William Penn

History is always a dialogue between the past and the present. The down grading of William Penn in the esteem of Quakers by removing his name from one of the rooms at Friends House is very much part of such dialogue. 

How the mighty are fallen! Penn name must be removed from public display because he owned slaves. An unforgivable sin to our modern twenty-first century eyes, illuminated by Black Lives Matter. How could he! Surly one of the founding fathers of Quakerism, one of those who came to accept, propound and live by the testimony of equality, must have realised the crime against humanity he was committing, the massive hypocrisy he was indulging in? Did equality for Penn only extend to people with white skins?

Or should we be looking more carefully at this, and at our relationship with the past? 

There is always a danger of decontextualising when we project into the past our current values, resulting in misrepresentation. Historic figures always need to be appreciated in their context, not judged as if they were our contemporaries; although their significance to us is always part of the current public discourse. The dunking of Coulson into Bristol Docks speaks volumes about were we are in re-assessing our relationship with parts of British history.

William Penn was born in 1644, some 263 years after the Peasants Revolt of 1381, when the peasants of south-east England tried and failed to free themselves from forced labour, and 231 years before the 1875 Employer and Workman Act decriminalised the failure to perform labour. Penn lived near the midway point between the two; between the medieval, when almost everyone was bound into a web of enforced service, and the modern world of freedom of labour and individual liberty.

Prior to 1875 employees could suffer criminal sanctions, including fines and imprisonment, for withholding their labour. The Master and Servant Act of 1823 required "the obedience and loyalty" from servants to their contracted employer, with infringements of the contract punishable before a court of law, often with a jail sentence of hard labour. That act itself was a codification of earlier laws and practices that enforced work and bound servants to their masters. Servants were still legally bound to their masters even two centuries after Penn's birth.

It was not until 1574 that serfdom was finally abolished in England and Wales, although it had begun slowly disintegrating after the Peasants Revolt of 1381. However, the impression that people were anything like free thereafter was far from the truth. Being bound as an apprentice, indentured servitude, bonded labour, debt bondage, being bound in service, impressment into the military, convict labour and forced day labour, on road repair and such like, were all normal. It has been calculated that 80% of the world's people were in forced labour of one kind or another in Penn's time, and for much of the following century (see Adam Hochschild Burry the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery).

Wives and children fared little better being, in the eyes of the law, dependents of the man. Injury to a man's wife, child or servant was injury to him, and he would deserve compensation for such harm. As master of his household he was entitled and expected to administer 'just punishment' to all – wife, children and servants –  including the use of the rod.

The concentration on the Afro-American experience of slavery can lead to the impression that seventeenth century slavery was simply an issue of white people enslaving black. True, as long as the extensive enslavement of Europeans in North Africa by the Barbary Pirates, the enslavement of up to 80,000 Ukrainians, Russians, or other Slavic peoples a year by the Crimean Tartars for shipment into the Ottoman Empire, or the widespread trading in slaves along the Silk Road and elsewhere in Asia is ignored. Fear among Europeans of falling into Barbary or Ottoman slavery was very real. Upwards of two million Europeans were taken into slavery between 1500 and 1700, with the Barbary pirates raiding as far north and the English Channel and Iceland. It was only in the eighteenth century that numbers of African slaves in the Americas overtook that of European slaves in the Islamic world. There were also other very healthy and vigorous slave trades around the world in Penn's time. Slavery was globally endemic and horribly normal.

In the seventeenth century Quakerism was new and was finding its way, following those openings that George Fox spoke of, being led by the light. All of the first generation of Quakers came to it from outside, bringing with them the mores, beliefs, attitudes and values which they had grown up with and which they had lived by. Bending themselves to the emerging ethic as it grew was at times a painful struggle. There was no template for being Quaker. It all had to be worked anew. The rejection of all authority except that of the inward light meant being open to transformation. Nothing was a given. The seed had to be allowed to grow. Continuing revelation is never comfortable. It requires moving from what is, to what now seems required. The testimonies were not givens, they emerged through painful living and long hours of contemplative sitting in that collective and germinating silence, attending to the ministry that arose. 

It took many years for the testimony of equality to emerge and to see how it applied to all manner of people. Accepting the spiritual equality of women was not automatic – Margaret Fell's Woman's Speaking Justified dating from 1666 – and for many years men held Meeting for Business separately, not involving women in the proceedings; women's' Meetings were confined principally to matters of social wealfare. Likewise, how equality applied to children, servant, employees, non-Quakers, non-Christians, non-Europeans, or any other degree or kind of person, had to be worked through, including what aspects of life it applied to. A process that is still unfolding: the twenty-first century seeing Quakers addressing the issue of equal marriage amongst other issues.

For seventeenth century Quakers your lot in life, your estate, was simply a given. You might be a free man or bound. You might be a pauper, or the owner of great wealth. Equality in the spirit was separate to your earthly estate. William Penn counted amongst the wealthiest men of the age, especially after receiving the grant of lands in North America from Charles II, making Penn the greatest private landowner in the world: but his word arising from the gathered silence of meeting for worship was worth no more than that of the least of his servants, indentured, bound, or enslaved.

Equality did not mean material or economic equality for early Quakers, it applied to spiritual equality: being open to revelation, to speaking the word as it came from within. This perception was applied to slaves as well as to the 'free'. It appears that the first encounter between Quakers and slavery was in Barbados in the 1660s, where slaves were welcomed into Quaker meetings, even becoming elders. Nelson McKeeby has described this as a weird version of slavery.

By acknowledging that slaves had spiritual equality Quakers had laid the foundations for their coming to realise that slavery itself was wrong. A revelation first expressed in 1688 in the Germantown Petition against Slavery, only seven years after the grant of Pennsylvania to Penn, and six since the first colonisation of Philadelphia. Penn seems to have had 12 slaves, initially employed on the construction of his house and outbuildings. However, slaves were already part of the workforce of the Delaware valley, having been imported as early as 1639 by Dutch and Swedish settlers, and added to by later landings. It seems that Penn's slaves were purchased from that pool by Penn's agent as that was all the manpower to be had. Penn, like the Barbadon Quakers, was concerned with how slaves, other indentured people, including personal servants, were treated, and laid down regulations concerning them all after his return to Pennsylvania in 1699. Jack H Schick's account of Slavery in Pennsylvania includes a more detailed account of this. 

In an era when slavery was normal the interesting story is how the Quakers came to reject the practice and became leading campaigners for abolition. It almost conforms to George Foxe's revelation that in order to come to realisation of what was right, it was necessary to have a sense, and perhaps experience, of what was wrong. By giving spiritual dignity, respect and equality to everyone regardless of their estate, the Quakers lit a fuse that ended slavery. 

So should we feel shame about William Penn because of his slave owning? Should he have leaped in one bound from the normality of his times, to applying equality in every respect to everyone, or was this a work in progress? It may be that the removal of Penn's name from a room says more about our current discomfort about race than it says anything about Penn and his times. Is it a way of  avoiding the dissonance that its continued presence may invoke, rather than our engaging with the transformations we need to make?

[This item has been re-worked by removing the more polemical and confrontational tone of the original due to the criticisms it received, for which I am most grateful.]