Colonial-era Quak­ers weren’t all saints when it came to oppos­ing slav­ery but there are some moments we afford to look back to with a smidge of pride. In 1783, a del­e­ga­tion from Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing walked into the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress to make good on all that “cre­at­ed equal” language.

Prince­ton vil­lagers and mem­bers of the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress beheld the arrival of an unusu­al del­e­ga­tion of somber­ly dressed men astride hors­es. They had come from Philadel­phia to raise an issue that the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress did not wish to address: the plight of half a mil­lion Amer­i­can res­i­dents — one-fifth of the peo­ple — who had been lis­ten­ing to mem­o­rable words about inalien­able rights and how Amer­i­ca would ush­er in a new age of free­dom and jus­tice, but who were con­demned along with their chil­dren to life­long slav­ery. The four men car­ried a parch­ment titled “The Address of the Peo­ple Called Quakers.” 

The author, Gary Nash, has a book out about Wal­ter Mif­flin, one of the four, which Friends Jour­nal reviewed this April.

As I recall, the transat­lantic slave trade went into over­drive in the new­ly inde­pen­dent Unit­ed States. If the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress has lis­tened, the com­plex­ion and char­ac­ter and his­to­ry of the U.S. would be far different.
 
https://​paw​.prince​ton​.edu/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​m​o​m​e​n​t​-​n​a​s​s​a​u​-​h​all