In 1688 four members of the Germantown Quaker meeting, Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks and the brothers Derick and Abraham op den Graeff, wrote and signed a protest against slavery, widely described as the first formal protest against slavery in the English colonies of North America. It was drafted at the house of Thones Kunders which stood at the corner of Germantown Avenue and Wister Street. Their argument rested on the rule that "we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves." People sold as slaves had often been stolen or brought over against their will, they wrote, which was no better than Turks capturing and selling Europeans. They also asked whether the enslaved had a right to fight for their freedom, and warned that slavery gave Pennsylvania a bad name in Europe.
The paper went to the monthly meeting at Dublin, now Abington, which judged it too weighty to decide, then to the quarterly meeting in Philadelphia, and in September 1688 to the yearly meeting at Burlington, New Jersey, which declined to take a stand for or against slavery.
Abolitionists rediscovered the document in 1844 and published it. It was misplaced again, found in March 2005 in the vault of the Arch Street Meeting House and placed with Haverford College's Quaker and Special Collections. The state marker on the site, dedicated in 1983, notes that the protest came 92 years before Pennsylvania passed the nation's first state abolition law. The Kunders house is gone, and a shopping centre stands on the site. A table said to be the one on which the protest was written is kept at the Germantown Mennonite meetinghouse.
Getting there
40.0304, -75.1656
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
