THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

Society of Friends. 17 In 1754 Woolman wrote Some Considerations on the Keeping of
Negroes, which was circulated extensively in America as well as England. The golden
rule applied equally to all, Woolman argued; thus, slavery violated Christian principles of
universal brotherhood. That same year Philadelphia Yearly Meeting published its own
statement against slavery. 18 In the 1750s, other yearly meetings also took action against
slavery. New York Yearly Meeting, for example, ended slave trading by its members in
1759. Most Quakers freed their adult slaves by 1775 as the Society of Friends made
slaveholding an offense punishable by disownment. 19 In addition to eliminating slave
trading and slaveholding among members of the Society of Friends, some Quakers
including Woolman, as well as Benjamin Lay and Anthony Benezet, also urged Friends
to stop using of the products of slave labor. 20 Woolman compared slave-labor products
17 Thomas Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (Gloucester, Mass., 1965), 51. For a full
biography of Woolman, see Thomas P. Slaughter, The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of
Abolition (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008).
18 Ibid., 51-58; Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic
Abolitionism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 52-55; Christopher Densmore, Hugh
Barbour, Thomas Bassett, Arthur Worrall, “Slavery and Abolition to 1830,” in Quaker Crosscurrents:
Three Hundred Years of Friends in the New York Yearly Meetings, ed. Hugh Barbour, Christopher
Densmore, Elizabeth H. Moger, et. al. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 65-70. The preparative
meeting, or individual congregation, formed the foundation of Quaker organizational structure. Friends
often referred to the preparative meeting simply as the meeting. One or more meetings made up the
monthly meeting, which was the basic unit of the Society of Friends’ organization. Monthly meeting had
the power to receive and to disown members, solemnize marriages, and own property. Quarterly meeting,
which consisted of one or more monthly meetings, dealt with matters of doctrine or organization believed
too important to be handled by the monthly meeting. Several quarterly meetings made up a yearly meeting,
which was the ultimate authority for Quakers in the nineteenth century.
19 Drake, Quakers and Slavery, 48-67. See Gary B. Nash, “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial
Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3 rd Series, 30 (1973), 223-256. Nash argues that the number
of Quakers who owned slaves did not decrease after 1755 and the percentage of Quakers who owned slaves
in the 1760s was higher than that of the general population. See also David Brion Davis, The Problem of
Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213-254.
20 Drake, Quakers and Slavery, 48-67, 71-72, 115.
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