Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Meanwhile, similar protests were growing among New York and New
England Quakers. Abolition of slavery centered in the Flushing meeting in
New York, and the Dartmouth and Nantucket meetings in Massachusetts.
Sparking the protest was an English Quaker minister, John Farmer, who
raised a protest against both slavery and the slave trade at the Flushing
Quarterly Meeting in 1717. The agitation was joined by Horsman Mullenix
and William Burling. Burling presented an attack on slavery at the New
York Yearly Meeting in 1718, though he himself balked at urging its
abolition for fear of causing strife within the church.
In New England, the Nantucket Monthly Meeting in 1717 bravely condemned
both the slave trade and slavery per se, while Dartmouth and
Greenwich confined themselves to criticizing the slave trade. Newport, heavily
involved in both slaveholding and slave trading, refused to condemn either
one; hence the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting took no action. John Farmer
now came to New England to preach against slavery, thereby intensifying
the gulf between Newport and Nantucket. After urging the New England
Yearly Meeting to denounce slavery in a paper, Relating to Negroes, Farmer
succeeded only in bringing the meeting's wrath down upon his own head.
The meeting ordered Farmer to stop preaching against the slave trade, to
turn over his papers to its care, and to cease publicizing his essay. Farmer
would not allow his rights to be trampled on and continued to preach his
opposition to slavery. Appealing to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Farmer,
like Southeby, was ousted from the Quaker Society. The Philadelphia meeting's
only concesson to antislavery sentiment was to threaten, in 1719, the
expulsion of any Quaker engaging in the importation of slaves. And even
this mild step was not followed by other regional yearly meetings for several
decades. The Virginia Yearly Meeting only began to advise against the slave
trade in 1722, but not until 1768 did it move over to discipline. New
England advised against slave imports in 1717 and only made the prohibition
mandatory in 1760. Maryland issued a hesitant prohibition in 1759-60.
New York advised in 1718 and only prohibited the slave trade in 1774. The
North Carolina Yearly Meeting only advised in 1772.
The high-handed treatment of Southeby and Farmer suppressed further
antislavery agitation for over a decade. Finally, in 1729, the question was
reopened by one courageous man, Ralph Sandiford. An English Quaker and
businessman, Sandiford settled in Philadelphia, only to be revolted at the
sight of slave auctions. In this year, despite refusal of permission to publish
by the overseer of the press in Philadelphia, Sandiford bravely published his
The Mystery of Iniquity, in which he bitterly attacked Quaker slaveholding.
The Quakers, he charged, had had it in their power to make their name
glorious by spurning slavery; instead they had shown a defect of spirituality
by engaging in this evil practice.
Sandiford's booklet once again radicalized the Quakers of Chester, Penn-
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