History and Research

The Religious Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, is a religious denomination that began in the seventeenth century. Its early founders, including George Fox, sought to worship according to the principles of the teachings of Jesus. They believe that anyone can be divinely inspired by God and that each human has the light of God within them. As such, Quakers eschew all violence.

Many people believe that Quakers always stood in opposition to the institution of slavery. Unfortunately, Quakers - like colonial Americans of all denominations - owned and sold enslaved humans. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania and a prominent Quaker in his own right, owned several dozen enslaved people. Likewise, Isaac Norris, a well known political figure and Quaker, actively engaged in the slave trade, buying enslaved individuals from the Caribbean for sale in Philadelphia.

The incongruity of Quaker beliefs and human bondage was something that concerned some Quakers from the beginning. George Fox argued that all men were created in the likeness of God, and that enslaved people, too, had the Inner Light within them. He urged Quakers to treat enslaved people with kindness and suggested that Quakers should educate the enslaved in the principles of Quakerism. It is possible that some Quaker enslavers heeded his words, but many did not.

In 1688, four Quakers from the Germantown Meeting attended the Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia and spoke against the practice of slavery. Despite their arguments, the Meeting refused to take action. Similarly, in 1696, William Southeby and Cadwalader Morgan submitted papers arguing that the slave trade - that is the importation of enslaved individuals from Africa or the Caribbean - should be prohibited. They pointed out that enslaving a person necessarily required force and violated Quaker principles of nonviolence. Some other Quakers agreed, hoping that slavery might die out on its own without the importation of new enslaved people from Africa. At the same time, many Quakers were worried about directly working against the interests of wealthy powerful Quakers like Issac Norris, and hoped that such incremental steps might not invite his interference to the same degree as calls for outright abolition might. Either way, the 1696 Yearly Meeting advised Friends against engaging in the slave trade, which seems to have had only a marginal effect.

In the following decades, men like Norris continued to stand in the way of abolitionist-minded Quakers. Friends who wanted to publish books, papers, or treatises had to have their work approved by the Friends Overseers of the Press Committee - a group of influential Quakers, including Norris. Friends who published without committee approval risked being read out of Meeting - in other words, they would no longer be considered a member of the Religious Society of Friends. Indeed, many Quakers met this fate over the course of the early eighteenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, events began to shift in favor of abolitionists. The old leaders of the Quaker community who themselves owned slaves - men like Norris - were gone, and more open minded men began to fill the inner circle of the community. Men like John Woolman and Antony Benezet rose to prominence and actively opposed the institution of slavery. In 1755, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting called on local meeting to discipline any Friend who actively engaged in the slave trade and in 1761, the Meeting created a committee of antislavery Friends to try to convince Quaker enslavers to free the individuals they held. Over the coming years, some meetings took more drastic steps. The Goshen Meeting - the Meeting attended by Joseph Pratt II - appointed Friends to visit slaveholding Friends to encourage them to manumit the enslaved people they held. If they did not, they might be read out of meeting - and several were.

Anti Slavery Quakers continued their work urging Friends to manumit those they held in bonadage. Through the 1760’s, 70’s, and 80’s, their efforts paid off within the community. Quakers did indeed free hundreds of enslaved individuals in the second half of the eighteenth century. While slavery continued to persist outside the Quaker community, Quakers emerged amongst the leaders of the nascent abolitionist movement that eventually helped to end slavery in Pennsylvania and the United States as a whole.

The process of bringing about the end of slavery in Pennsylvania was a long and laborious process. By the time of the American Revolution, slavery in Pennsylvania was already in a state of decline. In 1761, Pennsylvania increased the import duty on enslaved people, the effect of which was a drastic decrease in the number of individuals imported to the colony. The population of enslaved individuals in Pennsylvania could no longer be replenished as it had been in the past. Just as important, enslaved people continued to do what they had always done and resisted their enslavers. Some engaged in subtle acts of defiance like slowing their work, or deliberately breaking their tools and equipment. Others took opportunities to run from their enslavers and live lives as free men and women. Meanwhile, some Pennsyvanians began to free the enslaved people they held - especially those in the Quaker community.

The other great blow to slavery in Pennsylvania was the 1780 Gradual Abolition Act. The act made the slave trade illegal in the Pennysvlania. Additionally, it declared that anyone born in Pennsylvania was free, regardless of their race. The act did not, however, free those who were already enslaved. While the law was clearly flawed, it represented the first time a legislative body had passed a law abolishing slavery. By 1800, a combination of the abovementioned factors, as well as economic factors meant that slavery had been all but abolished in Pennsylvania. Finally, in 1847, the Assembly passed an act which declared slavery to be illegal outright.

Like many of their fellow Quakers, we know that the Pratt family did enslave at least four individuals. Remarkably, we have their names preserved in the wills of Joseph Pratt I and Joseph Pratt II. They were Peggy, Cuffy, Susanna, and York. Besides this, though, little is known about them.

Peggy and Cuffy were both listed in the will of Joseph Pratt I. Pratt ordered that Cuffy would be manumitted when he paid or secured £35 to Pratt’s son, Joseph Pratt II. Similarly, Pratt required Peggy to pay £25. At this point, it is impossible to give Pratt’s motives for manumitting Peggy and Cuffy. Pratt died in 1754, just as opinions were changing in the Quaker community, so it is possible that he was affected by these changes, but his motivations are unclear. As mentioned above, enslavers who manumitted enslaved individuals had to put up a bond to the government. Enslavers often put the responsibility for obtaining the bond on the enslaved by requiring them to pay the enslaver - just as Pratt did. Unfortunately, we have no idea whether Peggy or Cuffy were able to obtain their freedom.

Whether Peggy and Cuffy were able to free themselves from the Pratt’s enslavement or not, we know that Joseph Pratt II bought at least two more enslaved individuals by the time he died in 1775. Susanna and York. Susanna, or Susanna Cuff, was manumitted by Joseph Pratt II in 1775, just a few months before he died. In the manumission document, Pratt attests that Susanna was at the time twenty-two years old. Further, he states that he had enslaved her for twenty-one years, meaning that in or around 1754, Pratt had acquired a one year old Susanna. This has given rise to the theory that Susanna was the child of Peggy and Cuffy - the similarity of Cuffy’s name and Susanna’s last name suggests some connection and Susanna would have been born the same year that Joseph Pratt I died. If this is not the case, though, it is unclear why Pratt enslaved Susanna. Most enslavers of the period would not have purchased a one-year-old person since, of course, they could not care for themselves. Where exactly Susanna came from, and what happened to her after she was freed remains a mystery.

Just a few months later, Joseph Pratt II died. In his will, he mentioned an enslaved man named York. Pratt’s will requires his sons to care for York when he can no longer work. Such requests were not unheard of. Why Pratt did not free York outright is uncertain. We know that only two years after Pratt’s death, his sons did manumit York. In the tax records, we also see a “freeman” listed. At the time, freeman referred not to free people of African descent, but to individuals who lived in a municipality but did not own or rent land in their own right. Perhaps this indicates that York continued to live on the Pratt’s farm under their care, but we cannot be sure.

Manumission Record of Susanna Cuff