It may be sufficient to say, that from this time, the Minutes of the yearly meeting for Pennsylvania and the Jerseys exhibit proofs of an almost incessant attention, year after year[A], to the means not only of wiping away the stain of slavery from their religious community, but of promoting the happiness of those restored to freedom, and of their posterity also.

And as the yearly meeting of Pennsylvania and the Jerseys set this bright example, so those of New England, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and of the Carolinas and Georgia, in process of time followed it.
[Footnote A: Thus in 1779, 1780,-1,-2,-4,-5,-6.

The members also of this meeting petitioned their own legislature on this subject both in 1783 and in 1786.] But whilst the Quakers were making these exertions at their different yearly meetings in America, as a religious body, to get rid both of the commerce and slavery of their fellow-creatures, others in the same profession were acting as individuals (that is, on their own grounds and independently of any influence from their religious communion) in the same cause, whose labours it will now be proper, in a separate narrative, to detail.
The first person of this description in the Society, was William Burling of Long Island.

He had conceived an abhorrence of slavery from early youth.

In process of time he began to bear his testimony against it, by representing the unlawfulness of it to those of his own Society, when assembled at one of their yearly meetings.