The Society of Friends, a religious denomination also known as the Quakers, dates from the late 1640s. It began as a radical movement that empowered individuals and encouraged disrespect for prevailing institutions. George Fox is typically identified as the founder of the movement, although others, especially Margaret Fell, also contributed to its creation. The Quakers believed that an educated ministry and a church hierarchy were detrimental to true religion, and instead urged the believer to look to the “light,” or “seed,” within. This divine spark was thought to be a part of Christ within each believer. Their detractors sometimes falsely accused the early Quakers of claiming actually to be Christ. Because their message encouraged people to act independently of established institutions, it offered answers to those who found the English civil wars, regicide, and increased radicalism of the 1640s unsettling. The early Quakers were imbued with the millennialism common in the era. They felt compelled to spread the news of the “inward light.” An early group of converts, later known as the “first publishers of the truth,” traveled throughout England gathering many converts. Any believer, having been convinced of the sect’s message, could begin to preach publicly, and many of them did, including a large number of women. The movement spread from the north of England into London and from there throughout the countryside.
The response to the early Quakers was mixed. An official policy of religious toleration in the 1650s protected them to some extent from persecution and allowed the growth of the movement. After George Fox converted Margaret Askew Fell, wife of a justice of the peace in Lancashire, her home at Swarthmore Hall became central to the movement. Despite the convincement (discovery of truth) of someone of Fell’s social standing, the Quaker message frightened conservatives, who saw it as socially leveling as well as heretical. The aggressive preaching style of the early Quakers, which included harangues aimed at passersby and at congregations gathered for other sorts of worship services, earned them enmity from crowds as well as magistrates. Such peculiar practices as the refusal to swear an oath or to doff one’s hat to a social superior were often greeted with suspicion. To defend their views and further their movement, the sect published many pamphlets. In 1655 James Nayler outraged conservatives by recreating Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, riding into Bristol on an ass while his followers sang “Hosanna.” Parliament tried Nayler for blasphemy and considered the death sentence but in the end ordered his mutilation, whipping, and imprisonment. Quaker convincements in the British Isles, however, may have reached 30,000, and traveling witnesses had begun to visit other parts of Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.
The restoration of the Stuart MONARCHY in 1660 brought greater persecution. The Quakers, led by Fox and Fell, responded by developing new policies that would assuage some of the concerns of conservatives. They also organized the movement to sustain it over time. The Society of Friends as a distinctive organization with a structure of monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings, a CLASS of recognized ministers (both male and female), and a generally accepted body of doctrines was born after 1660. The society embraced quietism, the plain style, and pacifism. It continued to grant a greater role and more authority to women than any other religious movement. Elite young men, some of them university trained, joined the movement. William Penn, Robert Barclay, George Keith, and Isaac Pemberton were among those converted. The period from 1660 to 1680 was one of modest growth and consolidation. Persecution was heavy, especially initially, and the organization systematically collected accounts of sufferings. This literature of suffering, along with the journals of traveling Friends and doctrinal tracts, became staples of the Quaker library.
Quakers had been drawn to North America from the 1650s, and traveling witnesses had convinced colonists from Barbados to Maine. Rhode Island boasted
The Stony Brook Quaker Meetinghouse in Princeton, New Jersey, was built in 1760. (Library of Congress)
An especially active Quaker population. Massachusetts vigorously opposed the spread of Quakerism, banishing, whipping, and mutilating missionaries who visited there in the 1650s. Finally, it ordered banishment on pain of death, which led to the execution of four Quakers, including former Boston resident Mary Dyer, between 1659 and 1661. The persecution was scaled back after Charles II ordered an end to the executions in 1661. A Quaker meeting was gathered in the town of Salem, and it continued to meet despite efforts to crush it. In 1672 George Fox toured Quaker meetings in the Caribbean and North America. He, along with other members of the society, sought a colonial site to which British Quakers could migrate to escape persecution. As a result, a number of English Quakers were involved in the establishment of New Jersey. This activity formed a prelude to the major Quaker colonization effort, Pennsylvania.
William Penn, a convert to Quakerism, inherited a debt owed to his father by Charles II, who paid it by naming Penn the proprietor of a large tract in North America. Penn envisioned Pennsylvania as a moneymaking venture for himself (but like most proprietors he would be disappointed in this) and a haven for his coreligionists. In keeping with Quaker principles, he pursued a pacifistic policy with the Native American population, did not require military service of inhabitants, and permitted liberty of conscience. Many Quakers migrated to the colony after it was founded in 1681. The Society of Friends was a dominant force in Pennsylvania society and politics until Quaker men withdrew from politics in large numbers during the French and Indian Wars, or Seven Years’ War.
Shortly after the founding of Pennsylvania, the society experienced a major controversy, known as the Keithean schism. Keith, a well-educated Scottish convert, was serving as a tutor in Philadelphia when he proposed a series of reforms to the society. Had they been adopted, these reforms would have made the society more like other Christian churches of its day, with a confession of faith, tests for membership, and a greater reliance on the Bible. Although Keith did not prevail and eventually left the society to become an Anglican missionary and polemicist, the schism rocked early Pennsylvania and sent reverberations throughout the Atlantic Quaker community. A later schism that led to an orthodox (or evangelical) versus Hicksite split in the 19th century revolved around some similar issues.
The connections between Friends in Britain and North America fostered economic enterprises, and some Quakers grew rich as a result of their commercial activities. The image of the Quaker as hardworking, honest, and sober brought business to Friends, and later sociologist Max Weber would use the society as the primary example of how Protestant religion fostered economic development. These connections were maintained by a unique system of traveling ministers, individual Quakers who felt called to visit other communities of Friends. They traveled, usually in same-sex pairs, with a certificate granted by their original meeting and supplemented by testimonials from other meetings they visited. They traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, around the British Isles, and up and down the coast of North America. Women as well as men made these journeys, occasionally leaving young children at home to be tended by relatives while they went on tours that might last many months. These travelers and the journals they produced of their experiences helped to knit together a transatlantic Quaker community. They also reaffirmed the movement’s commitment to spiritual equality.
By 1760, 50,000 to 60,000 Quakers lived in the mainland North American colonies controlled by Britain; half resided around Philadelphia and in Maryland. All Friends met in local meetings for weekly worship. Monthly meetings for business handled disciplinary cases, granted permission to couples to marry, and produced certificates and testimonials in support of traveling Friends. A yearly meeting decided policies and handled the most contentious cases of discipline or dissent. By 1760 six yearly meetings met in North America, including meetings for New England, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia and North Carolina. The Philadelphia yearly meeting (covering the regions of Pennsylvania and New Jersey) was the largest. The smaller meetings might look to the Philadelphia or London yearly meeting for guidance, but each meeting was officially autonomous. Just as the society used suasion to bring recalcitrant members into line, it used similar strategies to keep all Friends “united in the truth.”
In Pennsylvania the Society of Friends learned to exercise power, an experience it had not had previously. The danger of becoming a powerful and complacent majority presented new challenges to the American branch of the Society of Friends. The society eventually became concerned about the need to police its own borders, and in the 1750s it began to disown members who married outside the meeting or engaged in other unacceptable activities. This period of renewed attention to the features that made the sect distinctive has been referred to as “the reformation of American Quakerism.” It resulted in a decline in membership but also in a recommitment to the principles of the sect among the remaining members.
Because of its principled commitment to social justice, nonviolence, and honesty, the society experienced periodic reform movements intended to reaffirm the sect’s commitment to its principles. The withdrawal from politics of Quaker men in the 1750s occurred after members decided that continued involvement required too great a compromise. The issue of SLAVERY was another area of concern, and Friends eventually opposed the traffic in human beings. Germantown Quakers petitioned against the practice as early as 1688, and agitation over the issue continued sporadically thereafter. In the 18th century reformer John Woolman led the way on this issue. Decision making by consensus was a slow process, but the ideal was to bring everyone along. Once the meetings had agreed to phase out first the SLAVE TRADE and later slavery, Quakers could be disowned for trading in slaves (after 1743) or for owning them (1770s). Quakers, especially Anthony Benezet, formed the first antislavery society in 1775 and worked with British Friends to make antislavery an international cause.
See also Protestantism.
Further reading: Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (Hounslow, U. K.: Maurice Temple Smith Ltd, 1985).
—Carla Gardina Pestana
World History
