Love Jesus 13

Excerpt from “Christianity in the United States,” by Daniel Dorchester (1888, pages 227-228).

Rev. John Eliot, the Quakers, etc., Protest.
In 1675 Rev. John Ehot, the apostle to the Indians, memorialized the governor and council of Massachusetts against selling
captured Indians into slavery, because ” the selling of souls is dan-
gerous merchandise.” He also, ” with a bleeding and burning pas-
sion,” says Cotton Mather, remonstrated against ” the abject condition of the enslaved Africans.” As early as 1688 a body of Quakers in Germantown, Pa., presented to their Yearly Meeting a protest
against 15 ” buying, selling and holding men in slavery ; ” and five years later Mr. George Keith, also a Pennsylvania Quaker, denounced
slavery as ” contrary to the religion of Christ, the rights of man,” etc. ; and, three years later still, the Yearly Meeting took formal
action against the introduction of slaves. In the year 1700 Samuel
Sewall, Esq., subsequently Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
Massachusetts, published a tract entitled, The Selling of Joseph, in
which he characterized with singular boldness the system of slavery
as an outrage, and enunciated ” the primal truth of human equality
and obligation.” In the year 1700 the public mind was agitated in relation to slavery, and the next year the town of Boston instructed
its representatives ” to promote the encouraging and the bringing
of white servants, and to put a period to negroes being slaves.” In 1716 the Quakers in Dartmouth, Mass., memorialized the Rhode
Island Quarterly Meeting on the evil of slavery, and the Nantucket
Society of Friends declared it to be repugnant to the truth to pur-
chase and hold slaves. In 1729 the same society sent a serious
address on the subject of slavery to the Philadelphia Yearly Meet-
ing. In the same year William Burling, in the Yearly Meeting on
Long Island, bore faithful testimony against slavery, and Elihu
Coleman and Ralph Standifred published pamphlets condemning
the institution of slavery as ” iniquitous and anti-Christian.” Eight years later Benjamin Lay, another Quaker, pleaded the cause of
the bondmen in a volume published in Philadelphia.