The City of Brotherly Love was the home of some of Americas first Abolitionists. As early as 1688 a group of Mennonites in Germantown on the edge of Philadelphia wrote and published The Resolution of the Germantown Mennonites. This manifesto decried the practice of slavery. One of it's most salient arguments was Point #6:
"If the slaves were suddenly to become the masters, and the masters the slaves, would the white man not take up a weapon and fight for his life? Then why shouldn't the black man do the same?"
These resolutions were presented to various Quaker Meetings and over the next 87 years the Quakers gradually came to support this cause, overcoming an initial reluctance to deal with "a thing of too much weight for this meeting to determine".
Anthony Benezet
Anthony Benezet was from a French Huguenot family that migrated to England when France outlawed Protestants in 1685. After turning to the Quaker faith Benezet moved with his family to Philadelphia in 1731. It was because of his work in educating both slave and free blacks in the evening from 1750 on that he was able to influence the Quakers to take a stand against slavery. In 1773, with Quaker backing he established a day school for free blacks. (He was also the founder of the first public girls school). He and fellow Quaker John Woolman convinced the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to finally move to disown Quakers who participated in the slave trade. In 1775 he became the initial founder and president of The Abolitionist Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.
Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery
In 1784, after the death of Benezet, Ben Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush undertook the reorganization of the society renaming it The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Ben Franklin petitioned congress in 1990 to call for the abolition of slavery, representing this society. His petition included these words:
"That mankind are all formed by the same Almighty being, alike objects of his Care & equally designed for the Enjoyment of Happiness the Christian Religion teaches us to believe & the Political Creed of America fully coincides with the Position."
While it would be 73 more years before Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Ben Franklin fired the first shot over the American Congress's bow and the political fight to actually fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence that "All men are create equal" was begun.
Sources
Slavery in the United States: a social, political, and historical encyclopedia by Junius P. Rodriguez, ABC-CLIO, 2007
The constitution of the Pennsylvania Society, for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes, Unlawfully Held in Bondage, 1788
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