In the winter of 1773, 29-year-old Dianah Nevil, a woman with Indigenous, African and European ancestry arrived in Philadelphia with her young children and made a remarkable claim– one that set her on a years-long legal journey, changed the course of her family’s life, and jump started the nation’s first white abolition society.
That winter Nathan Lowry of Flemington, N.J. sold Nevil and her family to Benjamin Bannerman, who intended to transport them to Virginia. Bannerman was a slave trader, whose wife placed an ad in the Virginia Gazette in 1768, chronicling his abusive behavior. Two years before the American War for Independence, Nevil and her four children left Flemington either because Bannerman directed her to move or because Nevil sought asylum — and traveled to Philadelphia, 50 miles away.
Upon reaching the city, sources agree, she asserted that she and her children were free people. In 1773, there were approximately 945 enslaved persons in the greater Philadelphia area. Twenty years before that, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting–an organization providing guidance to its Quaker meeting worship groups– had directed Quakers to disown members — who bought or sold Africans, and encouraged members who enslaved people to release them from enslavement.
Amid this effort, Nevil’s claimwas taken seriously.
Fifty miles to freedom
Mayor William Fisher, Quaker merchant, placed her in a workhouse located at 3rd Street and Elbow Lane (near what is now the Ben Franklin Museum and a parking lot), where two of her children died, possibly because of the poorhouse’s deplorable conditions.
A group devoted to her cause,calling themselves the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, hired lawyers to argue for her rights, in a case that would last months and then years.
That group, later known as the Pennsylvania…
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