George Fox Calls on Quakers to Treat Enslaved People Humanely and Eventually Free Them (1671)

Quaker founder George Fox, visiting Barbados in 1671, addressed a meeting of Friends and called on Quaker slaveholders to treat their enslaved workers with Christian consideration and to free them after a period of service. Fox stopped short of demanding immediate abolition but planted an ideological seed: that Christian conscience had obligations toward enslaved people. His Barbados address was circulated among Quakers and contributed to the growing antislavery testimony that would produce the Germantown Petition of 1688 and later abolitionist movements.