QUAKERISM IN AMERICA
The American colonies seemed to the early leaders of the Quaker movement
to offer at once a field for the free development of their faith and a
base whence they might spread to the ends of the earth. The possibility
of buying land from the Indians was being discussed in the society as
early as 1660. But though, it is true, Quaker influence was decisive in
establishing religious toleration in America, though the relationship
between the native tribes and the colonists was transformed through
their substitution of unarmed treaty parties for the existing methods of
intimidation and of strictly fair dealing for dishonesty and
contract-breaking, though they initiated and took the lion's share in
the abolition of slavery,[17] and established the precedent of a State
founded on brotherly love, although they did more than any other group
of refugees or body of colonists to settle the foundations of the
religious and civil life of the country; yet the texture of the
religious life of the American people is to-day largely Puritan
Protestantism, and of the Quaker influence in government there remains
not a trace.
[Footnote 17: As early as 1657, and before he had come in contact with
slavery, Fox addressed a letter of advice from England to all
slave-holding Friends. In 1671, seeing for himself the system at work in
Barbadoes, he recommended that the holders should free their slaves
after a term of service, and should arrange for their welfare when
freed. The first documentary protest against slavery put forward by any
religious body came from the German Quakers in Philadelphia
(Germantown); they had come as settlers from Kirchheim in Germany, where
Penn's teaching had met with an ardent response. John Woolman spent
twenty years in ceaseless labour on behalf of the slaves. Throughout the
society the work went on; meetings were held, individual protests were
made, slave-holding Friends were visited. By 1755 it was generally
agreed that negroes should be neither bought nor imported by Friends,
and less than thirty years later the society, with the exception of a
few isolated and difficult cases, was free of slavery. Many Friends paid
their slaves for past services, and in all cases provision was made for
their welfare.]
For more than half a century after the savage persecution[18] by the
Puritans--reaching its fullest fury in Boston under Governor
Endicott--had come to an end, Quakerism was a steadily growing power in
America.
The Quakers flourished in Rhode Island, to whom they supplied many
Governors, and where at one time they were continually in office; they
made fair headway in Connecticut. In Long Island their establishment was
finally secured by the advice of the Dutch home Government on the ground
of their excellence as citizens. They achieved a foothold in Virginia in
face of the indignant persecutions of the Episcopalians. Their history
in Maryland is an excellent illustration of the nature of their work on
behalf of religious toleration. When, in 1691, an Act was framed to
secure the establishment of the Protestant church, the Quakers, who were
by this time both numerous and influential in the colony, laboured in
opposition to it until they brought the bill to nought. They supported
the Catholics in their struggle for emancipation, and were largely
instrumental in securing the repeal, in 1695, of the Act against them.
They also joined with Rome to prevent the Episcopalian Church from being
established by law, but in this they were only partially successful. In
the Carolinas they appear to have fared well. For years, though in a
minority, they controlled the government. New Jersey was thrown open to
them by a large purchase of land. William Penn's share in this
transaction was the beginning of his practical interest in America,
finally to express itself in the foundation of the Quaker State of
Pennsylvania,[19] which was very largely his own work. His labours as a
religious apologist, filling some five volumes, and representing in his
graceful, polished style the application to social life of the Puritan
morality upon which the Quakers had grafted their beliefs, are
secondary to his work in America, for which he gave up all he
possessed--influence, the prospect of a brilliant career at home,
friends, fortune, and health.
[Footnote 18: The first Quakers to reach America were two women, Anne
Austin and Mary Fisher. When they arrived at Boston, their luggage was
searched, their books were burned in the market-place by the hangman;
they were stripped and examined for signs of witchcraft, and after five
weeks' imprisonment and cruelty were shipped back to Barbadoes. Then
followed a series of persecutions too horrible to be detailed,
increasing in severity from fines--fireless, bedless, and almost
foodless--imprisonment in chains in the Boston winter, floggings (one
part alone of the punishment of the aged William Brand consisted of 117
blows on his bare back with a barred rope, while two women were stripped
to the waist in the mid-winter snow and lashed at the cart-tail through
eleven towns), ear-croppings, and tongue-borings, to the death penalty
suffered by three men and one woman. The intervention of Charles II.
referred only to the death penalty. Whippings continued until 1677, and
imprisonment for tithes until 1724.]
This colony, bought strip by strip in honest treaty with the Indians,
developed more quickly than any other. It was a home for refugees of
every shade of opinion. Friends at no time formed more than half the
population, but their influence was supreme.
[Footnote 19: It is interesting that Penn did his utmost--even to
attempting to bribe the secretaries when the charter was drawn up--to
abolish the _Penn_ prefixed by James II. to his own original
_Sylvania_.]
Two years after the settlement of the State[20] Penn writes that two
general assemblies had been held with such concord and despatch that
they sat but three weeks, and at least seventy laws were passed without
one dissent in any material thing.
For thirty years there was peace, liberty, and refuge for all, and an
unrivalled prosperity. We may picture Penn, in the days of witch crazes,
holding his one trial of a witch, and establishing the precedent of
finding the woman guilty of the common fame of being a witch, but not
guilty as indicted; and in another characteristically Friendly moment
refusing, when greatly in need of funds, six thousand pounds for a trade
monopoly which would have violated his principle of fairness to the
Indians. Free thought was encouraged, and a little group of
distinguished men appeared in Philadelphia. The final downfall of
Friendly administration in Pennsylvania was the result of the refusal on
the part of the majority of the Quakers to adjust their principles to
the demand sent to the Quaker legislature for means to proceed against
the French and the Indians.
[Footnote 20: In 1683.]
Up to the time of this occurrence it had seemed as if America were on
the way to becoming an autonomous province of the British Empire,
steered by Quaker principles. Privilege after privilege had been quietly
secured by Penn from the home government, and it is not difficult to
believe that if on the eve of the Revolution negotiations had been left
in Friendly hands, the war of separation need not have taken place. When
it broke out, the Quakers retired decisively from legislative and
municipal positions. A Quakerized liberty party carried on the
traditions of civil liberty up to the last moment. The Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians, who despised the Quakers, and treated the Indians as
heathen to be exterminated, formed the main body of the Pennsylvanian
revolutionary party.
Friends suffered under English taxation, and their principles prevented
them from smuggling, yet they opposed not merely warfare, but
revolution, disowning those who supported it, and reiterated their
loyalty to England. They were arrested and imprisoned as friends of the
British, their goodly farms and their meeting-houses were placed at the
mercy of troopers and foragers, whose pay they would not accept. Their
decent streets were demoralized. They went quietly about their business
as best they might, pursuing, even while the war was in progress, their
labours in the aid of drunkards and slaves, their succour of the
uneducated.
They built schools for the negroes, and when, after the revolution was
at an end (whereupon they duly suffered at the hands of the rejoicing
multitude), there came the scandal of the "walking purchase" of land
from the Indians and the fear of a serious outbreak, they formed a
private association and pacified the Indians, preventing warfare at the
cost to themselves of weeks of negotiation and the sum of five thousand
pounds paid by them. Incidents of this type occur again and again in
Quaker history, and are practical proof of the fact that their avoidance
of the spirit of strife, so often present in political life, was no kind
of timidity, of passive resistance, or comfortable retirement from the
business of the world. Least of all was it indifference to what went
forward in the public affairs of the nation.
Apart from its temporary dominion of "affairs," American Quakerism
follows much the same line of development as does the movement at home.
The original impulse tends to be superseded for the imitative mass by a
doctrine embodied in an institution; the dogma of the Inner Light
becomes dangerously absolutist. There is a corresponding return to the
steadying refuge of an infallible scripture, and the modern church,
while still united and distinguishable by the marks of Quaker culture,
of faith and practice, kindling here and there to the older insight and
vision, shows a divided front.
In 1827 a large group--now known as Hicksites--separated under Elias
Hicks, whose repudiation of doctrines and creeds, and insistence on
right living, resulted, in the opinion of "orthodox" Friends, in a wrong
attitude towards Christ and the scriptures. The evangelical reaction in
England, which was, in part, a result of the Hicksite controversy,
brought about a further division in America under John Wilbur, who
protested against Evangelical biblicism, and reasserted the doctrine of
the Inner Light, insisted on plainness of speech and dress, and looked
with suspicion upon "art." The orthodox group, deeply tinged with
Protestant evangelicalism, have largely adopted the pastoral system.
There are now at least four distinct groups in America.[21]
[Footnote 21: "According to recent statistics, the membership of the
fourteen orthodox bodies is upward of 90,000; of Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting, 4,400; of the Conservative Yearly Meeting, about 4,000; and of
seven Hicksite Yearly Meetings, under 19,000--say, 27,500 Friends
belonging to Yearly Meetings in America with which we do not correspond"
(_Facts about Friends._ Headley Bros. 1912).]