Why not talk about Germantown?

 Ah yes, the Quakers! They're good people. Didn't they play a big part in getting rid of slavery? Weren't they among the first to see that it was wrong?

Well no, actually. Quite a number of early Quakers were slave-owners - and that included William Penn, the man whose gigantic statue looms over Pennsylvania. He did think of freeing his slaves at one time - before one of his journeys he left a will setting them free if he died on the voyage - but he didn't actually do it and in the end he treated them as property and they passed to his heirs.

But didn't everyone believe in slavery then? No. They didn't. People who had been enslaved definitely thought it was a bad idea. That's why they rebelled so often. That's why some of them ran away when they had the chance - though that must have been a terrifying prospect in a land they didn't know. Pennsylvania enacted some pretty brutal laws to prevent enslaved people from talking to one another - and a state wouldn't pass laws like that unless the people in charge were pretty scared that the people they oppressed might conspire and rise up against them.

There were also Quakers who didn't believe in slavery - way back in William Penn's time and in Pennsylvania. Slavery was, after all, a pretty new enterprise on the scale adopted in the mid-17th century. It was taken up by the English government at just about the time Quakers were getting going. And some people found it appalling. Back in 1688 a protest was presented to the Quakers in Philadelphia signed by four Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania. It began: "These are the reasons why we are against the traffik of mens-body." The authors were Dutch and their English is clumsy but those words - "traffik of mens-body" - get right to the point of what slavery is. And the document goes on to point out all the reasons why it is wrong. It even points out the violence of slavery: that these people "have as much right to fight for their freedom, as you have to keep them slaves."

Quakers in Britain today don't hear much about the authors of the Germantown protest, even though one, Francis Pastorius, was a friend of William Penn, the subject of a poem by Whittier and is sometimes considered the first American poet. They're a bit of an embarrassment - a reminder that early Quakers not only got some things wrong but also that the wrong they did caused devastating damage to the lives of those they oppressed. 

But isn't it time we learned at least as much about the bad bits of Quaker history as we're prepared to face when looking at the wrongs of the British Empire or our country's conduct in war? There can't be one rule for the British Empire and another rule for us. And while we're at it, perhaps we should find a way to acknowledge that the resistance of enslaved people helped Quakers understand that slavery was wrong and that when Quaker anti-slavery activities finally got going in the late 18th century, they weren't just drawing on Quaker thought but also on the activities of non-Quakers like Olaudah Equiano, who had once been the property of Quaker Robert King, and Ottobah Cugoano. These were men whose position in British society was far less easy than that of members of the Religious Society of Friends.

Thinking about the enslaved people and the Germantown protest isn't just a matter of being truthful about long-dead history. The past has formed who we are and where we are as a Society today. Who we choose to celebrate - whose words we include in Quaker Faith and Practice - tells us something of where we are now, and whose unhappiness we might prefer to ignore.