Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / The 1688 Germantown Protest: The First American Anti-Slavery Petition
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, we've covered a lot of ground in this series — shipboard rebellions, British abolition laws, the Haitian Revolution. But I want to go back to something that happened in 1688, in a tiny German-speaking settlement in Pennsylvania. A group of men — four of them — wrote the very first public protest against slavery in what would become the United States. Luna: 1688? That's a century before most people think abolition even started. Lucas: Exactly. It's known as the Germantown Protest. And the men who wrote it weren't English Puritans or Enlightenment philosophers. They were Radical Pietists — German and Dutch-speaking Mennonites and Quakers who had fled religious persecution in Europe. The leader was Francis Daniel Pastorius, a well-educated lawyer from Sommerhausen in Franconia. He and three neighbors — Garrett Henderich, Derick Opdengraeff, and Abraham Opdengraeff — all from the Rhineland town of Krefeld, drafted a petition to their Quaker Monthly Meeting. Luna: And their argument against slavery — was it based on racial equality or something else? Lucas: That's the thing — it was almost entirely biblical. The petition opens by asking: 'Is there any that would be done or handled in this manner?... Have these negroes not as much right to fight for their freedom as you have to keep them slaves?' But then it leans heavily on the Golden Rule and the Book of Revelation. They argue that slaveholders are akin to the 'anti-Christian' merchants of Babylon who trade in 'slaves and souls of men.' There's no argument about racial equality as we'd understand it. They're saying Christians shouldn't own other Christians — but they don't quite extend that to non-Christians. Luna: So it was a moral challenge, but within a very specific religious framework. Lucas: Right. And the petition was addressed to the Quaker Monthly Meeting in Dublin, which was the local governing body. Pastorius and his friends were themselves Quakers — they'd converted in Europe — and they expected the meeting to take a stand. Instead, the meeting passed the petition up to the Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting, which passed it up to the Yearly Meeting. And there it died. Not rejected outright — just tabled, discussed, and eventually ignored. Luna: Why didn't it get any traction? I mean, the Quakers later became famous abolitionists. Lucas: Right — but in 1688, many Quakers still owned slaves. Pennsylvania's founder, William Penn, owned slaves himself. The economy of the colony — especially the farms and households of wealthier Friends — depended on enslaved labor. And the Yearly Meeting was dominated by these same men. They weren't ready to condemn an institution they profited from. So they kicked the can up the hierarchy until it quietly vanished. The original document was lost for over a century. It was rediscovered in 1844 by a Philadelphia abolitionist named Nathan Kite, who published it in the Pennsylvania Freeman. Luna: And then it became a rallying cry for the later abolitionist movement. Lucas: Exactly. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem called 'The Pennsylvania Pilgrim' that celebrated Pastorius. Frederick Douglass referenced the Germantown Protest in his speeches. It became proof that the antislavery impulse in America was older than the nation itself. But there's a nuance people often miss: the protest wasn't a blanket call for emancipation. It asked Christian slaveholders to free their slaves — but it didn't question the legitimacy of enslaving non-Christians. It was a step, not the finish line. Luna: That's a good reminder that moral progress is usually incremental and imperfect. Lucas: Exactly. And it's also a reminder of how hard it is for any institution — even a church — to turn against its own economic interests. The Quaker meetings took another 70 years to officially condemn slavery. The Germantown Protest was a seed that took a very long time to grow. And speaking of seeds — if you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you know this show is completely ad-free and listener-supported. We do this because we love digging into these overlooked corners of the past, and we're able to keep doing it thanks to listeners who chip in at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's not a big ask — just whatever feels right — and it genuinely keeps us going. Luna: Yeah, even a small contribution makes a difference. And we never run ads, so it's a clean listening experience. Lucas: Anyway — back to Germantown. So the protest was tabled, but it didn't disappear entirely. It resurfaced at key moments in the abolitionist movement, and when it did, it was used to argue that antislavery was an authentic American tradition, not a radical import. That's a powerful rhetorical move: 'Our ancestors were against slavery in 1688.' Never mind that most ancestors weren't. Luna: It's almost like they cherry-picked the history they wanted. Lucas: In a way. But the document itself is real, and it's remarkable. The original petition is housed at the Haverford College Quaker Collection. You can see the handwriting — a little shaky, in German script — and the signatures of those four men. They were outsiders in every sense: German speakers in an English colony, Pietists in a largely Anglican world, and opponents of slavery in a slaveholding society. They had no political power, no wealth, no platform. They just had their conviction and a piece of paper. Luna: And that piece of paper outlasted the entire system they were protesting. Lucas: It did. The slave trade was abolished in the US in 1808, slavery itself in 1865. But the Germantown Protest was written in 1688. It's a quiet reminder that the first voices against injustice are often the ones we don't hear — until much later. And it makes you wonder: what other forgotten protests are sitting in archives, waiting to be rediscovered? Luna: Maybe we'll dig into another one soon. Lucas: Maybe we will. For now, I think that's a good place to leave it.