germantown petition is the earliest known formal, written objection to African slavery by an organized religious body in the English colonies, predating the British Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade by nearly a century. Its rediscovery in 1844 gave nineteenth-century American abolitionists a homegrown religious precedent to cite, even though the original Quaker meeting had shelved it without action.
How we know
The original 1688 petition document survives and is held at the Arch Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia; both the National Park Service and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture have published transcriptions and historical analysis of the document and its two rediscoveries.
Sources
- National Museum of African American History and Culture. The Journey to Emancipation: the Germantown Protest, 1688 · Primary source (author-declared)nmaahc.si.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- National Park Service. Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery · Reputable sourcenps.gov · The domain "nps.gov" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineThe Atlantic Slave Trade29 events · Four centuries in which European traders forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans onto ships bound for the Americas, and the enslaved people, revolts, and abolitionists who fought it from the first crossing to the lastView all →