Memorial of The Society of Friends, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, on The African Slave Trade. [caption title]

“The horrors and mortality of the middle passage”

---

Anti-slavery petition to Congress by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the Mid-Atlantic states seeking the suppression of “...the African slave trade, carried on under the American flag, and by citizens of the United States…”

Of particular concern to the Quakers were the horrors of the “middle passage” from Africa including diseases in the crowded holds of the ships, the high mortality rate of slave trading in general, and the skirting of American anti-slavery laws by American citizens acting as intermediaries in the slave trade in the Caribbean.

Sold