Quaker Antislavery Petitions to First Congress Trigger Fierce Debate and Tabling

Two groups of Quakers enter the House of Representatives in New York and submit petitions calling on the federal government to ban the African slave trade and take steps toward abolishing slavery. The petitions come from three organizations: the Philadelphia and New York Yearly Meetings of the Society of Friends and the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the latter led by 84-year-old Benjamin Franklin serving as its president. Franklin’s petition, signed February 3, 1790, asks Congress to “devise means for removing the Inconsistency from the Character of the American People” and to “promote mercy and justice toward this distressed Race.” This represents Franklin’s last public act before his death, submitting what becomes the first unified antislavery petition campaign to the new federal government.

The petitions spark fierce congressional debate exposing the deep fault lines over slavery embedded in the new constitutional system. Southern congressmen charge that even acknowledging receipt of the petitions violates the compromises over slavery reached at the Constitutional Convention, as James Madison reports. They argue the Constitution’s twenty-year protection for slave trade (Article I, Section 9) and fugitive slave clause make any discussion of abolition unconstitutional and threaten the Union itself. Northern representatives counter that citizens have constitutional rights to petition for redress of grievances and Congress must at least receive and consider the petitions. The debate reveals how slavery’s constitutional protections create structural barriers to democratic discourse—merely discussing human rights violations triggers accusations of constitutional violation and disunion threats.

On March 5, 1790, the committee reviewing the petitions reports that the Constitution restrains Congress from prohibiting slave importation until 1808 and from interfering with state-level emancipation. The House then tables the petitions, effectively ending debate on slavery in the First Congress and establishing a precedent for avoiding the issue. This episode demonstrates institutional corruption in early republic governance: constitutional slavery protections (secured by slaveholding elites at the Convention) enable congressional suppression of antislavery advocacy through claims that discussing human rights violations threatens constitutional order. The tabling of antislavery petitions establishes patterns that intensify over subsequent decades, culminating in the formal Gag Rule of 1836-1844 when Congress automatically tables all antislavery petitions without discussion. However, the 1790 debates also show abolitionists successfully building political coalitions and using constitutional petition rights to force slavery onto the national agenda, revealing cracks in the slaveholding elite’s institutional control that widen until Civil War.