There has been renewed atten­tion in Quak­er cir­cles to William Pen­n’s slave­hold­ing in recent years. Late last year, the board that man­ages the William Penn House in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., decid­ed to embark on a renam­ing process because of the slav­ery, a deci­sion that has spawned a num­ber of seem­ing­ly end­less com­ment threads on Face­book, like this one. One thing that’s fas­ci­nat­ing is that many of the new advo­cates have set­tled on a spe­cif­ic num­ber of slaves. From Friends Com­mit­tee on Nation­al Leg­is­la­tion:

Despite his con­tri­bu­tion to U.S. his­to­ry and his inten­tions of found­ing a colony built on “broth­er­ly love,” William Penn owned 12 slaves in his estate, Pennsbury.

Twelve slaves. As part of my job is fact-checking, I like to double-check num­bers like that. Penns­bury Manor, the muse­um devot­ed to Pen­n’s life in his colony, just refers to a slave com­mu­ni­ty and pro­vides five names (Sam, Sue, Yaff, Jack, and Peter). So how has 12 become a cit­ed num­ber? Let’s go diving.

I don’t know FCN­L’s sources but a recent edi­to­r­i­al sub­mis­sion came to me in recent months cit­ing an August 2020 arti­cle by Michaela Win­berg in the online pub­li­ca­tion Bil­ly Penn, “William Penn kept enslaved peo­ple. These are some of their names”:

The records that exist aren’t total­ly clear, but it seems as if Penn enslaved rough­ly 12 peo­ple at his Penns­bury Manor estate, which was locat­ed in what is now the Philly sub­urbs. These peo­ple were pur­chased off the first slave ship known to have arrived in Philadel­phia, and were of African and Car­ribean [sic] descent.

I’m a fan of Bil­ly Penn but it’s not an aca­d­e­m­ic source. For­tu­nate­ly they gave a link to their asser­tion, a Sep­tem­ber 2012 arti­cle by Jack H. Schick in… oh dear, my own pub­li­ca­tion, Friends Jour­nal!In “Slav­ery in Penn­syl­va­nia” he wrote:

Quak­ers, though con­cerned and in the fore­front of efforts to end the insti­tu­tion of slav­ery, were not inno­cent. While liv­ing on his estate at Penns­bury Manor, before he returned to Eng­land for­ev­er in 1701, William Penn kept 12 slaves.

No cita­tion was giv­en but as Jack­’s edi­tor I can affirm he is fond of Wikipedia. I’m fair­ly con­fi­dent that he got his ref­er­ence from this entry, “His­to­ry of slav­ery in Penn­syl­va­nia”:

William Penn, the pro­pri­etor of the Province of Penn­syl­va­nia, held 12 slaves as work­ers on his estate, Penns­bury. They took part in con­struc­tion of the main house and out­build­ings. Penn left the colony in 1701, and nev­er returned.

If you ask Google “How many slaves did Penn have?” it gives you “12 slaves” as its instant answer and links to this Wikipedia page. Giv­en that the all-knowing search engine thinks this a vet­ted answer wor­thy of a 32-pixel head­line, how much can we trust it?

The imme­di­ate answer is: not much. Wikipedia has no cita­tion (as of this writ­ing; I should prob­a­bly go edit it myself). The trail would go cold there if not for the plat­for­m’s obses­sion with keep­ing its revi­sion his­to­ry. Through that one can find that the claim on Pen­n’s slaves dates to the Octo­ber 2007 cre­ation of the entry.

William Penn, the founder of the Penn­syl­va­nia colony, owned 12 slaves on his estate, Penns­bury; how­ev­er, he grad­u­al­ly became a sup­port­er of the abo­li­tion of the institution.

Thir­teen years of edits has reworked the sen­tence quite a bit but the 12 num­ber remains from the begin­ning and in that first Wikipedia draft there was a cita­tion to a USHis​to​ry​.org page. This is a still-extant web­site pro­duced by the Inde­pen­dence Hall Asso­ci­a­tion, a Penn­syl­va­nia non­prof­it found­ed in 1942. The process of link rot is at work, alas, and Wikipedi­a’s 2007 link gives a “page not found” today. Thank­ful­ly Archive​.org can take us back in the ear­ly aughts and let us read it in all of its early-oughts design glo­ry (it takes me back to see a back­ground image used to cre­ate a col­umn!). The USHis­to­ry post is just a cut-and-paste of a 2003 arti­cle in the Philadel­phia Inquir­er (again, acces­si­ble thanks to Archive​.org). Reporter Melis­sa Dribben’s lede goes right to the point:

William Penn owned at least 12 slaves. Dur­ing his life he grad­u­al­ly came around to advo­cat­ing abo­li­tion, but when he died in 1718, Penn­syl­va­nia was a long way from end­ing the practice.

Fur­ther down she men­tions Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soder­lund and their 1991 book, Free­dom by Degrees: Eman­ci­pa­tion in Penn­syl­va­nia and Its After­math. For the first time in this train of cita­tions we’ve actu­al­ly come to trained his­to­ri­ans! And I’d be hard pressed to think of any two aca­d­e­mics I would trust more to doc­u­ment this era of colo­nial Penn­syl­va­nia than Nash or Soder­lund. It’s long out of print but Google Book­s’s pre­view gives us the moth­er lode:

Quak­er pro­pri­etor and his asso­ciates made no effort to pro­hib­it black slav­ery in the City of Broth­er­ly Love and its envi­rons. Indeed, Penn owned at least twelve slaves him­self and stat­ed at one point that he pre­ferred them to white inden­tured ser­vants because slaves could be held for life. Though in one ear­ly will the pro­pri­etor pro­vid­ed for man­u­mis­sion, slaves worked on his Penns­bury estate in Bucks Coun­ty through­out his tenure. One of these slaves was Black Alice who died in 1802 at age 116. She recalled often light­ing the pro­pri­etor’s pipe.¹³

The para­graph has a cita­tion [see update, below] but the lim­it­ed Google Books pre­view does­n’t include the cita­tion index and used copies are a bit too pricey for me (by chance I am cur­rent­ly read­ing Nash’s very fas­ci­nat­ing Forg­ing Free­dom, which is avail­able as a used book for a much more rea­son­able price).

I do wish that this trail of cita­tions did­n’t end at a book that’s cel­e­brat­ing its thir­ty year anniver­sary. I’m sure we’ve had a num­ber of ambi­tious his­to­ri­ans dig­ging through base­ment archives since the ear­ly 90s. Sure­ly they’ve uncov­ered more evi­dence. (For exam­ple, Black Alice, a fas­ci­nat­ing fig­ure, seems not to have been Pen­n’s slave at Penns­bury but instead was enslaved by fellow-Quaker Samuel Car­pen­ter, a friend of Penn, and own­er of an oys­ter house where Alice worked from age five.) But at least this one asser­tion — that Penn owned exact­ly or around or over twelve slaves — has a sol­id aca­d­e­m­ic source at its root.

Update March 18, 2021:

I emailed Jean R. Soder­lund, who gave me the sources for that para­graph in Free­dom by Degrees!

The cita­tions in note 13 are: Dunn et al., eds, Papers of William Penn, 3:66 – 67; 4:113 – 14; Han­nah Penn to James Logan June 6, 1720, and Logan to Han­nah Penn, May 11, 1721, Penn Papers, Offi­cial Cor­re­spon­dence, 1:95, 97, HSP; Samuel P. Jan­ney, The Life of William Penn (reprint 1970), 421; Nash, Forg­ing Free­dom, 12.

She did quite a bit of work dig­ging through the records con­cern­ing Pennbury after pub­lish­ing the book and says “I don’t remem­ber being con­cerned about the ref­er­ence to ‘at least twelve’ in Free­dom by Degrees.”

I’ve also edit­ed Wikipedia. Thirteen-plus years after their stat showed up on the “His­to­ry of slav­ery in Penn­syl­va­nia” page, Nash and Soder­lund final­ly get the citation.