Pa. Quakers laid groundwork for emancipation

First of four parts

Mark Roth

is a staff writer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Nearly a century before the Emancipation Proclamation, the leading antislavery movement in the United States was centered in Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania Abolition Society was founded by Quakers in Philadelphia the year before the Declaration of Independence. For the next 60 years, until the emergence of such fiery antislavery advocates as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, the Pennsylvania group's philosophy of gradual emancipation was the leading edge of the antislavery movement in America.

And unlike most other abolition groups, which went out of business after the Civil War, the Pennsylvania society still exists, handing out about $30,000 a year in grants for historical and equal-rights causes.

It is no accident that the society was founded by Quakers, also known as the Religious Society of Friends, said Rochester Institute of Technology historian Richard Newman.

When the Quakers began as a Christian reform movement in England in the 1600s, he said, they quickly faced persecution, in part because they did not respect the hierarchy of the Anglican church or social classes of the time.

Even their use of thee and thou in addressing all people was a sore point for gentry, who expected to be called m'lord and m'lady, Newman said. "This really ticked off members of English society. Why won't they take off their hats to us and address us in respectful terms?"

Transplanted to Pennsylvania through the leadership of William Penn, the Quakers were early advocates of freeing slaves, saying, "We as Quakers know what it means to be treated harshly," he said.

Jean Soderlund, a historian at Lehigh University, said the Quakers believed that every human being was inhabited by God's inner light, and that made them more likely to push for equality.

"They believed that God was in everyone, and that included women and included people of other ethnicities," Soderlund said. "The Puritans believed in predestination, where some were saved and others were not, whereas the Quakers believed that everyone might be saved."

Nevertheless, when the Pennsylvania Abolition Society began its work, it did not push for immediate emancipation, favoring instead a gradual approach.

There were a couple of reasons for that. One was a belief held by many American leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, that slaves were not prepared to live as free people without a period of education and training.

Another was the natural spirit of compromise the Quakers had adopted within their own ranks. When Quakers arrived in Pennsylvania, many of them owned slaves. Over the next 100 years, Quakers first agreed to end the purchase of slaves, then involvement in the slave trade, and finally, in the 1770s, they declared no slave owners could remain in the Society of Friends.

So it made sense that the first major accomplishment of the abolition society was the passage of a law that said any slaves born in Pennsylvania after 1780 would be emancipated at age 28.

Despite its gradualist approach, the law had a big impact.

Even though the law applied only to slaves born after March 1, 1780, many Pennsylvania slave owners freed slaves born before that date at age 28, as well, Soderlund said. Also, slaves from nearby states such as Virginia and Maryland fled to Pennsylvania, wrongly believing they would be free the minute they crossed the border.

Some of those cases ended up in the courts, where abolition society lawyers such as David Paul Brown were ready and willing to defend escaped slaves.

"It's remarkable how much these legal counselors did," said Chris Densmore, a present-day board member of the abolition society. "They were active for 20, 30, 40 years, being called out day and night in these cases. I've done a lot of looking at fugitive slave cases, and pretty much every time, there were lawyers on the scene immediately to defend a free black man or an escaped slave, and they were never going to see a dime in many cases."

Though it seems conservative by today's standards, the 1780 emancipation law was one reason Southerners insisted on moving the nation's capital out of Philadelphia and below the Mason-Dixon Line. It may also have shaped Jefferson's views on emancipation.

"After seeing the Pennsylvania law, Jefferson doesn't think it's a great model for the American future," Newman said. "He doesn't see blacks and whites will live together peacefully in the future."

In an 1819 letter to abolitionist Edward Coles, the 76-year-old Jefferson asserted his belief in the need to free the slaves, but added:

"I have seen no proposition so expedient on the whole, as . . . emancipation of those born after a given day, and of their education and expatriation after a given age. This would . . . lessen the severity of the shock which an operation so fundamental cannot fail to produce. For men probably of any color, but of this color we know, brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves."

As the years rolled by and the cotton industry took hold in the South, more assertive abolitionists said the gradualist philosophy of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society wasn't enough to stop the explosion of the slave population below the Mason-Dixon line. In 1820, there were about 1.5 million slaves in America. By 1860, there were nearly four million.

In the 1830s, abolitionists like Garrison began to insist on immediate emancipation. In an 1831 speech, he proclaimed:

"On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen - but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present."

Despite what seemed a rivalry between "immediatists" like Garrison and the gradualists of the Pennsylvania society, historians say that when the more radical Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society was established in 1837, many of its members included people from the older abolition society.

Partly because it had always focused on the care and support of slaves and free blacks by setting up schools and providing jobs, Densmore said, the abolition society after the Civil War "looked around and said: 'Our job is not finished. There still are these problems of education, employment, and legal rights.' "

In ensuing years, the society pushed for such reforms as integrating public transit in Philadelphia and other modern-day civil rights measures.

Today, it confines itself to handing out small grants, such as one it gave recently to a Girls Club in Coatesville to restore an African American cemetery that had fallen into disrepair.

The society now has a majority membership of African Americans, Densmore said, and the group can "pretty much gather around a single table. On the other hand, we have a certain amount of moral capital; we were founded a week before the Battle of Lexington."

In fact, one of the society's annual awards for individual achievement is named for the 18th-century abolitionist John Parrish. The $1,500 grant comes from money Parrish's family invested - in 1808.