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Archiver > QUAKER-ROOTS > 1998-09 > 0906555841


From: Candy Roth <>
Subject: Quakers in the Revolution (long)
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 09:04:01 -0400


In a wonderful pamphlet pub. by Lancaster Co., PA as one in a series for
their Bicentennial celebration in 1776 - this from the one entitled
"Loyalist, Pacifists and Prisoners" by Rollin C. Steinmetz:

The Quakers

There is a great discrepancy in the quantities of written matter available
with regard to the Quakers, the Moravians and the German sectarians of the
Revolutionary period. Quakers of both town and country were more
articulate, more given to self-expression, more introspective than the
German dialect-speakers of the Mennonite and Dunker faiths. Quakers, not
unlike the German sects, had grown increasingly isolated from the surrounding
world. they had come to pursue their advocacy of peace like their other
activities as in 'a garden enclos'd' (to use the words of the
eighteenth-century England Friend, Samuel Fothergill). "But the Quaker
enclosure, for all its stifling narrowness in many respects, was still
broader than the sectarian world of the pious Mennonite and Dunker farmer
and backwoodsman," Peter Brock says, in the book 'Pioneers of the Peaceable
Kingdom.'

The Quakers may be described as nonviolent resisters rather than as
nonresisters in the Mennonite style. The Society of Friends had at first
believed in the admissability of fighting for a righteous cause, a belief
only gradually abandoned. Once arrived in Pennsylvania, non-violence
solidified among the eQuakers, who saw Penn's land as the New jerusalem of
the Holy Experiment. Their testimony, they believed, was destined to spread
from here to all the world.

The tradition of pacifism among American Quakers had its lancaster moment in
1764 after the murder in the local jail of the Conestoga Indians by the
Paxton Boys (residents of what was then northern Lancaster County).
Indignant at the ruling Quakers for failing to protect the frontier against
Indian depredations, the 'boys' then marched on Philadelphia. The Quakers
there were alarmed. Indian refugees under the care of the Moravians were
moved to Philadelphia for protection. Some 200 young Quakers took up arms
to fight off the Paxton Boys. The invaders, however, merely presented their
demands to the administration, wheeled around and went home. For three
years thereafter, Quaker meetings in Philadelphia attempted to bring their
delinquent youths to acknowledge their error in preparing to resort to
violence. A few remained recalcitrant. None was disowned.

This was more than a decade before the Declaration of Independence. But,
Brock deduces, "by this date, though neither Quaker nor non-Quaker was aware
of it, Quaker Pennsylvanie had become a part of past history."

The Mennonites and others with similar tenets were inclined, during the
revolutionary period, to suffer in silence. The Quakers may have suffered,
but certainly not in silence. They were highly vocal. They were also
scrupulous in keeping records of every pennyworth of goods and chattels of
members which went under the auctioneers' hammers for fines and taxes which
Quakers refused to pay because they were levied for purposes of making war.
Moravians, generally more literate than the other local German inheritors of
the anabaptist tradition, left more detailed records. Moravians, however,
were concentrated in Lititz, with some at Lancaster and others at Bethel in
what was later to become Lebanon County. Quakers were most numerous in the
countryside bordering Chester County, fewer elsewhere. The details of
Preparative, Indulged and Monthly Meetings, all part of the carefull
organized church sheltering beneath the umbrella of the Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting, need not be gone into here. Suffice to say the Lancaster Meeting,
organized in 1753, disappeared as early as 1802. Columbia Meeting started
earlier and lasted longer - 1728 to 1829. Lampeter Meeting was in operation
1728-1852; Little Britain 1749-1864. Such attrition suggests that the
Friends hereabouts were weakened by their oppostition to the Revolution,
probably as much as by the Hicksite schism of the early nineteenth century.

Quaker historians say that, in Pennsylvania, 222 members of the Society of
Friends were 'dealt with' during the war for taking the test oath, and 321
for either 'paying fines themselves or conniving at others paying in their
behalf.' Probably half of these cases ended in disownment. Hiring a
substitute was considered by the Quakers even worse than paying the fine; it
was condemned also by the German sectarians who did not object to paying
fines.

General Thomas Mifflin, elected governor of the state three times, and
buried along the wall of trinity Church in Lancaster, was born a Quaker but
departed the brotherhood early in life. Christopher Marshall, Philadelphia
patriot and merchant whose diary during his exile in Lancaster tells us so
much about like here during the Revolution, had been disowned by the Quakers
back in 1751 for what his meeting considered un-Quakerly business practices.
Timothy Matlack, secretary of the Supreme Executive Council, who spent
considerable times in Lancaster, was tossed out of the church in 1765 for
similar reasons.

Some of those disowned by the Society of Friends joined the Free eQuakers, a
small but busy group which never numbered more than a few hundred. They
represented the only schism connected directly with the Quakers' peace
testimony. Their spirit was exemplified by Thomas Ross, Jr. who stood up in
Wrightstown MM, after the clerk had read the evidence of disownment against
him for his part in military affiars, and delivered his own opinion that
Friends themselves had deviated from their traditional sense of liberty.
'They are become,' he told the meeing, 'extremely partial, inconsisten, and
hypicritical,' and he had no desire to continue in membership.

Betsy Ross, she of the first flag, neice of George Ross, Lancaster signer of
the Declaration, is supposed to have been among the last of the Free
Quakers.

Free Quakers said their movement was a defensive war against 'ecclesiastical
tyranny' because the Quaker heirarchy would not permit 'that Christian
liberty of sentiment and conduct which all are entitled to enjoy.'

Peter Brock concludes,

'If by some chance the policy urged on the Society by the Free Quakers had
been accepted by the Friends, adherence to the peace testimony would have
been reduced to a merely vocational pacifism, a transformation that has,
indeed, almost been accomplished in our own day. As it was, the
conscientious objector, noncomformist in regard to the community at large,
was still a conformist in relation to his own society.'
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So, there is one of the many writings regarding our ancestors and their
struggles.....I think it's clear that the path for the Quakers, as for all
denominations, was not an easy one. The courage of our forefathers in this
country to live/change/resist/perpetuate their beliefs, no matter what they
may have been, never ceases to impress!

...Candy :)

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