Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

should do unto us,' which would induce such Friends as have any slaves to
set them at liberty—making a Christian provision according to their ages. . . ."
Discipline was to be imposed upon Quakers who persisted in buying, selling,
or keeping slaves, but in ways short of actual expulsion. Particularly important
was the meeting's appointment of an energetic committee, headed by
Woolman, to persuade and help Quaker slave owners to put this policy—
including the Christian provision of reparations—into effect. By 1774, all
the willing Quakers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania had freed their slaves.
In that year, disciplinary threats of expulsion were imposed for slave purchasing,
holding, or selling, and as a result, all the Quakers had freed their
slaves by 1780. In consequence, there was by the end of the colonial period
an appreciable decline of slavery in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. More
important, the example of the voluntary abolition of slavery by the Quakers
held up a beacon light of freedom to all Americans.
The action of 1758 of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting—by far the most
important Quaker meeting in the colonies—provided an immediate inspiration
to Quakers in the other colonies. Richard Smith, one of the few
Quakers in Connecticut, had already announced the freeing of his own
slave. Woolman's trip to New England in 1760 inspired the monthly meeting
in South Kingston, Rhode Island—in the Narragansett area, where slavery
was widespread—to outlaw slavery two years later on pain of expulsion.
Boston, Lynn, and Salem Quakers moved to prohibit slavery, but other areas
proved far more resistant—especially Newport and New York City, which
resisted pressure from upstate New York meetings. Maryland and Virginia
Quakers split sharply on the issue.
Gradually, all the Quaker meetings were moved around to the full abolitionist
position, but this could only be done by their adoption of the great
libertarian and rationalist doctrine of natural rights, increasingly sweeping
the colonies. With the aid of natural-right theory, the Quakers now realized
that not only benevolent Christian morality but also basic justice required
freedom for every man. Justice and the very nature of man required freedom
for all. John Woolman had already proclaimed that "liberty was a natural
right of all men equally"; and now the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of
1765, reaffirming its decree of seven years before, reasoned the necessity of
abolition so that all Quakers might "acquit themselves with justice, and
equity toward a people, who by an unwarrantable custom" had been "unjustly
deprived of the common privileges of mankind." And a New York
Yearly Meeting of 1768, even while temporizing on abolition, conceded that
"Negroes as rational creatures are by nature born free."
This appeal to justice raised Quaker arguments from concern about initial
enslavement through war to the continuing enslavement of the Negroes.
For now the Quakers saw fully that aggression against the natural liberty of
Negroes occurred not only at the time of their initial enslavement or impor-
178