or of the essential right of the negro as a man, in
favor of his being freed "where the way opened," and against the holding
of man for the service of another. The only hesitation of the meeting
was frankly stated; emancipation was not to be pushed to the point of
division among Christians, and was not to be accomplished to the
impoverishment of the negro.

Yet if this action seems to any one like "trimming," it was followed by
other deliverances increasingly clear and emphatic. Three years later
Friends were forbidden to sell their slaves, except under conditions
controlled by the Meeting. Throughout the communities of Friends the
agitation was being carried on, and the meetings were anxious to purge
themselves of the evil.

Finally in 1775 came the clear utterance of the Yearly Meeting in favor
of emancipation without conditions: "it being our solid judgment that
all in profession with us who hold Negroes ought to restore to them
their natural right to liberty as soon as they arrive at a suitable age
for freedom." At this meeting the Oblong was represented by Joseph
Irish, Abner Hoag and Paul Osborn.

It only remains to picture the rest of the process by which slavery was
purged away on Quaker Hill. In 1775 the practice of buying and selling
slaves had come to an end, and no public abuse was noted by the Meeting
in the treatment accorded to slaves by their masters. The next year
there was but one slave owned by a member of the Meeting; and the day he
was freed in the fall of 1777 was counted by the Meeting so notable that
the clerk was directed to make a minute of the event. The owner had been
Samuel Field, and the slave was called Philips. Another manumission in
1779 is recorded, but it was doubtless in the case of a new resident of
the Hill, for it is recorded without signs of the joy exhibited in the
freedom of Philips.

In the years 1782-3 the final act in emancipating the local slaves was
taken, in the investigation by a committee of the Meeting into the
condition of the freed slaves, and the obligations of their old masters
to them. It was not very cordially received at first, but in the third
year of the life and labors of the committee it was reported by them
that "the negroes appear to be satisfied without further settlement." So
the first American community to free herself from slavery required but
sixteen years of agitation fully to complete the process.

[8] See "Some Glimpses of the Past," by Alici