I Wish I'd Been There: Protesting Slavery

by Elaine Sommers Rich

 

I wish I'd been present in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on April 18, 1688, when the first anti-slavery protest in the New World was signed. Who signed the document? What did it say? For whom was it written? How was it received?

The four signators were Gerrit Hendricks, Derick op den Graeff, Francis Daniel Pastorius, and Abraham op den Graeff. All had come to Penns Woods a mere five years earlier, three of them on the Concord and Pastorius on the America. As a grade school child, I learned at least some of the names of signers of the Declaration of Independence, written a century later than this document (John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson). Why did I not learn about these four signers of the document against slavery?

All four remembered well the persecution they had recently experienced in Europe. Gerrit's father had had two cows confiscated "because he persisted in attending Quaker meetings." The men were Quakers, but their immediate forebears, e.g., Grandmother Grietjen, were Dutch Mennonites. Indeed Grandfather Herman had been a delegate to the meeting at Dordrecht in 1632 when the famous Dordrecht Confession of Faith was adopted.

Francis Daniel Pastorius held a doctorate in law. He had attended several German universities. He spoke and wrote Dutch, German, English, Greek, Latin, French, and Italian. Later, in 1691, he became the first mayor of Germantown, and in 1701, the first schoolteacher. Why in my American history classes did I never learn about this remarkable man?

Probably the anti-slavery document was formulated and signed in the home of another immigrant, Tunes Kunders, a dyer of blue cloth, in whose home the first meetings for worship were probably held.

I have read the anti-slavery declaration. It is simply an application of Jesus' counsel to "Do unto others as you would have them do to you". Following are some of the statements in modernized spelling: "There is a saying that we should do to all men like as we will be done ourselves, making no difference of what generation, descent, or color they are. And those who steal or rob men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alike? . . . But to bring men hither, or to rob and sell them against their will, we stand against."

They were writing to their brothers and sisters in the faith who owned slaves. "This is to the monthly meeting held at Richard Worrells."

Continuing, "We know that men must not commit adultery, but some do commit adultery in others, separating wives from their husbands and giving them to others; and some sell the children of those poor creatures to other men. Oh! Do consider well these things, you who do it. Would you wish to be done in this manner? Is this done according to Christianity?" I find their words eloquent and powerful!

What happened to this protest? Two months later the quarterly meeting at Philadelphia said it was "so weighty that we think it not expedient to meddle with it here." They passed it on to yearly meeting, which also refused to adopt it, saying they (again, spelling modernized) "adjudged it not to be so proper for this meeting to give a positive judgment in the case , it having a general relation to other parts, and therefore, at present, they forbear it."

In other words, contemporaries of the signators rejected and ignored their heartfelt protest against slavery. It took another two centuries, after John Woolman, after the Abolitionists, after a terrible and unnecessary civil war, for slavery to be abolished on this continent.

Sometimes, when I am tempted to grow weary working with small minorities of people on peace and justice issues, I remember the 1688 Germantown Declaration against Slavery and am encouraged to continue. I wish I'd been there when it was signed.

 

[I acknowledge the following sources: William Penn and the Dutch Quaker Migration to Pennsylvania by William I. Hull, Pastorius by Marion Dextor Learned, and Maintaining the Right Fellowship by John L. Ruth.]

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Elaine Sommers Rich, is a member of First Mennonite Church, Bluffton, Ohio, and writes a regular column for the Mennonite Weekly Review.

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Mennonite Historical Bulletin, July 2000