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 USHistory.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.
“To some degree, Penn recognized the injustice of slavery. At one point, he proposed that slaves in Pennsylvania be freed after a certain period of bondage. He suggested the creation of a township, called Freetown, where they could live, but the Pennsylvania Assembly rejected the idea. ”
https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20101220_Slavery_stained_some_unlikely_founders__too.html