Pennsylvania Freedmen's Relief Association aka the Pennsylvania Branch of the American Freedmen's Union Commission

Title: Pennsylvania Freedmen's Relief Association aka the Pennsylvania Branch of the American Freedmen's Union Commission
Description: The Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief Association (NFRA) was founded in 1862 by several prominent citizens, including railroad director Stephen Colwell and white abolitionist and Presbyterian minister J. Miller McKim. McKim had been an agent of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. He had resigned from that organization due to the existential crisis facing abolitionists around the North as slavery died. McKim and others believed that the various abolitionist organizations should transform into aid societies for the material benefit of the newly freed. The leadership of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society disagreed, maintaining that abolitionists should continue their focus on influencing public opinion through speeches and publications, so that emancipation would be accepted as a moral good rather than a wartime expediency.; Read More