Four men wrote down in 1688 what the meeting could not answer, and the meeting did not answer it. The note was forged and the medium would not conduct.
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On the eighteenth of February, 1688, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, four men signed a petition against the enslavement of Africans and sent it to their monthly meeting: Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks, Derick op den Graeff, Abraham op den Graeff. It is the first organized protest against African enslavement in the Americas.
Their argument was not complicated and did not need to be. There is a saying that we should do to all men as we would be done ourselves. They asked their neighbors to consider what they would think if Turks took them at sea and sold them, and whether the objection they would raise then was available to men holding people in Pennsylvania. And they noted, with the colony eight years old, what was at stake in the answer.
The petition was not refuted. It was forwarded.
[See THE QUAKERS · WILLIAM PENN]
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UPWARD IS NOT AN ANSWER
The monthly meeting found the matter too weighty for it and sent it to the quarterly meeting. The quarterly meeting found the same and sent it to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The yearly meeting found the same and did not act.
At no point was the argument met. No body said the Golden Rule does not extend to Africans, or that the Turkish case was distinguishable, or that the reasoning failed. Each level agreed the question was serious, agreed it exceeded its own competence, and moved it to a body that could bear the weight, and the last body in the sequence had nowhere further to send it.
This is the second hinge in its clearest documented form. The note was forged. Four men had crossed, had said what the crossing gave them, had put it in writing and delivered it to the medium that existed to carry such things. The failure is not in the four and not in their argument, and the record shows it: the medium acknowledged receipt, acknowledged weight, and did not conduct.
[See THE REFUSED NOTE · AUDIBILITY]
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THE MEETING WORKING AS DESIGNED IS NOT AN ANSWER EITHER
The obvious defense is that the meeting was doing exactly what a meeting does. What cannot be united on is not done. Nothing is voted, nothing is tallied, no majority is read against a minority, and the meeting waits.
That defense is real, and it is why this case is worth holding rather than dismissing. The practice RegenerativeLaw takes as its own worked example of governance without an occupied interval produced, here, eighty-eight years of nothing before the yearly meeting required its members to manumit, while the thing being protested continued and the parties protesting were themselves living among slaveholders.
A body that can wait indefinitely will wait indefinitely, and waiting is free only to the party who is not being held. The cost of the meeting's patience was not borne by the meeting. Whatever else the record establishes, it establishes that the absence of a schedule is not by itself a virtue, and that the second law's governance can be occupied by a first-law fact sitting inside the room, unaddressed, while the form runs correctly around it.
[See GOVERNANCE · THE COST TELL]
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THEN IT CIRCULATED WITHOUT THEM
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting did eventually require manumission, and the Society became the first substantial body in the English-speaking world to move against slavery, and the men from Germantown were not there for it.
The petition was set aside and forgotten. It was rediscovered in 1844, a hundred and fifty-six years after it was written, at which point the abolitionist movement had its own reasons to want it and made it a document of the movement's antiquity. Then it was lost again, and found again in March 2005, in a vault at Arch Street Meeting House.
So the note did circulate, a century and a half after it was sounded, in a room that had not been in the original conversation, for purposes its authors could not have specified. What was prevented was not the eventual result. What was prevented was that their completion become the ground the next crossing stood on, and that loss appears nowhere in the record as a loss.
[See TESTIMONY · TRANSMISSION]
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WHY IT BELONGS IN THE LINEAGE
RegenerativeLaw claims descent through the Friends and stakes a religious-liberty claim on the documented character of that descent. A lineage assembled only from the cases where the tradition was right, against outsiders, is not a lineage. It is a brief.
Germantown belongs in it precisely because it is the tradition failing to hear one of its own. The four were Friends, writing in the tradition's own grammar, to the tradition's own bodies, invoking the tradition's own convictions, in the colony founded on liberty of conscience by a man who had been jailed for his.
The direct encounter reaches the creature and does not thereby reach the room, and a tradition that claims the first should say plainly that it has been slow at the second.
[See HISTORY AND TRADITION · CONVINCEMENT]
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They wrote it, signed it, and handed it up. Everything after that was done by other people, to the document, over three centuries, and the men who wrote it received none of it.
The record does not show a refusal. It shows a receipt, an acknowledgment of weight, and a forwarding, repeated until the forwarding stopped, and then a hundred and fifty-six years in which nothing happened to a piece of paper that was right when it was written.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
