Editing Colonial Commerce (section)

== The Slave Trade ==

Philadelphia's commercial prosperity was intertwined with the Atlantic slave trade, though the city never became a major slaving port comparable to Charleston or Newport. Philadelphia merchants participated in the trade both directly—financing voyages that transported enslaved Africans to American markets—and indirectly, through commerce with the slave-based plantation economies of the Caribbean and American South. Enslaved people arrived in Philadelphia throughout the colonial period, serving in households and businesses as domestic servants, skilled craftsmen, and laborers. By the mid-18th century, enslaved people constituted approximately 6-10 percent of Philadelphia's population, though this proportion was lower than in most other colonial port cities.<ref name="nash">{{cite book |last=Nash |first=Gary B. |title=Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 |year=1988 |publisher=Harvard University Press |location=Cambridge, MA}}</ref>

The [[Quaker Philadelphia|Quaker]] dominance of Philadelphia's merchant community created tensions around slavery that would eventually contribute to the city's emergence as a center of abolitionism. Though many Quaker merchants owned slaves and participated in slave-connected commerce, the Society of Friends increasingly questioned the compatibility of slaveholding with their religious principles. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting prohibited Quakers from owning slaves by 1776, and Friends subsequently devoted considerable energy to abolition and assisting free Black communities. Pennsylvania's 1780 gradual emancipation law—the first such law in the nation—reflected this Quaker influence and began the process by which Philadelphia transitioned from a slave-owning society to a center of Black freedom and abolitionist activism.<ref name="soderlund">{{cite book |last=Soderlund |first=Jean R. |title=Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit |year=1985 |publisher=Princeton University Press |location=Princeton, NJ}}</ref>