Quaker Bibliographical Notes

QUAKER BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES39 QUAKER BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES * By Henry J. Cadbury II. Antislavery Writings 10. The Earliest Writings EVERYONE who has studied the first century of Quaker protest against slavery knows how little sympathy both within and without the Society the early protesters secured. The following bibliographical notes make an interesting commentary on this opposition.2 It would seem that the hostility is responsible for the fact that so many of the protests either were not published or if published were so little regarded as to have almost or entirely disappeared. The printed items today are all very scarce. It will be observed that while several of them are in Friends Reference Library in London not more than one of them has been located in any single library in America. ? Continued from the Bulletin, vol. 24 (1935), p. 93. 2 This article aims to deal only with the bibliographical data. The principal biographical and historical literature would include : Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 1808, Chapter v; R. Vaux, Memoirs of the Lives of Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandiford, 1815; Edward Bettle, "Notices of Negro Slavery Connected with Pennsylvania," in Pennsylvania Historical Society Memoirs, i (1826), pp. 351-388; L. M. Child, Memoir of Benjamin Lay, 1842; Nathan Kite, A Brief Statement of the Rise and Progress of the Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends against Slavery and the Slave Trade, 1843; "The Society of Friends," in Anti-Slavery Advocate (London), No. 7 (1853), p. 49 ff. (continued) ; James Bowden, History of the Society of Friends in America, 1854, ii, pp. 176-221 ; "Biographical Sketches" in The Friend (Phila.), xxviii (1855), p. 293 ff. (four instalments ) ; "Early Anti-Slavery Advocates," ibid., xxix, p. 85 ff. (ten instalments) ; Ezra Michener, A Retrospect of Early Quakerism, 1860, pp. 328-359; "Progress of Anti-Slavery among Friends," in Friends Intelligencer, xxxi (1874), pp. 91 ff., 120 f.; A. C. Thomas, "The Attitude of the Society of Friends towards Slavery," etc., in Papers of the American Society of Church History, viii (1897), pp. 263-299; Thomas E. Drake, Northern Quakers and Slavery (still unpublished) ; Gideon Frost, "Remarks on Slaveholding as Practiced by Early Friends," in Non-Slaveholder, ii (1847), p. 199. 40 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION The first written protests against slavery by Friends were not published. The now famous Germantown petition of Dutch Friends (1688) was entirely lost to view, known only from minutes which report its rejection, until 1844.3 In that year Nathan Kite, who had just written a Brief Statement of the Rise and Progress of the Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends against Slavery and the Slave Trade, found the original manuscript and published it in the Philadelphia Friend} At Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1696 the minutes report that "several papers have been read relating to the keeping and bringing of negroes." That by Cadwallader Morgan alone seems to be extant. It has not yet been published.5 The first printed paper against slavery, An Exhortation & Caution to Friends concerning buying or keeping of Negroes, was not issued by Friends in good standing but by the Keith party at "our Monethly Meeting in Philadelphia, the 13th day of the 8th Month, 1693." The only copies that I know of are two at Friends Reference Library, London, and one at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence. As a Bradford imprint it would today be of much value.8 3 Bettle, "Notices," etc., loc. cit., p. 365, wrote in 1826 : "We have used many endeavors to abtain a copy of this highly interesting document but are sorry to believe that neither the original nor a copy is in existence ;" and Kite, op. cit., p. 8, in 1843 : "Diligent search has been made at various times for the paper spoken of in the above extract, and there is reason to fear that it is no longer extant." 4 Vol. 17, p. 125, 1 mo. 13, 1844. It has been republished, most recently in William I. Hull's William Penn and the Dutch Quaker Migration to Pennsylvania, 1935, p. 297 ff. The original is at...