Quakers and the Underground Railroad:

person of African descent, whether emancipated or free, has no right which a white man is bound to respect... " The United States Constitution, adopted written in 1787, while avoiding the use of the word "slave " required that "fugitives from labor, " meaning enslaved people, escaping from one state to another, must be returned to their so-called owners. More than a century before Dred Scott, in 1754, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends told its members "To live in ease and plenty, by the toil of those whom violence and cruelty have put in our power, is neither consistent with Christianity nor common justice. " By the 1770s, all of the Quaker Yearly Meetings in North America were united on the proposition that the enslaved had a "natural and just right of liberty " and no Quaker should think to claim a human being as property. Slavery was, in Quaker eyes, a "national evil." "[A] house divided against itself shall not stand... " [Matthew 12: 25]. What is to be done? On one side were people who believed slavery to be right and proper, and on the other were those who denied any legitimacy to the institution. In the middle were many people who may have had reservations about slavery but accepted its existence as the law of the land and part of the national compact. Harboring a "fugitive from labor " was a violation of both the United State