AMUSEMENTS IN THE QUAKER COMMUNITY.
The Quaker community had little time for amusements, and less patience.
The discipline of the Meeting levelled its guns at the play spirit, and
for a century men were threatened, visited, disowned if necessary, for
"going to frollicks," and "going to places of amusement." The Meeting
House records leave no room for doubt as to the opinion held by the
Society of Friends upon the matter of play.
An account is given elsewhere of the discipline of the Meeting in its
struggle against immorality and "frollicking." The following quotation
from James Woods' "The Purchase Meeting," vividly depicts the confused
elements of the social life of that time: "On great occasions such as
the holding of a Quarterly Meeting, the population turned out _en
masse_. Piety and worldliness both observed the day. The latter class
gathered about the meeting house, had wrestling matches and various
athletic sports in the neighboring fields, and horse races on the
adjacent roads. The meetings regularly appointed committees as a police
force to keep order about the meeting house during the time of worship
and business."
The stories told by old Quaker Hill residents of the gatherings about
the meeting house, even on First Day, or Sunday, confirm the above
quotation. The field opposite the meeting house, for years after 1769,
when the earliest meeting house was moved away from that site, was used
as a burial ground, and later, no headstones being placed in those early
days, as a space for tethering horses. An old resident tells me that
crowds of men were always about the meeting house before and after
meeting, and even during meeting, and that in later years the resident
of Site No. 32, who owned valuable horses, used to exhibit a blooded
stallion on a tether, leading him up and down to the admiration of the
horse-owners present, and to their probable interest.
These conditions seem to have continued through that whole century. The
play spirit had no permitted or authorized occasions. It had to exercise
itself with the other instincts, in the common gatherings. It was, as
far as we can see, a time of asceticism. Men were forbidden rather than
invited, in those days.
The Meeting not only provided no play opportunities, but it forbade the
attendance of its members upon the "frollicks," which then were held, as
nowadays they are held, in the country side. A gathering with plenty to
eat, and in those days a free indulgence in drink on the part of the
men, with music of the fiddler, and dancing, this was a "frollick"--that
horror of the meeting house elders. Indeed, it was of incidental moral
detriment; for it was outlawed amusement, and being under the ban, was
controlled by men beyond the influence or control of the meeting. The
young people of the Quaker families, and sometimes their elders, yielded
to the fascinations of these gatherings. The unwonted excitement of
meeting, the sound of music, playing upon the capacity for motor
reactions in a people living and laboring outdoors, inflamed beyond
control by rum and hard cider, soon led to lively, impulsive activities
and physical exertions, both in immoderate excess and in disregard of
all the inhibitions of tradition and of conscience. That there was a
close relation of these "frollicks" with the sexual immorality of the
period is probable.
Of more concern to us here is the observation, which is made with
caution, that the attitude of the community to amusements was not
conducive to moral betterment, because amusement was not specialized.
The repression of the play spirit, offering it no occasions,
recognizing no times and places as appropriate for it, disturbed the
equilibrium of life, forced the normal animal spirits of the population
to impulsive and explosive expressions and deprived them of the
regulative control of the community.
It is probable that that early period had modes of amusement the record
of which is wholly lost. There are few sources existing to inform us of
the amusements of laboring classes. Hints occur in such records as that
of the sale of powder and shot, of fishhooks and a quart of rum, at the
Merritt store, in 1771, to the Vaughns. Seven years later the Vaughns
were the Tory "cowboys," who robbed the defenceless neighborhood, until
their leader was killed by Captain Pearce, during the Revolution.
It is probable that then the community wore the aspect which now it
wears, of industry without play; and that members went elsewhere for
their amusement, the acknowledged leaders in which were resident in
other neighborhoods and communities.
The recreation of the body of working population of the Hill was
incidental to the religious assemblies. In these meetings they took an
intense and a very human pleasure. Their solitary, outdoor labor was
performed in an intense atmosphere of communal interaction. He who
raised hogs was to sell them, not to a distant market, but to Daniel
Merritt, or John Toffey, the storekeepers. He who made shoes went from
house to house, full of news, always talking, always hearing. He who
wove heard not his creaking loom, but the voice of the storekeeper or of
the neighbor to whom he would sell. The cheeses a woman pressed and
wiped in a morning were to be sold, not far away to persons unseen, but
to neighbors known, whose tastes were nicely ascertained and regarded.
The result was that meetings on First Day and Fourth Day were times of
intense pleasure, occasions of all-around interest: not mere business
interest, but incidentally a large satisfaction of the play instinct,
especially for the working and mature persons. The young, too, had their
happiness and enjoyment of one another in a multitude of ways, in
addition to those boisterous games described above by Mr. James Wood.
Their intense friendships and lively enterprises were probably not so
easy to confine to the bounds of sober, staid meetings, but no less did
their merry good spirits fill those assemblies. The galleries of the old
Meeting House were built in 1800 for the young, who were expected to sit
there during meeting. The wooden curtains between the "men's part" and
the "women's part" are especially thorough in their exclusion of even an
eyeshot from one side to the other.