In spite of the obstacles created by the statute of 1725-1726, the freeing of negroes continued. In 1731 John Baldwin of Chester ordered in his will that his negress be freed one year after his decease. Two years later Ralph Sandiford is said to have given liberty to all of his slaves. In 1742 Judge Langhorne in Bucks County devised freedom to all of his negroes, between thirty and forty in number. In 1744 by the will of John Knowles of Oxford, negro James was to be made free on condition that he gave security to the executors to pay the thirty pounds if required. Somewhat before this time John Harris, the founder of Harrisburg, set free the faithful negro Hercules, who had saved his life from the Indians. In 1746 Samuel Blunson manumitted his slaves at Columbia. During this period negroes were occasionally sent to the Moravians, who gave them religious training, baptized them, and after a time set them at liberty. During the following years the records of some of the churches refer again and again to free negroes who were married in them, baptized in them, or who brought their children to them to be baptized.[180] At an early date there was a sufficient number of free black people in Pennsylvania to attract the attention of philanthropists; and it is known that Whitefield as early as 1744 took up a tract of land partly with the intention of making a settlement of free negroes.[181] Up to this time, however, manumission probably went on in a desultory manner, hampered by the large security required, and practised only by the most ardent believers in human liberty. The middle of the eighteenth century marked a great turning-point. The southeastern part of Pennsylvania, in which most of the negroes were located, was peopled largely by Quakers, who in many localities were the principal slave-owners, and who at different periods during the eighteenth century probably held from a half to a third of all the slaves in the colony. But they were never able to reconcile this practice entirely with their religious belief and from the very beginning it encountered strong opposition. As this opposition is really part of the history of abolition in Pennsylvania it will be treated at length in the following chapter. Here it is sufficient to say that from 1688 a long warfare was carried on, for the most part by zealous reformers who gradually won adherents, until about 1750 the Friends' meetings declared against slavery, and the members who were not slave-owners undertook to persuade those who still owned negroes to give them up.