Philadelphia Quakers and the lesser-known history of owning slaves

Descendants of Philadelphia’s 23rd mayor, Anthony Morris, have much to be proud of. He was a Quaker, a brewer, and cofounder of Penn Charter. But, as his great, great, great, great, great, great, great-granddaughter, Eleanor Morris Cox, put it: “We found the skeleton.”

For most of their lives, Southampton, Pa.-raised siblings Morris Cox, 84, and her brother, David Morris, 79, were unaware that any Quakers, much less their own relatives, had enslaved others.

Pennsylvania — which encompasses the ancestral lands of the Lenni-Lenape and other Indigenous people — was, as many know, founded by Quaker William Penn in 1681 as a refuge for people experiencing religious persecution. The faith believes there is that of God in everyone.

Raised as Quakers, Dave, Eleanor, and their two siblings attended Southampton Monthly Meeting, Bucks Quarterly Meeting, and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. They said they absorbed “without question” the idea that their Quaker ancestors were “good” people and not slaveholders. They believed that all Philadelphia Quakers were abolitionists.

The truth is, “they did enslave people,” the siblings said in a recent Zoom call with The Inquirer. Visitors to Pennsbury Manor will learn that William Penn’s estate “was home to enslaved people.” The information hid in plain sight.

In January 2023, the siblings shared the results of their five-year investigation into the shadows of their heritage in Friends Journal — a Quaker magazine with 6,500 subscribers. In an article, the siblings acknowledge that the first five generations of the Morris family held a minimum of 20 persons in bondage.

Howard H. Brinton’s Friends for Three Hundred Years, published in 1965, briefly mentions that “Friends” (a shortening of the alternate Quaker moniker “the Religious Society of Friends”) officially advised against “the importation of Negroes” in 1696. However, that advisement was in some cases ignored. In 1776, Friends recommended that Quaker slaveholders who “continue to reject the advice of their brethren” be disowned.

To uphold good standing in their meetings, slaveholders submitted freedom papers, also known as “manumissions,” to their meetinghouses.

Two hundred and forty five years later, in 2021, Haverford College’s librarian Mary Crauderueff and scholar David Satten-Lopez launched Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers, with transcribed and digitized documents regarding 339 humans held in bondage by Friends.

As Crauderueff told Friends Journal in 2022, the manumissions revealed that “well-known [and prosperous] Quaker families” participated in enslavement, including ancestors of Thomas, Evans, Pemberton, Shoemaker, Mifflin, Bacon, [and] Wharton. Descendants, Crauderueff acknowledged, have provided financial support to Quaker institutions like Friends Journal and Haverford College.

Last summer, two students at Swarthmore College inventoried a separate trove of Quaker manumissions, among them 60 individuals who were owned by those who worshipped at Bucks Quarterly Meeting, where the Morris family attended.

There is little to no corroborating evidence showing that enslavers followed through on their emancipation commitments. Owing to the manumissions’ dehumanizing format, which seldom included more than a first name, there’s no substantive information regarding the fates of those whose lives were stolen.

For instance, so far, the Morrises only know the names of those enslaved by Morris I and his son, Morris II: Will, Jack, Peter, Martin, Eleanor Sneed, Elinor, Pompey. The siblings are left to surmise that perhaps these individuals worked in domestic service, beer-brewing, and other businesses.

The Morris family is, by contrast, exceptionally well-documented. In 1898, Robert Moon, an ophthalmologist who married a descendant, Margaret H. Morris, published the first of five volumes of his wife’s ancestry: The Morris Family of Philadelphia: Descendants of Anthony Morris 1654-1721.

One of those descendants, also named Anthony Morris (1766-1860), once owned Highlands Mansion and Gardens in Fort Washington, which is currently maintained by the National Park Service.

In addition to caretaking the Highland’s “44-acre historic site with a late 18th-century Georgian mansion and two-acre formal garden,” the NPS also oversees 24 boxes of Morris family materials, including wills, property records, vaccination records, poems, diaries, receipts for an 1870 wedding meal, watercolor paintings, obituaries, memoranda for bequeathing family heirlooms, and even a “Hair of Washington.”

» READ MORE: These immigrants wrote the first U.S. protest against slavery in 1688. Philadelphia wasn’t quite ready.

While these archives contain Anthony Morris I’s endorsement of the 1688 Germantown Edict — one of the earliest Quaker statements decrying slaveholding — no material among the boxes pertains to his son’s (Anthony Morris Jr.’s) coauthorship of Pennsylvania’s Slave Code, “An Act for the Better Regulating of Negroes in this Province.”

This legislation, passed in 1726, made enslaved persons’ marriages illegal; it codified fines, whippings, and re-enslavements; and it made manumission difficult.

When asked how they faced this new truth, Dave and Eleanor shared the sobriety they felt in the face of so much of what Eleanor called “ancestor worship.”

Working with ProGeneaologists (affiliated with Ancestry.com) the siblings commissioned a book in 2022 that would include as much information as possible about their family’s participation in slavery.

Consequently, researchers tracked down manumission papers, property transfer papers, wills, and deeds bearing the first names of the people their ancestors enslaved. In addition to the aforementioned, their names were: Chester, Bristol, Gloster, Phillis, John, Sophia, Bella, Casar, Rose, Mary Grifits, Elinor, Rachel Baremore, Hagar, and Sabina.

Dave and Eleanor Morris say they are not trying to vilify their ancestors. Instead, as they testified in the Friends Journal article, they’re acknowledging what their ancestors wrought on others, including but not limited to: withholding reading, writing, and other educational privileges; withholding the rights to marry, certify births and deaths; and consequently, imposing a legacy of genealogical research inequity.

Dave Morris admits he doesn’t know how to deal with this truth. In 2021 the siblings attended a workshop at Pendle Hill called “Race, Reparations and Right Paths,” examining, among other things, “racial injustices embedded within individual and organizational histories.” Last summer they toured Lest We Forget Museum of Slavery in Germantown, which contains artifacts both brutal and beautiful, conveying “how enslaved Africans were bought and sold as chattel” and effecting a “lasting racist attitude.” The museum also brims with works of African sculpture, paintings, and photographs.

The purpose of the Morris Family Story is threefold: to confront their family’s full history, to make this research available, and to assist African American genealogists in finding descendants of the enslaved.

As the siblings ready their book for distribution, they continue to wonder about Chester and Bristol, Hagar and Sabina. When and where were they born? When did they die? And where are they buried? Who honors their memory?

(Dave, Eleanor, and other Morrises referenced in this story have no known relationship to Founding Father and Philadelphia-based Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris, who also had ties to slavery.)