Quaker erasure

 

William Penn statue in 1894, prior to being placed on the pinnacle of City Hall, Philadelphia

"Don't erase William Penn," the cry goes up. "Don't cancel him."

I don't think he's being cancelled. He's still there in the history books, in Quaker Faith and Practice, on hundreds of websites, in legal textbooks, and in many statues, including the gigantic one that was for years the highest point in the city of Philadelphia.

More gently, we're asked to sympathise with him, which is fair enough - if we also offer our sympathy to Sam, Sue, Yaff, Jack, Peter, Chevalier, Susannah and Virgil Warder and to others whose names we don't know. These were the recorded enslaved people on William Penn's estate in Pennsylvania and we can't tell from those names where their lives began or whether they had other names that were stolen from them like their liberty.

We can't know what gifts, qualities and spiritual insights the enslaved people "owned" by William Penn had to offer. We can't tell how they were prevented from sharing them. We can know, if we choose, that in 1700 the legal code of Pennsylvania prevented Black people (it's unclear whether or not free Black people were included) from gathering together in groups of more than four. Breaking this rule was punishable by 39 lashes. The people who have been most fully cancelled and erased from history are those who were enslaved; in the words of Ecclesiasticus: "some there be which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them."

We can guess that the descendants of the enslaved people on William Penn's estate are among us in the world even though we may not know who they are. Very few of the enslaved people "owned" by Quakers make it into the history books, although Olaudah Equiano is a notable exception. But it seems to me that they deserve to be acknowledged with a degree of humility. We aren't the people who chose to enslave our fellow humans, despite numerous warnings that this was theft and violence. But if we cherish the good deeds and writings of the enslavers, we don't just need to acknowledge their wrong actions. We also need to be aware that the enslaved human beings had equal worth.

There's still a tendency to say that there was no opposition to slavery in the 17th century. This simply isn't true. There isn't just the evidence of the Germantown protest of 1688, which must have emerged from prior, unrecorded discussion and prayer. In 1693 George Keith, then in a dispute with fellow Quakers that led to his disownment the following year, wrote with others An Exhortation and Caution to Friends against buying or owning enslaved humans. This picks up many of the points made in the Germantown Protest and suggests a widespread attempt to find the right course of action. This document tends to be forgotten in view of Keith's support of a more conventional and biblically-based practice - he and his followers later introduced versions of adult baptism and communion - but it makes me wonder whether Keith and his followers saw shortcomings in reliance on the Inward Light in part because those who endorse it seemed happy to tolerate the abhorrent practice of slavery.

So far as I can see, none of the 17th century Quaker opponents of slavery are mentioned in Britain's Quaker Faith and Practice. Their words aren't quoted. Those enslaved and "owned" by Quakers are not named and their views and insights aren't reported. There's a lot of emphasis on later Quakers who spoke about slavery (though not yet the embarrassing Benjamin Lay). There's little acknowledgement of such groups as the Sons of Africa who worked with them on their campaigns.

This does still matter. It's partly a matter of being honest about the history of Quakers instead of serving up a sentimentalised and dishonest version. But it's also because, if we really believed in equality, we wouldn't just be looking for ways to defend William Penn and other early Quaker enslavers. We'd be giving weight to the experiences of those who Penn and other Quakers enslaved, who suffered terribly and who were just as fully human as their Quaker "owners." 

If we can't acknowledge the equality of all in the past, what chance do we have of seeing all as equal or of working for equality today?

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.