In these
days, indeed, the purchase of them was deemed favourable to both parties,
for there was little or no knowledge of the manner in which they had been
procured as slaves. There was no charge of inconsistency on this account,
as in later times. But though many of the Quakers engaged, without their
usual consideration, in purchases of this kind, yet those constitutional
principles, which belong to the Society, occasioned the members of it in
general to treat those whom they purchased with great tenderness,
considering them, though of a different colour, as brethren, and as persons
for whose spiritual welfare it became them to be concerned; so that
slavery, except as to the power legally belonging to it, was in general
little more than servitude in their hands.
This treatment, as it was thus mild on the continent of America where the
members of this Society were the owners of slaves, so it was equally mild
in the West India islands where they had a similar property. In the latter
countries, however, where only a few of them lived, it began soon to be
productive of serious consequences; for it was so different from that,
which the rest of the inhabitants considered to be proper, that the latter
became alarmed at it.
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