“To go as pirates and catch up poor Negroes or people of another land, that never forfeited life or liberty, and to make them slaves, and sell them, is one of the worst kinds of thievery in the world.”  Such statements, however, were not more than the voice of individual opinion.  The principles of the Quakers carried them far beyond the Puritans, and their history shows what might have been accomplished if other denominations had been as sincere and as unselfish as the Society of Friends.  The Germantown protest of 1688 has already been remarked.  In 1693 George Keith, in speaking of fugitives, quoted with telling effect the text, “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee” (Deut. 23.15).  In 1696 the Yearly Meeting in Pennsylvania first took definite action in giving as its advice “that Friends be careful not to encourage the bringing in of any more Negroes; and that such that have Negroes, be careful of them, bring them to meetings, have meetings with them in their families, and restrain them from loose and lewd living as much as in them lies, and from rambling abroad on First-days or other times."[2] As early as 1713 the Quakers had in mind a scheme for freeing the Negroes and returning them to Africa, and by 1715 their efforts against importation had seriously impaired the market for slaves in Philadelphia.  Within a century after the Germantown protest the abolition of slavery among the Quakers was practically accomplished.

[Footnote 1:  For this and the references immediately following note Locke:  Anti-Slavery in America, 11-45.]

[Footnote 2:  Brief Statement of the Rise and Progress of the Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends against Slavery and the Slave-Trade, 8.]

In the very early period there seems to have been little objection to giving a free Negro not only religious but also secular instruction; indeed he might be entitled to this, as in Virginia, where in 1691 the church became the agency through which the laws of Negro apprenticeship were carried out; thus in 1727 it was ordered that David James, a free Negro boy, be bound to Mr. James Isdel, who was to “teach him to read the Bible distinctly, also the trade of a gunsmith” and “carry him to the clerk’s office and take indenture to that purpose."[1] In general the English church did a good deal to provide for the religious instruction of the free Negro; “the reports made in 1724 to the English bishop by the Virginia parish ministers are evidence that the few free Negroes in the parishes were permitted to be baptized, and were received into the church when they had been taught the catechism."[2] Among Negroes, moreover, as well as others in the colonies the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was active.  As early as 1705, in Goose Creek Parish in South Carolina, among a population largely recently imported from Africa, a missionary had among his communicants twenty