ecessary to proceed further on this subject. It may be
sufficient to say, that from this time, the Minutes of the yearly meeting
for Pennsylvania and the Jerseys exhibit proofs of an almost incessant
attention, year after year[A], to the means not only of wiping away the
stain of slavery from their religious community, but of promoting the
happiness of those restored to freedom, and of their posterity also. And
as the yearly meeting of Pennsylvania and the Jerseys set this bright
example, so those of New England, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and of
the Carolinas and Georgia, in process of time followed it.

[Footnote A: Thus in 1779, 1780,-1,-2,-4,-5,-6. The members also of this
meeting petitioned their own legislature on this subject both in 1783 and
in 1786.]

But whilst the Quakers were making these exertions at their different
yearly meetings in America, as a religious body, to get rid both of the
commerce and slavery of their fellow-creatures, others in the same
profession were acting as individuals (that is, on their own grounds and
independently of any influence from their religious communion) in the same
cause, whose labours it will now be proper, in a separate narrative, to
detail.

The first person of this description in the Society, was William Burling of
Long Island. He had conceived an abhorrence of slavery from early youth. In
process of time he began to bear his testimony against it, by representing
the unlawfulness of it to those of his own Society, when assembled at one
of their yearly meetings. This expression of his public testimony he
continued annually on the same occasion. He wrote also several tracts with
the same design, one of which, published in the year 1718, he addressed to
the elders of his own church, on the inconsistency of compelling people and
their posterity to serve them continually and arbitrarily, and without any
proper recompense for their services.

The next was Ralph Sandiford, a merchant in Philadelphia. This worthy
person had many offers of pecuniary assistance, which would have advanced
him in life, but he declined them all because they came from persons, who
had acquired their independence by the oppression of their slaves. He was
very earnest in endeavouring to prevail upon his friends, both in and out
of the Society, to liberate those whom they held in bondage. At length he
determined upon a work called The Mystery of Iniquity, in a brief
Examination of the Practice of t