Many casual observers of the American colonial period are of a mind that Benjamin Franklin was born in Philadelphia. In actuality, he was born in Boston in 1706, and fled a harsh apprenticeship in printing (at the hands of his older brother James!) in 1723, settling in Philadelphia with forged release papers from his ongoing Boston apprenticeship. But from the time he settled in Philadelphia throughout his long life, he would cross paths with the Quakers on a daily basis henceforth. Contrary to somewhat common misconception, Franklin was not himself a Quaker, but held a lifelong affection for this Christian sect.
The Society of Friends, or “Quakers” traces its origins to the time after the English Civil War in the mid- 17th century, when various “dissenting sects” separated from the Church of England, such as Puritans, Pilgrims, and others. George Fox had a vision of Jesus telling him that he could have a personal relationship with God without the mediation of clergy, and from that time on, he preached in Great Britain that simple contemplation would encourage Christ into the hearts of the faithful. Brought before magistrates for blasphemy, Fox encouraged his judges to “tremble and quake in the presence of the Lord”, and in mocking him, the judges called him a “Quaker.” Like so many other mocking names (“Christian”, “Lutheran”, “Lollard”, “Yankee”, just to name a few), Fox and his followers quickly adopted the term. One of his devotees, a dissenting Protestant Quaker named William Penn, encouraged King Charles II of England to settle a debt to his father by chartering a colony in British North America that would encourage universal religious toleration. This colony would be named “Pennsylvania” (silva from the Latin for “forest”, thus “Penn’s forest”).
The Quakers of Great Britain rose to prominence in the first half of the 18th century due to their general discipline in daily living, as well as their appeal to upper middle class values. The absence of clergy allowed them to devote their charity to buildings and investments in support of their fellow Quakers, and by 1750, they were among the most financially stable families of London. Naturally drawn to the banking profession by virtue of personal wealth, ready cash, and lack of religious rules against charging interest on loans, the British Quakers would become the backbone of the London banking industry in the generation ahead of the Rothschild family. Quaker names such as Barclay and Lloyd would remain associated with the wealthiest banks in the Empire.
At the same time in both Great Britain and Pennsylvania, the Quakers would comprise the first abolitionists working to free the slaves and their owners from the blot of slavery. Indeed the Quakers held to the fervent belief that the institution of slavery was as harmful to slaveholders as it was to the slaves themselves. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandiford would speak out against slavery in the early 18th century, but it fell to Anthony Benezet, inheriting from his father the first free school for slaves and the poor in the American colonies to carry that banner. Benezet was a personal acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin (and truly of every Philadelphian of prominence in the mid-18th century) and by the final years of his long life had assumed the gravitas of a holy man or yogi in the streets of Philadelphia. He would be the first proponent of the simple and undeniable fact (based on his long experience in education) that Blacks were every bit as capable of learning as their white counterparts (a fact that was disputed by Thomas Jefferson and David Hume, among other cognoscenti of that era!). Franklin, himself an owner of between four and six slaves during his life (in contradiction to some authors who claim that he was never a slave owner), renounced slavery after the American Revolution as a pledge to the London Quakers who aided him in the Revolution, and became President of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society at the end of his life (two generations before Garrison, Beecher, and Douglass in Boston).
Franklin’s last public treatise in February 1790, two months before his death, was “An Essay on the African Slave Trade,” a biting satire by a fictional Muslim author who owned white Christian slaves and asked with heavy-handed irony, “If we do away with our Christian slaves, who will till our fertile lands?” In this final flurry of political activism, he also petitioned Congress to abolish the slave trade in the American colonies. Regrettably this effort would fail against the powerful slave-owning politicians of the American south, but Franklin remained true to his promise to his Quaker friends and colleagues, including John Fothergill, David Barclay, and Thomas Paine.