Robert Test Sandbox

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: [unknown]

Experimental Area

William Penn on the Problem of Slavery

According To J. William Frost, "Friends have long been somewhat puzzled, perhaps even embarrassed, that the two most prominent 17th-century Quakers, George Fox and William Penn, made so slight a contribution to the Quaker-led early antislavery movement."^[1] Andrew R. Murphy, in a recent biography of William Penn, says that "For his part, Penn seems neither to have been troubled by slavery nor, frankly, to have given it much thought.^[2]

Murphy continued his point about Penn:

In Ira Brown’s catalogue of “Pennsylvania’s antislavery pioneers” from 1688 through the Revolution, William Penn does not play a central role. At some point, Penn seems to have acquired an African American fisherman, whom he instructed Harrison to sell in 1685. Having sent over a gardener, Penn recommended to Harrison that he should train up some others in the art. “It were better they were blacks,” he wrote, “for then a man has them while they live.” Near the end of 1685 he told Harrison that he had “as good as bought . . . the blacks of Captain Allen.” In a letter to his Bucks County neighbor Phineas Pemberton, Penn communicated his distress about the loss of “my black” in a shipwreck: “I would not have lost him for 50 pounds sterling.” In the same letter, he broached the idea of a building a house on one of his children’s lands, “intending to buy blacks to put upon the place with a white overseer.^[3]

Sources

1. ↑ J. William Frost George Fox's Ambiguous Anti-slavery Legacy at Brynmawr.edu]
2. ↑ Andrew R. Murphy William Penn: A Life (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 2019), p. 185.
3. ↑ Murphy, p. 185.