1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery

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1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery
The petition was the first American public document to protest slavery. It was also one of the first written public declarations of universal human rights.
Created	April 1688
Location	Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections
Signatories	Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks, Derick op den Graeff, and Abraham op den Graeff
Purpose	Protest against the institution of slavery.

The 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery was the first protest against enslavement of Africans made by a religious body in the Thirteen Colonies. Francis Daniel Pastorius authored the petition; he and the three other Quakers living in Germantown, Pennsylvania (now part of Philadelphia), Garret Hendericks, Derick op den Graeff, and Abraham op den Graeff, signed it on behalf of the Germantown Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Clearly a highly controversial document, Friends forwarded it up the hierarchical chain of their administrative structure—monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings—without either approving or rejecting it. The petition effectively disappeared for 150 years into Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's capacious archives; but upon rediscovery in 1844 by Philadelphia antiquarian Nathan Kite, latter-day abolitionists published it in 1844 in The Friend, (Vol. XVII, No. 16.) in support of their antislavery agitation.