The 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery was the first protest against enslavement of Africans made by a religious body in the Thirteen Colonies. Francis Daniel Pastorius authored the petition; he and the three other Quakers living in Germantown, Pennsylvania, Garret Hendericks, Derick op den Graeff, and Abraham op den Graeff, signed it on behalf of the Germantown Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Clearly a highly controversial document, Friends forwarded it up the hierarchical chain of their administrative structure—monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings—without either approving or rejecting it. The petition effectively disappeared for 150 years into Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's capacious archives; but upon rediscovery in 1844 by Philadelphia antiquarian Nathan Kite, latter-day abolitionists published it in 1844 in The Friend, in support of their antislavery agitation.

Derick Isaacs op den Graeff, also Dirk, Dirck, Derrick Isaacs op den Graeff, Opdengraef, Opdengraff as well as Op den Gräff was one of the so-called Original 13, the first closed group of German emigrants to North America, an original founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania, as well as a civic leader. As an early abolitionist He was a signer of the first organized religious protest against slavery in colonial America. He, or his brother Abraham op den Graeff, are briefly mentioned in John Greenleaf Whittier's poem "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim" simply as "Op Den Graaf".