For those of you turning to the dictionary, manumissions are the documents promising the freedom of enslaved humans. Despite our popular image, Quakers enslaved Africans for over a century, starting with Quaker on Barbados in the 1660s. That island was the first fabulously successful British colony in the Western Hemisphere and that economy was built on sugar and slaves. Quaker missionaries converted slave-owning White Barbadians.¹

Barbados became less friendly to Quakers in following decades (repressive laws, natural disasters) and many moved to William Penn’s new colony in the 1680s, bringing their enslaved people and a Quaker acceptance of human bondage with them. Katherine Gerbner’s “Slavery in the Quaker World” is a good place to start with this history (and yes, I interviewed her too a few years ago).

Some Friends started formally writing against slavery starting in 1688 but rich, slave-holding Friends (including William Penn) didn’t agree and the protests were shelved. It wasn’t until 1776 that Friends in Philadelphia formally acknowledged that human bondage and Quaker principles were opposed. Slave-owning Friends had two choices: free those in their bondage or be disowned from the religious society.

The manumission papers are the receipts of the former Friends. Copies of the freedom promises were sent up the chain of Quaker bureaucracy as proof and eventually ended up in the archives of Haverford College.

My first interview, “Inside Haverford’s Manumission Archives,” is with David Satten-López, the Haverford fellowship student who digitized a portion of these records, and Mary Crauderueff, who heads Haverford’s Quaker collections.

The second interview is a video conversation with Avis Wanda McClinton, a strong voice on remembering the Quaker history of forced bondage.

I’m so glad we’re talking about this tragic history more and happy that folks like Avis, Mary, and David have let me be part of the conversation.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

Despite his contribution to U.S. history and his intentions of founding a colony built on “brotherly love,” William Penn owned 12 slaves in his estate, Pennsbury.

Twelve slaves. As part of my job is fact-checking, I like to double-check numbers like that. Pennsbury Manor, the museum devoted to Penn’s life in his colony, just refers to a slave community and provides five names (Sam, Sue, Yaff, Jack, and Peter). So how has 12 become a cited number? Let’s go diving.

I don’t know FCNL’s sources but a recent editorial submission came to me in recent months citing an August 2020 article by Michaela Winberg in the online publication Billy Penn, “William Penn kept enslaved people. These are some of their names”:

The records that exist aren’t totally clear, but it seems as if Penn enslaved roughly 12 people at his Pennsbury Manor estate, which was located in what is now the Philly suburbs. These people were purchased off the first slave ship known to have arrived in Philadelphia, and were of African and Carribean [sic] descent.

I’m a fan of Billy Penn but it’s not an academic source. Fortunately they gave a link to their assertion, a September 2012 article by Jack H. Schick in… oh dear, my own publication, Friends Journal!In “Slavery in Pennsylvania” he wrote:

Quakers, though concerned and in the forefront of efforts to end the institution of slavery, were not innocent. While living on his estate at Pennsbury Manor, before he returned to England forever in 1701, William Penn kept 12 slaves.

No citation was given but as Jack’s editor I can affirm he is fond of Wikipedia. I’m fairly confident that he got his reference from this entry, “History of slavery in Pennsylvania”:

William Penn, the proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania, held 12 slaves as workers on his estate, Pennsbury. They took part in construction of the main house and outbuildings. Penn left the colony in 1701, and never returned.

If you ask Google “How many slaves did Penn have?” it gives you “12 slaves” as its instant answer and links to this Wikipedia page. Given that the all-knowing search engine thinks this a vetted answer worthy of a 32-pixel headline, how much can we trust it?

The immediate answer is: not much. Wikipedia has no citation (as of this writing; I should probably go edit it myself). The trail would go cold there if not for the platform’s obsession with keeping its revision history. Through that one can find that the claim on Penn’s slaves dates to the October 2007 creation of the entry.

William Penn, the founder of the Pennsylvania colony, owned 12 slaves on his estate, Pennsbury; however, he gradually became a supporter of the abolition of the institution.

Thirteen years of edits has reworked the sentence quite a bit but the 12 number remains from the beginning and in that first Wikipedia draft there was a citation to a USHistory.org page. This is a still-extant website produced by the Independence Hall Association, a Pennsylvania nonprofit founded in 1942. The process of link rot is at work, alas, and Wikipedia’s 2007 link gives a “page not found” today. Thankfully Archive.org can take us back in the early aughts and let us read it in all of its early-oughts design glory (it takes me back to see a background image used to create a column!). The USHistory post is just a cut-and-paste of a 2003 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer (again, accessible thanks to Archive.org). Reporter Melissa Dribben’s lede goes right to the point:

William Penn owned at least 12 slaves. During his life he gradually came around to advocating abolition, but when he died in 1718, Pennsylvania was a long way from ending the practice.

Further down she mentions Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund and their 1991 book, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. For the first time in this train of citations we’ve actually come to trained historians! And I’d be hard pressed to think of any two academics I would trust more to document this era of colonial Pennsylvania than Nash or Soderlund. It’s long out of print but Google Books’s preview gives us the mother lode:

Quaker proprietor and his associates made no effort to prohibit black slavery in the City of Brotherly Love and its environs. Indeed, Penn owned at least twelve slaves himself and stated at one point that he preferred them to white indentured servants because slaves could be held for life. Though in one early will the proprietor provided for manumission, slaves worked on his Pennsbury estate in Bucks County throughout his tenure. One of these slaves was Black Alice who died in 1802 at age 116. She recalled often lighting the proprietor’s pipe.¹³

The paragraph has a citation [see update, below] but the limited Google Books preview doesn’t include the citation index and used copies are a bit too pricey for me (by chance I am currently reading Nash’s very fascinating Forging Freedom, which is available as a used book for a much more reasonable price).

I do wish that this trail of citations didn’t end at a book that’s celebrating its thirty year anniversary. I’m sure we’ve had a number of ambitious historians digging through basement archives since the early 90s. Surely they’ve uncovered more evidence. (For example, Black Alice, a fascinating figure, seems not to have been Penn’s slave at Pennsbury but instead was enslaved by fellow-Quaker Samuel Carpenter, a friend of Penn, and owner of an oyster house where Alice worked from age five.) But at least this one assertion—that Penn owned exactly or around or over twelve slaves—has a solid academic source at its root.

Update March 18, 2021:

I emailed Jean R. Soderlund, who gave me the sources for that paragraph in Freedom by Degrees!

The citations in note 13 are: Dunn et al., eds, Papers of William Penn, 3:66–67; 4:113–14; Hannah Penn to James Logan June 6, 1720, and Logan to Hannah Penn, May 11, 1721, Penn Papers, Official Correspondence, 1:95, 97, HSP; Samuel P. Janney, The Life of William Penn (reprint 1970), 421; Nash, Forging Freedom, 12.

She did quite a bit of work digging through the records concerning Pennbury after publishing the book and says “I don’t remember being concerned about the reference to ‘at least twelve’ in Freedom by Degrees.”

I’ve also edited Wikipedia. Thirteen-plus years after their stat showed up on the “History of slavery in Pennsylvania” page, Nash and Soderlund finally get the citation.

Penn was a man of paradoxical qualities. He espoused a radically egalitarian Quaker theology, insisting that something divine resided within each individual, yet he owned slaves on his American estate. He praised representative institutions such as parliament and the jury system, but spent years in hiding for his loyalty to an absolutist king. ‘I am like to be an adopted American,’ he wrote shortly after arriving in Pennsylvania in 1682, but spent only four of his remaining 36 years there. And he was chronically incapable of managing money, spending eight months in an English debtors’ prison in his 60s, even while his colony quickly became a commercial success.

https://aeon.co/ideas/hes-not-the-guy-on-quaker-oats-hes-much-more-interesting

The archival material in the Library relating to William Penn includes property deeds relating to land in Pennsylvania, such as the one pictured below. There are also letters from William Penn amongst other people’s papers. One notable example, dated 13th of 11th month 1690 (13 January 1691, in the modern calendar), is a letter from him to Margaret Fox, formerly Margaret Fell, telling her of the death of her husband, George Fox.

William Penn: commemorations and curios

It sounds like there have been lots of momentos made from the elm tree under which William Penn is said to have signed a treaty with the Lenape in 1683. The Penn Treaty Park museum has stirring accounts of the storm that tore the tree from its roots in 1810. There were so many relic hunters hacking off pieces of the fallen tree that the owners of the property owners hired a guard. Their solution was the obvious capitalist one: chop the remainder up and sell it.

According to an article on the Haverford College site, cuttings of the original tree were taken in its lifetime and trees have been propagated from its lineage for a few generations now. Haverford recently planted a “great grandchild” of the original treaty elm on its campus to replace a fallen grandchild. Newtown Meeting in nearby Bucks County has a great great grandchild.

The idea of Quaker relics and trees imbued with special properties because of a lineage of placement doesn’t really jive very well with many Friends’ ideas of the Quaker testimonies. But I’m glad that the treaty is remembered. The tree had served as a sort of memorial; with its demise, a group came together to more properly remember the location and commemorate the treaty.

About 12 years ago, the Abington meetinghouse caretaker, Dave Wermeling, found an old sketch of Lay in a box. A short biography on worn brown paper was glued to back of the drawing. “I thought, ‘Who is this, and how can you not be talking about him?’” Wermeling recalled.

I’ve long admired the story of Benjamin Lay. I’m not sure that the general public reading these articles is quite realizing that Quaker disownment wasn’t a full shunning. As far as I know he continued to be influential with Quakers, for his passion if not his strategy. Lay went far, far ahead of the Quakers of the time. His stunts were awesome, but drenching yearly meeting attenders with pig blood and publishing books without permission was going to get you uninvited from formal decision making meetings.

I would very much hope that if any of us moderns were transported back to that era, we would find the conditions of human bondage so outrageous that we would all go full Benjamin Lay: disrupt meetings, shatter norms, get disowned by our religious bodies. If you read the history of eighteen-century Quaker activism in the Philadelphia area you’ll see there were many tracts starting in the earliest years of the Quaker colonies. There were lots of Quakers who felt slavery was morally wrong. But few felt the empowerment to break from social conventions the way Lay did. But that’s kind of the nature of prophecy. I would be suspicious of any candidate for prophet that is liked by the administrative bodies of their time. What kind of complacency are we demonstrating by our inactions today?

https://www.philly.com/philly/news/quakers-benjamin-lay-dwarf-abolitionist-slavery-abington-friends-meeting-20180419.html?mobi=true

Reece is a proud Quaker and believes it’s his Quaker roots that sent him to Dr. King’s side. “I was raised to believe all people are equal, are born equal, created equal,” he said. Reece met King in 1967 at the old Robert Morris Hotel in Philadelphia. He spent several hours with the civil rights icon. Reece says that night he, King and a few others planned a poverty march for the following spring, but King never made it.

Norval was an activist with AFSC back in his youth, served as a Pennsylvania secretary of commerce, and became a cable television entrepreneur. He’s pretty ubiquitous in Quaker circles these days, linking the activist and entrepreneurial in interesting ways. My favorite part of the video is when they casually redisplay a picture they had blurred out near the beginning (the one in the preview) and don’t bother naming the guy walking just ahead of him.