emigrated from Kriesbeim, and settled at Germantown, Pennsylvania,
addressed a memorial against "the buying and keeping of negroes" to the
Yearly Meeting for the Pennsylvania and New Jersey colonies. That
meeting took the subject into consideration, but declined giving judgment
in the case. In 1696, the Yearly Meeting advised against "bringing in
any more negroes." In 1714, in its Epistle to London Friends, it
expresses a wish that Friends would be "less concerned in buying or
selling slaves." The Chester Quarterly Meeting, which had taken a higher
and clearer view of the matter, continued to press the Yearly Meeting to
adopt some decided measure against any traffic in human beings.

The Society gave these memorials a cold reception. The love of gain and
power was too strong, on the part of the wealthy and influential planters
and merchants who had become slaveholders, to allow the scruples of the
Chester meeting to take the shape of discipline. The utmost that could
be obtained of the Yearly Meeting was an expression of opinion adverse to
the importation of negroes, and a desire that "Friends generally do, as
much as may be, avoid buying such negroes as shall hereafter be brought
in, rather than offend any Friends who are against it; yet this is only
caution, and not censure."

In the mean time the New England Yearly Meeting was agitated by the same
question. Slaves were imported into Boston and Newport, and Friends
became purchasers, and in some instances were deeply implicated in the
foreign traffic. In 1716, the monthly meetings of Dartmouth and
Nantucket suggested that it was "not agreeable to truth to purchase
slaves and keep them during their term of life." Nothing was done in the
Yearly Meeting, however, until 1727, when the practice of importing
negroes was censured. That the practice was continued notwithstanding,
for many years afterwards, is certain. In 1758, a rule was adopted
prohibiting Friends within the limits of New England Yearly Meeting from
engaging in or countenancing the foreign slave-trade.

In the year 1742 an event, simple and inconsiderable in itself, was made
the instrumentality of exerting a mighty influence upon slavery in the
Society of Friends. A small storekeeper at Mount Holly, in New Jersey, a
member of the Society, sold a negro woman, and requested the young man in
his employ to make a bill of sale of her.

(Mount Holly is a village lying in the western part of the