William Penn advocated the emancipation of slaves, that they
might have every opportunity for improvement. In 1695 the Quakers while
protesting against the slave trade denounced also the policy of neglecting
their moral and spiritual welfare.[5] The growing interest of this sect in
the Negroes was shown later by the development in 1713 of a definite
scheme for freeing and returning them to Africa after having been educated
and trained to serve as missionaries on that continent.
When the manumission of the slaves was checked by the reaction against
that class and it became more of a problem to establish them in a hostile
environment, certain Quakers of North Carolina and Virginia adopted the
scheme of settling them in Northern States.[6] At first, they sent such
freedmen to Pennsylvania. But for various reasons this did not prove to be
the best asylum. In the first place, Pennsylvania bordered on the slave
States, Maryland and Virginia, from which agents came to kidnap free
Negroes. Furthermore, too many Negroes were already rushing to that
commonwealth as the Negroes' heaven and there was the chance that the
Negroes might be settled elsewhere in the North, where they might have
better economic opportunities.[7] A committee of forty was accordingly
appointed by North Carolina Quakers in 1822 to examine the laws of other
free States with a view to determining what section would be most suitable
for colonizing these blacks.
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