I think we have come a long way . . . did “The Gates of Greenham” reach your shores? No-one has rapped in our Meeting yet, though!

Vernon – Cornwall, UK

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/542409.html

All best,
John Anderies
Head of Special Collections

Can anyone tell me where the address on the Keats’ letter is located? I believe it is “25 College St.”, but would that be in London or one of the two major British universities, Oxford or Cambridge?

The power of the letter remains strong today, and reading it one is almost overcome with the power of Keats’ love for Fanny and his sense that it will not ever be fulfilled.

Jack Shepherd

Jean Soderlund in Quakers & Slavery : a divided spirit, says:

“The earliest known antislavery appeal of Pennsylvania Quakers was signed in 1688 by Gerrit Hendricks, Derick op den Graeff, Francis Daniel Pastorius, and Abraham op den Graeff of the Germantown meeting. These men opposed the slave trade on the grounds that it encouraged theft and adultery, raised the possibility of rebellion, gave Pennsylvania and the Society of Friends bad reputations, and was contrary to the Golden Rule, that is to do unto others as you wish others to do unto you (Luke 6:31).”
(http://tripod.brynmawr.edu/record=b1094930~S12 p. 18)

Thomas Drake in Quakers and Slavery in America gives a more detailed analysis:

“In 1688 the little Quaker gathering at the house of Tones Kunders drew up a formal remonstrance against slavery and the slave trade and submitted it to the monthly meeting of Friends in nearby Dublin: “These are the reasons,” the Germantown Friends said, “why we are against the traffic of men-body, as followeth: Is there any [among us] that would be done or handled at this manner? Viz. to be sold or made a slave for all the time of his life?” They remembered, they said the fear which had gripped them on their voyage across the sea when they thought they might be captured by Turkish pirates and sold into slavery. Was it not worse, they asked, for Christians to act like the Turks, and steal Negroes from their native Africa to keep them in lifelong bondage? Was this an application of the golden rule?

The Germantown Quakers could see no more reason for enslaving black men than white. They had come to Pennsylvania themselves to find liberty of conscience: “liberty of the body” should also prevail. Christians, instead of compounding the crime of manstealing by separating slave husbands from their wives and forcing them into adultery, ought to deliver the Negores “out of the hands of the robbers.” At the least they should refuse to purchase slaves.

In more practical vein, the Germantown settlers warned their fellow Pennsylvanians that the news that “Quakers do here handle men” as people in Europe “handle there [sic] cattle,” would make an extremely ill report among prospective immigrants in Holland and Germany. Furthermore they feared a slave revolt – thinking perhaps of what had happened in Barbados – and asked the other Quakers what they as professors of peace would do if the slaves should [revolt].”
(http://tripod.brynmawr.edu/record=b1448213~S10 p. 11-12)

Ann Upton
Quaker Bibliographer