Letters - 7 May 2021
From William Penn to Assisted dying
William Penn
According to your report (16 April) on Meeting for Sufferings, trustees decided that the William Penn room would be changed on the grounds that Penn had enslaved people in his household. The report does not say if the trustees consulted historians first.
Penn was a close associate of George Fox, who visited Quaker enslavers in Barbados in 1671, and of Margaret Fell, whose daughter married into a family of Barbadan enslavers. Fox decided that, although Quakers were against slavery, it was not possible for US Quakers to avoid it.
The policy of Quakers after 1671 was to treat enslaved people well (as if they were family members), encourage them to worship, and set them free as soon as financially possible.
In modern terms, what Fox discovered was that slavery was a ‘dominant mode of production’, as capitalism was later.
In the nineteenth century the Cadburys accepted capitalism but tried to provide their workers with exemplary conditions, and this is what Fox tried to do for those enslaved by Quakers. The only alternative then was indentured labour but this could be worse than slavery.
Penn was against slavery. He had it regulated and put a tax on the trade, but London overruled him if the Pennsylvania assembly did not. In 1701 he left the US for good, leaving his estate to be managed by James Logan.
There is no evidence of his freeing enslaved people thereafter but this may have been due to his absence, financial problems, or to the reluctance of someone to be freed from a good master and indentured to a worse.
The decision of the trustees should therefore be reconsidered.
Penn was a great champion for liberty of conscience; his 1682 peace treaty with the Indians is a marvel of anti-racism, famously praised by Voltaire; and his view of slavery was better than that of Aristotle or Saint Paul, and no worse than George Fox himself.
Graham Taylor
Eric Walker suggests we cannot judge William Penn as an enslaver, because enslavement was normal at the time, and only a few objected to it (30 April).
This attitude privileges the experience of white enslavers and ignores the experience of the enslaved. Just because something is normal (for some), that doesn’t make it right or excusable.
Slavery is always wrong from the perspective of the enslaved. ‘That spirit of Christ by which we are guided is not changeable’ (Qf&p 24.04) and this should make us tremble.
How will God and future generations judge us for the way we accept any number of evils as ‘normal’?
Mark Russ
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