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The Underground Railroad, 1893 depiction of the anti-slavery activities of a Northern Quaker named Levi Coffin by Charles T. Webber. The Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, played a major role in the abolition movement against slavery in both the United Kingdom and in the United States. [1]
The Southern states, however, were still very prominent in keeping slavery running. Because of this, an informal network of safe houses and escape routes—called the Underground Railroad—developed across the United States to get enslaved people out of America and into Canada (British North America) or the free states.
Quakers immigrated to Canada from New York, the New England States, and Pennsylvania. A Canadian Quaker sect, the Children of Peace, was founded during the War of 1812 after a schism in York County. A further schism occurred in 1828, leaving two branches, "Orthodox" Quakers and "Hicksite" Quakers.
Quakers were at the center of the movement to abolish slavery in the early United States; it is no coincidence that Pennsylvania, center of American Quakerism, was the first state to abolish slavery. In the antebellum period, "Quaker meeting houses [in Philadelphia] ...had sheltered abolitionists for generations." [2]: 1
Quaker Benjamin Lay, a former sailor who had settled in Philadelphia in 1731 after living in the British sugar colony How 18th-century Quakers led a boycott of sugar to protest against slavery ...
Levi Coffin Jr. (October 28, 1798 – September 16, 1877) was an American Quaker, Republican, abolitionist, farmer, businessman and humanitarian. An active leader of the Underground Railroad in Indiana and Ohio, some unofficially called Coffin the "President of the Underground Railroad", estimating that three thousand fugitive slaves passed through his care.
[6] [7] While most Quakers did not agitate vocally for abolition, the majority condemned slavery as brutal and unjust. [4] It was in this atmosphere that Haviland was raised. In 1815, her family left Canada and returned to the United States, settling in the remote and sparsely populated town of Cambria, in western New York. [1]
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 ...