Image

Here again, the grandparents were commemorated before the parents themselves. Further, the mother’s father and father’s mother were the first to be honored.2

Yet another example was the family of John and Elizabeth Woolston, who married at Middletown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1735. The eldest children were three daughters, who were named after the father’s mother, the mother’s mother and the mother herself in that order. The first-born son received a forename common to his father and his maternal grandfather; the second son was named for his father’s father. Once again, the descent of names was carefully balanced between maternal and paternal sides of the family.3

Image

A fourth example was the family of Nathan and Hannah Sharples (var. Sharpless), also of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.4

Image

This bilateral descent of names was not universal among Quaker families. But it was very common in the Delaware Valley—more so than in Massachusetts or Virginia. An onomastic equality between husband and wife was more evident in the naming customs of Quaker families than in other Anglo-American cultures. This concern for equality was carried to the point of double-reversing the naming order for children of different genders, so that the first-born female commemorated the father’s line, and the eldest male followed the maternal line. This custom appeared in all but one of the examples listed above. In both the Wharton and Woolston families, boys were named first for the mother’s father; girls were named first for the father’s mother.

Quaker onomastics were also distinctive in the choice of names. Favored forenames often came from the Bible, but the proportion of biblical names was not nearly as strong as among the Puritans. In England only about 50 percent of male Quakers received biblical names, compared with 90 percent in Calvinist families. The leading favorites were John, Joseph and Samuel. Traditional English and Teutonic names continued to be popular among Friends. The extravagant biblicism of the Puritans was tempered by the plain style among the Quakers.5

Biblical namesakes were more common for females than for males. Mary, Elizabeth and Sarah accounted for a large part of all Quaker names, as they did among other English-speaking people. Also popular among Friends were the names Anne-Anna-Hannah, and Esther-Hester, which commemorated two of the strongest feminine characters in the Bible—an outspoken female prophet, and a consort of the Persian King Xerxes. Esther would seem at first sight to have been an unlikely Quaker namesake—reveling as that Jewish lady did in an epic slaughter of the Gentiles. But she also appears in the Bible as a woman of strong and independent character who was devoted to helping the people of God.

These naming choices were not invented in the New World. They were virtually identical among Quakers in England’s North Midlands and America’s Delaware Valley. Through the eighteenth century, males received the same combination of biblical and teutonic names—with John, Thomas, William, Joseph and George the leading favorites among Friends on both sides of the water. Quaker females were mostly named Mary and Sarah in England and America, with Hannah, Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Esther and Deborah strong secondary favorites. Plain English names such as Jane, and traditional Christian favorites such as Catherine and Margaret preserved their popularity among Quakers, more so than among Puritans. Also exceptionally popular among Quakers in England and America was the name of Phebe, which rarely appeared in Puritan and Anglican families.6

Many Quaker families also made occasional use of grace names for their daughters, with particular favorites being Patience, Grace, Mercy and Chastity. A few families gave them to male children as well. All the names chosen by Richard and Abigail Lippincott for their eight children could be combined into a prayer:

Remember

John

Restore

Freedom

Increase

Jacob

Preserve

Israel

The Lippincotts were a Calvinist family who converted to the Society of Friends.7

Altogether, Quaker names were much the same on both sides of the Atlantic. In its choice of forenames this onomastic system was similar to the Puritans in some respects; but in the descent of names its three-generational rhythm was closer to Anglicans; and its even-handed bilateral descent of names was sui generis. Altogether, the Quaker culture of the Delaware Valley was unique in its customs of child naming.

Image Delaware Child-rearing Ways: Bracing the Will

 

On the subject of child rearing, Quaker ideas took form very slowly during the seventeenth century. The founder George Fox continued for many years to endorse the Calvinist idea that “all children should be brought into, and kept in subjection … through the breaking of the stubborn will within.”1 But many Quakers rejected the idea that children were born evil, and some also denied the doctrine of original sin. Robert Barclay condemned this cardinal belief of Calvinism as an “unscriptural barbarism.”2 By the early eighteenth century, Quakers in both England and America had come to believe that small children were “harmless, righteous and innocent creatures.”3 Many members of the Society of Friends believed that children were incapable of sin until old enough to understand their acts. Others suggested that youngsters continued in a state of innocence until they were as old as eleven or twelve.4

These ideas about child nature created distinctive Quaker customs of child nurture which differed very much from those of Puritans and Anglicans. The first and most important difference was in the special intensity of Quaker interest in the young. One Quaker parent wrote in her diary, “My chief concern is about my children. O if they may be preserved out of wickedness … there is so much wickedness in this place on every side.”5 Others expressed the same interest in a happier way. Isaac Norris wrote of his own children,

I have two daughters yet alive, delightful children. … They are a constant care as well as a great amusement and diversion to me to direct their education aright and enjoy them truly in the virtuous improvement of their tender minds.6

This concern was shared not merely by parents but by the entire community. One historian concludes from long acquaintance of meeting records that “the Quaker yearly meetings for nearly three centuries have drawn attention to the welfare of young people more frequently than any other topic.”7

Quaker autobiographers testified to the constant attention of their parents. “I was not ‘christened’ in a church,” wrote Rufus Jones, “but I was sprinkled from morning till night with the dew of religion.” Even in the late seventeenth century, the environment of a Quaker family was more child-centered than home life in other cultures.8

For the first years of infancy, Quakers believed in what they called a “guarded education.” They thought that small children should be sheltered from the world and raised within a carefully controlled environment. Behind this idea lay an empiricism which held that children could be “trained up” by control of their surroundings. “Virtue passes not by lineal succession, nor piety by inheritance,” said the London meeting.9

The second stage of Quaker child rearing began with what was perceived to be “the dawn of reason” in the child. One Philadelphia mother wrote candidly:

I acknowledge with truth that I am not so dotingly fond of very young infants, as some are, I have no idea of kissing every little dirty mouth, that is held up for notice, and I wou’d quite as leave, indeed, should prefer playing with a good large rag baby, than with a child of two or three months. But when the dawn of reason begins to make its beautiful appearance, and they can take notice; I think them the most engaging little creatures in the world.10

When this stage was reached, Quaker parents were urged to raise their children mainly by working through their reason. William Penn put it thus:

If God give you children, love them with wisdom, correct them with affection: never strike in passion, and suit the correction to their age as well as fault. Convince them of their error before you chastise them … punish them more by their understandings than the rod.11

Travelers of other faiths also often commented upon the permissiveness of child rearing among Quakers—of children who said “I will not” to their parents with impunity. These travelers commented also on the extent to which Quaker households appeared to be, in the modern phrase, child-centered. They observed accurately an important truth about child-rearing customs in this culture.12

Quaker parents made heavy use of rewards rather than punishments, and promises rather than threats. One father, while on a trip to England, wrote home to his daughter in America, “If when I return I hear thee has been a good Girl, there is not a little girl in Burlington shall have what I intend for thee.”13

Corporal punishment was used with moderation by some Quaker parents and masters, and others forswore it altogether. David Cooper wrote in his memoir that he could “never remember receiving but one stroak from a master.” The ideal and often the reality was a different method. Cooper himself wrote:

A strict obedience is so important that no head of a family can support their station with any degree of peace and satisfaction, without [it], and by timely and steady care is easily maintained, whereby a great deal of jarring, scolding and correcting is avoided.14

Child-nurture among Friends, however, should not be confused with a modern permissive system. Quaker children were trained to strict ideals of “silence and subjection”—not so much to parents or elders, but to the meeting. The individuality of the Quaker child was subordinated to the entire community, even as it was protected against the relentless will-breaking of the Puritans and the hierarchical will-bending of the Virginians.15

Child rearing was a communal process, which collectively involved many people besides the parents themselves. “In learning about goals for raising children,” an historian of one Quaker family writes, “the Pembertons largely relied upon the exchange of ideas among family and friends. … in the main, parents expected to raise children in much the same way as they had been raised.”16

Children also actively socialized each other, from a very early age. This process happens in every culture, but among Quakers, it took on a special quality. The Quaker journalist John Kelsall, for example, wrote, “As I remember about the sixth year of my age, my brother and I would have got under some hedge, wall or such like place, and there have kept a meeting in imitation of Friends.”17

Further, Quaker children were trained from an unusually early age to think in terms of serving the community. William Dillwyn wrote to his daughter Sukey, “Good girls always love to serve the poor, and make their lives happy—it is much better than romping about with rude children.”18

By precept and example, and also by the structure of socialization, Quaker children were taught subordination not so much to other individuals as to a community of values. Here was an important part of the process by which cultures were maintained from one generation to the next.

The third stage of life was one which the Quakers called youth, and which we know as adolescence—a period they defined as life from fourteen to twenty-one.19 One Quaker called this “the slippery and dangerous time of life.”20 In this stage, Quaker parents tended to be more active and constraining than Puritans and

Anglicans had been. Quakers argued that young people should remain within their families. “I think it is better,” one wrote, “for children to be at home than a gadding abroad.”21 Many strenuously condemned the custom of “sending out” which was widely practiced among the Puritans. William Penn wrote angrily against those who “do with their children as with their souls, put them out at livery for so much a year.”22 Where apprenticeship was necessary, Quakers were careful to find members of their faith to serve as masters. When they were unable to do so, the question was carried as high as the quarterly meeting—a serious business indeed.23

Quakers encouraged their children to remain at home even to adulthood. Others of different sects suspected that the motives were not entirely spiritual. Henry Muhlenberg wrote in 1748 that young people in Pennsylvania were “almost in bondage” to their parents. Whatever the reason, youngsters in Quaker families tended to stay at home in a way that Puritan children did not.24

Quakers were also very strict in other ways with their teenage children. An example was their attitude toward dancing. A Quaker preacher, traveling in the more complaisant colony of Maryland, came upon a party of young people who were dancing merrily together. He broke in upon them like an avenging angel, stopped the dance, and demanded to know if they considered Martin Luther to be a good man. The astonished youngsters answered in the affirmative. The Quaker evangelist then quoted Luther on the subject of dancing: “as many paces as the man takes in his dance, so many steps he takes toward hell.” This, the Quaker missionary gloated with a gleam of sadistic satisfaction, “spoiled their sport.”25

In some ways, Quakers could be very repressive of their young. But they never created the same hierarchy of age that was so strong in other cultures. They cultivated an ideal of equality among children. William Penn urged Quaker parents to take great care to be even-handed with all of their off-spring. “Be not unequal in your love to your children, at least in the appearance of it; it is both unjust and indiscreet; it lessens love to parents, and provokes envy among children.” In a later generation, this advice would become a cliché of child-rearing literature. But the Quakers were far ahead of others in their concern for sibling equality.26

The Quakers also extended this ideal of equality to relations between children and adults. People of other faiths were startled to observe Quaker children giving moral and religious instruction to their elders. We have one account of a ten-year-old child who interrupted a gathering of adults to deliver a spontaneous speech on salvation. The adults listened respectfully, and after the child was done speaking, a grandmother offered a prayer, and said, “Oh lord! That this young branch should be a teacher unto us old ones.”

Another young Friend, Thomas Chalkley, at the age of ten regularly reprimanded adults in his own family—condemning their swearing, breaking up their card parties, preaching to them about sin and salvation. To people of other cultures, the behavior of these Quaker infants terribles seemed to turn the world upside down. But among Friends, they appeared to put things right side up again.27

Other ethnic groups in the Delaware Valley introduced their own customs of child rearing. It is interesting to observe that many German pietists were remarkably similar to the Quakers in this respect. Among the Amish, for example, customary ideas of child nature and nurture had many qualities in common with those of English Friends. In both groups one finds the same belief in the innocence of the young, the same intensity of love and concern for their upbringing, the same combination of permissiveness in infancy and restraint in adolescence, the same hostility to “sending out,” and the same insistence upon strict subordination to a spiritual community.28

There were also many similarities in the child-rearing customs of German Pietists and English Quakers, which became the basis of a regional culture in the Delaware Valley, and the means of its transmission from one generation to the next.

Image Delaware Age Ways:
Quaker Elders as “Nursing Fathers and Mothers”

 

When the Quaker missionary Mary Dyer was about to be hanged in Boston, her Puritan executioners asked if she wished an elder to pray for her. “Nay,” said she, “first a child, then a young man, then a strong man before an elder.” In her response, one may observe how radical was her challenge against conventional attitudes. Mary Dyer did not merely challenge the prevailing system of age-stratification. She turned it upside down.1

The second generation of Quakers took a different view. They revived something of the traditional respect for age, but tempered it by the tenets of their faith. Meetings and moralists in the Delaware Valley routinely urged honor and respect for elders, citing the same biblical injunctions and rewards that were so often mentioned in Massachusetts and Virginia. “Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long,” the Burlington Friends’ meeting quoted from Scripture, just as their New England neighbors did. Further, elders within the Society of Friends were thought to be entitled to the same honor that was due to parents.2

In other respects, however, ideas of age relations were different among the Quakers. Their notion of respect for age did not rest upon principles of veneration as in New England, or on ideas of patriarchy as in the Chesapeake. Quakers did not think of elders as Abraham’s seed who had been specially chosen by God to live a long life. Nor did they believe that older people were Adam’s heirs who had been specially ordained to rule the young.

In the Society of Friends, older people were thought of in another way—mainly as “nursing fathers and mothers to the young,” and teachers (in the Christian sense) who were assigned a special sort of nurturing role which the Quakers called “elder-ing.” This idea developed in the late seventeenth century, when the young Quaker radicals of the 1650s had become “ancient solid friends,” with a special standing in their sect. In Richard Bauman’s phrase, they were highly respected as “weighty veterans of the Lamb’s war.” When they spoke to the young, their words seemed to rise from the very roots of the movement. As a consequence, they had a special eminence as prophetic ministers whose role was to “feed the flock of God.” Thereafter, this status passed to subsequent generations of elders.3

One women’s meeting described the function of elders in the following way:

Elder women in the truth were not only called Elders but Mothers and likewise mothers in Israel; now a mother in the church of Christ and a mother in Israel is one that gives suck and nourishes, feeds and dresses and washes and rules, [and] is a teacher in the church and … an admonisher and instructor and exhorter. … so the elder women as mothers are to be teachers of good things and to be teachers of the younger and the trainers up in virtue, holiness and Godliness, in wisdom and in the fear of the Lord.4

Men’s meetings used different metaphors, but the organizing principle was much the same. Quaker elders were not saints or patriarchs, but nursing mothers and even “nursing fathers” who supported, exhorted, admonished and when necessary also corrected the young. In turn, youngsters were urged to respect their elders, and to follow their advice. Instruments of this purpose included the memoirs which elderly Quakers produced in large number for the instruction of the young. One example was Joseph Oxley’s huge manuscript called “Joseph’s Offering to His Children.” Another was David Cooper’s autobiography which he called “Some Memoirs … Intended for the Use of His Children.”5

This ideal of a nurturing relationship became a living reality in the Delaware Valley. Autobiographers warmly remembered the support they had received from elders in difficult moments of youth. Thus, Benjamin Bangs wrote, “ … there was a tender care in the elders over me, who often would be dropping some seasonable cautions to me, by which I was greatly benefited.”6 Israel Norris remembered of his father:

In the latter part of his life his great care was to consider the difference between Age and Youth … his innocent cheerfulness to … his children … deservedly merited their respect and duty due a parent, and his pleasure in their company and the ease and cheerfulness of his conversation made them choose him as a companion and friend.7

That “difference between age and youth” also had another side. Elders made themselves very busy in the way of admonition—so much so that among Quakers the word “elder” was not merely a noun but a verb which meant to scold or correct the young. One Quaker wrote of another that “she gave her friend a good eldering.”8

In the first years of the Quaker movement, elders did not have a special status. But as time passed, they became a separate “station” or quasi-office in the meeting—“pillars in the House of our God,” Barclay called them.9 Friends began to be formally selected to serve as elders—a process that was full of pain and difficulty for Quakers.10 As early as 1686, the Philadelphia monthly meeting asked its elders to talk with those “professing truth that walk not according to it.”11 In 1727, the York quarterly meeting in England appointed four elders to correct “a growing evil of pride … [and] other vain and pernicious practices run into by some of the youth among Friends, which notwithstanding the frequent and repeated advice given in that respect. …”12 Elders were also made responsible for organizing the affairs of the meeting, and maintaining order. It was their task to deal with mentally disturbed people in meetings.13 During the early eighteenth century, they were also given the task of advising ministers.

On difficult and doubtful questions, young and even middle-aged Friends were actually compelled by their meetings to consult elders. Thus, the York quarterly meeting in 1708 issued a minute on “unnecessary and extravagant wigs,” which required that any Quaker who needed to wear a wig should “acquaint” the elders with his problem and get their advice.14 This process of consulting with elders was common in that culture. Anne Cooper Whitall remembered the Quaker community where she grew up as a place where

the old governed the young, and those of them that obeyed not … were punished—it was a shame not to hear reproof among the youth and among the aged a matter of punishment not to give it. … the youth mixed with the aged to awe them, and give them examples.15

When elders fell out among themselves, communities were deeply riven. George Churchman described the shattering effect of “a difference between two members not in low stations, and advanced in age,” much to the distress of “younger branches of our heavenly father’s family.”16

There were limits, however, to the authority of elders in Quaker culture. Their roles were not as authoritarian as those in Puritan Massachusetts or Anglican Virginia. The young had an obligation to listen, but not always to obey. Further, elders were entitled to respect only when Truth was with them. Not all elders were honored among the Quakers. And the young were also to be respected when truth was on their side. Ministers were apt to be Quakers of any age: some were as young as ten; others of ripe years. Elders themselves were not always very old; meetings were often instructed not to choose their elders merely according to age, though normally they did so.17

In daily affairs, younger Quakers commonly waited for their elders to take the lead. But when elders failed to do their duty, then youth itself stepped into the breach. John Woolman remembered one such incident. It arose from a disturbance at a public house in Mount Holly, New Jersey, about the year 1742, when “many people, both in town and from the country,” were “spending their time in drinking and vain sports.” Woolman was then a young man in his twenty-third year. He waited for his seniors to do something. “I considered I was young,” he wrote, “and that several elderly friends in town had opportunity to see these things.” When they did nothing, the young man himself reproved the master of the drinking house.18

But elderly Quakers were often very active in their nurturing and teaching role. An example was Susannah Morris, a Quaker missionary. In 1746 at the age of sixty-four she “found drawings in my mind to go to and fro in visiting meetings.” Leaving her husband and children at home, she sailed from Pennsylvania to Europe on her fourth Atlantic crossing to proselytize for her faith. Two years later she was traveling in America on another mission. Even in the coldest months when the Delaware was frozen, she was busy visiting “much at home in winter,” though she wrote that “for my age could not well bear cold.” In the year 1752 (aged 70) she made still another transatlantic missionary trip, and continued her work until she died at the age of seventy-three.19

Quaker age ways, in summary, were less hierarchical than in Virginia or Massachusetts. The precepts of patriarchy and veneration were condemned within the Society of Friends. But elders were honored by this culture in other ways, and they served actively until the end of life—which leads to another question about attitudes toward death.

Image Delaware Death Ways:
The Quaker Idea of Optimistic Fatalism

 

By the standards of the age, rates of mortality in the Delaware Valley were in a middling range during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century—lower than in Virginia, but higher than in Massachusetts. From 1675 to 1750, death rates increased and also became increasingly unstable—with sudden surges caused by the spread of epidemic disease.1

In that setting the Quakers no less than Puritans and Anglicans frequently reminded themselves of what John Woolman called “the uncertainty of temporal things.” They cultivated an attitude of fatalism which was nearly universal in this era. But the substance of their fatalistic thinking was not the same as that of other people. The Quaker attitude might be described as optimistic fatalism—optimistic in more ways than one. They regarded death as the climax of life—an event not to be feared or abhorred but welcomed and embraced. Death for a believing Quaker was an act of Christian apotheosis—the extinction of the mortal self.

Quakers were deeply interested in deathbed scenes, which had a very different texture from those of Puritan Massachusetts. A favorite book among Friends was Piety Promoted, an anthology of Quaker deathbed events which was published in at least thirty editions during the eighteenth century. This genre was not unique to Quakers; Puritans and Anglicans also produced many collections of the same sort. But the Quakers had different ways of thinking about mortality.2

An example was the death of a twenty-eight-year-old Quaker named Sybil Matlock Cooper, in 1759. Her husband recorded the event. As the end approached she said:

Give me one drop more of cold water, then let me go if it be thy will, Father, divers times repeating Come Death, Come Death. … The blood now retired from her face, and it was thought she was expiring, but it returned and she came to her natural colour as in a time of health and opening her eyes asked to be raised up. She seemed to admire to find herself still with us … I said My Dear, it may be the almighty will please to restore you to us again. She replied, I have not desired it.3

Many others not merely accepted death but welcomed it in this manner. Mary Penington wrote that since she came to be “settled in the truth,” she lived “free from the sting of death and without the least desire to live.”4 Yet another example was William Dillwyn’s description of his wife’s death:

Her sense continued to the last and free from pain. … [she] resigned her breath in a happy frame of mind and humble assurance of eternal rest—which even in that solemn hour her countenance sweetly testified—an innocent smile remaining on it, when a corpse.5

Male Quakers showed the same attitude. Joseph Oxley wrote:

I am now pretty far advanced in years, waiting daily until my change shall come, having no desire to stay longer than is my Master’s good will and pleasure; in this state of resignation I desire to live, and to live so as to be fit to die.6

Quakers often dreamed about death, as did New England Puritans and Anglican Virginians, and published their dreams in hundreds of journals. Many of these accounts were elaborate death fantasies in which the writers, after an initial feeling of revulsion, embraced death and glorified it. The classical example was a dream that came to John Woolman as he lay upon his sickbed:

In a time of sickness, with the pleurisy a little upward of two years and a half ago, I was brought so near the gates of death that I forgot my name. Being then desirous to know who I was, I saw a mass of matter of a dull gloomy color between the south and the east, and was informed that this mass was human beings in as great misery as they could be and live, and that I was mixed with them, and that henceforth I might not consider self as a distinct or separate being.

In this state I remained several hours. I then heard a soft melodious voice, more pure and harmonious than any I had heard with my ears before; I believed it was the voice of an angel who spake to other angels. The words were, “John Woolman is dead.” I soon remembered that I once was John Woolman, and being assured that I was alive in the body, I greatly wondered what that heavenly voice could mean. I believed beyond doubting that it was the voice of an holy angel, but as yet it was a mystery to me. …

 

The song of the angel remained a mystery; and in the morning, my dear wife and some others coming to my bedside, I asked them if they knew who I was, and they telling me I was John Woolman, thought I was only light-headed, for I told them not what the angel said. …

 

At length I felt a Divine power prepare my mouth that I could speak, and I then said, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I but Christ that liveth in me. …” Then the mystery was opened, and I perceived there was joy in heaven over a sinner who had repented, and that the language, “John Woolman is dead,” meant no more than the death of my own will.7

 

In the face of death, Quakers cultivated an attitude not merely of resignation but confident expectation. For believing Quakers, death became the fulfillment of life. It was an escape from the corruptions of the world, and the final transcendence of the mortal self.

When death actually came to a Quaker household, the entire family assembled, and shared an experience of the highest solemnity. The last words were heard with loving attention. The dying Friend lay at the very center of his friends and relations. Visitors crowded into the room, and children were also required to watch, listen and reflect. But once “the spirit had flown,” Quakers showed comparatively little interest in the physical remains of the deceased. Burial, funeral and mourning customs were exceptionally austere in this culture. Quakers grieved over the deaths of their loved ones as deeply as other people. But they condemned a show of mourning as “proud” and “vain” and “needless.” The yearly meeting in 1728 condemned “wearing black or black and white cloathes at Burials.”8 Funerals were kept very plain and simple. Large processions were discouraged. There were no palls, bearers, mutes, rings or gloves. Meetings issued strict rules of restraint for these occasions. One meeting urged its members “to keep out all needless and ayery [airy] discourses and to behave themselves soberly and in a weighty mind as becomes Truth; and not to be hasty to put the corpse in the ground, but pause a little that all may be done in a very solemn manner.”9

The act of interment itself was also very simple among the Quakers. When Richard Cooke was buried at Chester, the total expenses were six shillings for a plain wood coffin, and four shillings for all other charges.10 John Woolman asked that his coffin be made without any ornament from ash instead of oak, because “Oak … is a wood more useful than ash.”11 The corpse was wrapped in a simple shroud, woven of wool in England and of linen in America.

The issue of gravemarkers was, as Pearson Thistlethwaite has written, a special “stone of stumbling” for Quakers.12 The London yearly meeting recommended in 1766 that all markers should be removed from Quaker graves. Many meetings refused to agree, and Quakers quarreled about this practice for years. Not until 1850 were gravestones approved by the London yearly meeting—a plain flat marker without ornament or elaborate inscriptions.13

Wakes were also discouraged. George Fox called them a “heathen custom.” In the year 1700 the York quarterly meeting agreed that:

This meeting having under their weighty consideration the practice that is used in many places among Friends at burials (vizt.) of giving Cakes, and providing much meat and drink for the neighbors and friends which may come to such burials, it is the sense of this meeting that the providing too much meat and drink and cakes or such like things in the Method and manner aforesaid, tends to the prejudice and hurt of Truth’s testimony.

Shortly thereafter, cakes and “such like” things were forbidden outright by the York meeting, and “two weighty and faithful Friends” were appointed to “inspect and see into the practice.” But they continued to occur, despite official disapproval.14

Wakes were also discouraged in America, but never entirely suppressed. According to tradition, Quakers throughout the Delaware Valley worked out a compromise. Cakes and wine were served before a burial, and a full meal thereafter—but with a spirit of self-restraint. The bottle was allowed to circulate only twice.15

As time passed, mourning customs grew more elaborate among the Quaker colonies. Thomas Chalkley complained as early as 1714 that “funerals began to be growing thing among us.”16 As late as 1782, a child’s elaborate burial in a Quaker graveyard inspired one disapproving Friend to write:

The child’s father had been disowned for paying a military fine. His mother, a worthy public friend, was not present. His wife and children were members. The corpse was carried by four young women. Three of them did not belong to Friends, the other a disowned widow’s daughter. [They] were dressed in white, their hands white with powder, without bonnets, etc. To see this show enter our graveyard, and the corpse a member of a society that professed so much plainness and self-denial affected me much and occasioned disagreeable observations.17

As this comment suggests, old attitudes toward death lingered for a century in the Delaware Valley.

Among the other ethnic groups in this region, similar death customs were also kept by German Pietists. The Amish, for example, tended to share the same optimistic fatalism, the same death-watches until the flying of the spirit, the same austere burials, and the same emotional restraint. There were differences of detail. The Amish carefully washed the corpse, and always dressed it in white. But with these exceptions German Pietists, English Quakers and other Protestant “Spiritists” were very similar in their mortuary customs. In general, the death ways of these English and German cultures in the Delaware Valley had a very special texture that rose from their religious beliefs.

Image Delaware Religious Ways: The Quaker Spiritist Style

 

“As to religion,” Delaware Quaker David Cooper told his children in 1772, “ … Let it have the chief and principal place in thy heart.” He explained, “I mean real religion, not ceremonious attendance at meetings, and talking God and Godliness.”1

David Cooper’s “real religion” was far removed from practices in Puritan Massachusetts and Anglican Virginia. It gave rise to a unique ritual of worship that centered on the Inner Light and the movement of the Spirit.

Members of the Society of Friends met in meetings, sometimes once a week, or even several times a week. These meetings for worship normally went through a strict sequence of ritual stages. First was the gathering. Quakers quietly arrived, either as individuals or in small family groups. They were urged to cultivate a gravity of demeanor on their journey to the meeting. “Frivolous” conversation was condemned, as was laughter, smoking, spitting and chewing. Men and women entered the meeting by different doors, and were expected to take seats nearest the front in order of their arrival, and not by rank or wealth or age, except for the special honor done to elders.

Then the second stage began—a time of expectant silence called “turning the mind to the light.” The English Quaker Alexander Parker wrote in 1660:

So Friends, when you come together to wait upon God, come orderly in the fear of God; the first that enters into the place of your meeting, be not careless, nor wander up and down, either in body or mind; but innocently sit down in some place, and turn in thy mind to the light, and wait upon God singly, as if none were present but the Lord. … Then the next comes in, let them in simplicity of heart, sit down and turn in the same light, and wait in the Spirit; and so all the rest coming in, in the fear of the Lord, sit down in the pure stillness and silence of all flesh, and wait in the light.2

Sometimes no words were ever spoken, and yet the meeting was thought to have been highly successful. Many Quakers believed that the best meetings happened when no outward words needed saying.

But most meetings passed to another stage when people began to rise and speak, either in the form of preaching (if the words were addressed to one another) or prayer (if to the Lord). Usually, the elders spoke first, and others followed. The manner of speaking was different from ordinary discourse. Visitors in the eighteenth century remarked upon its strange cadence and accent. The Swedish traveler Peter Kalm attended a meeting for worship in Philadelphia’s Bank Meeting House, on 7 December 1750, and described it thus:

We sat and waited very quietly from ten o’clock to a quarter after eleven. … Finally, one of the two … old men in the front pew rose, removed his hat, turned hither and yon, and began to speak, but so softly that even in the middle of the church, which was not large, it was impossible to hear anything except the confused murmur of the words. Later he began to talk a little louder, but so slowly that four or five minutes elapsed between the sentences; finally the words came both louder and faster. In their preaching the Quakers have a peculiar mode of expression, which is half singing, with a strange cadence and accent, and ending each cadence, as it were, with a half or … a full sob. Each cadence consists of two, three or four syllables, but sometimes more, according to the demand of the words and means; e.g. my friends/put in your mind/we/do nothing/good of ourselves// without God’s //help and assistance. … When he stood for a while using his sing-song method he changed his manner of delivery and spoke in a more natural way … at the end, just as he was speaking at his best, he stopped abruptly, sat down, and put on his hat.3

Anyone could speak in meeting—Friends and strangers, elders and youngsters, men and women. One diarist recorded every speaker in meetings he attended; both men and women spoke frequently, but a small number of individuals accounted for most contributions. Elders were responsible for dealing with disturbed or disruptive speakers. The meeting itself sometimes responded to unwelcome remarks by standing silently in protest.4

The last stage of the meeting was often a return to silence. Then worship would end when one member, usually an elder, rose and shook hands with another, and everyone departed in quiet dignity. A Quaker meeting for worship was thus conducted in a manner very different from an Anglican liturgical service and the Puritans lecture day.

Other differences also appeared in the physical setting of Quaker worship. Meetinghouses in both England and the Delaware Valley tended to be simple rectangular buildings, with massive stone walls and plain white shutters. Double doors for men and women were sheltered beneath a projecting hood.5

A striking feature of Quaker meetinghouses was the intensity of their illumination. Interiors were very bright. Windows were large, numerous, and set high in the walls. Interior walls and ceilings were frequently “whitened” for additional effect. Quakers preferred to worship in a room that was suffused with light—a symbol of their beliefs, and a sharp contrast with the gloom of Anglican churches and especially Puritan meetinghouses which were sometimes so dark that ministers complained they were unable to read their sermons.6

Image

Quaker meetinghouses in the Delaware Valley were very different from Puritan meetinghouses in New England and Anglican churches in Virginia, and much the same as Quaker buildings in the North Midlands of England. These patterns of similarity and difference were defined both by religious beliefs and regional traditions. In the Delaware Valley, the church architecture of other Christian denominations was influenced by the customs of the hegemonic culture. The churches of Lutherans and Presbyterians in parts of Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century sometimes resembled Quaker meetinghouses in exterior design.

Inside the meetinghouse, all “vain” and “needless” furniture was ruthlessly stripped away. Quakers had no need for pulpits and altars, but often there was a raised platform called the “stand” where the elders sat in a place of special honor. Everyone else took a seat on the simple benches, men on one side and women on the other. There was no assigned seating as in Anglican and Puritan churches. A gallery called the loft was reserved for children and youths. Other furnishings included a sliding partition which separated men and women during their business meetings, and a cabinet where records were kept, including a locked deed-box which could be opened only in the presence of three Friends.7

American meetinghouses differed in a few details from those of England. Stonework in the Delaware Valley consisted of random walls, rather than cut stone blocks. Doors were placed differently in America and large stables were constructed for Friends who had to travel longer distances than was the case in England. But in most important ways, architecture of the meetinghouses changed very little in the New World.8

It is interesting to observe that Quaker meetinghouses set the fashion for religious architecture in rural communities throughout the Delaware Valley. Other denominations built many of their country churches in the same plain style throughout this region. The exteriors of some Calvinist and Lutheran churches were sometimes indistinguishable from Quaker buildings. Here was yet another way in which the religious customs of the Quakers had an impact upon the culture of an entire region.

Image Delaware Magic Ways:
The Quaker Obsession with Spiritualism

 

“We have not hoofs nor horns in our religion,” Quakers liked to say.1 But even the Children of Light were not without some belief in the supernatural. The history of magic in the Delaware Valley was a two hundred years’ war between old fears and a new faith—a running conflict between ancient superstition and the magic of the Inner Light. Many traditional forms of folk magic were carried to West Jersey and Pennsylvania by individual settlers. But the Quaker leaders of those colonies had no use for these “needless” beliefs and did their best to discourage them, without ever succeeding entirely in doing so. The old magic continued to be practiced and opposed in the Quaker colonies for many years.

As early as 1683 two elderly women named Margaret Mattson and Yeshro Hendrickson were accused of witchcraft, and brought to trial before the Proprietor himself. Both were Swedish, and required an interpreter in the English court. One of them, Margaret Mattson, was accused by her own daughter. Of the witnesses who appeared against them, one complained that the accused had bewitched his cattle. Another testified that while he was boiling the heart of a calf which he believed to have been killed by magic, Margaret Mattson came into his house looking visibly discomposed. A third declared that his wife “had awakened him in a great fright, alleging that she had just seen a great light, and an old woman with a knife at her bed’s feet.” On examination, the witnesses could not link any of their misfortunes directly to the accused Margaret Mattson herself, and the Proprietor’s court delivered a curious verdict which captured the ambivalence of attitudes toward witchcraft in Quaker Pennsylvania. Margaret Mattson was found guilty of “having the common fame of a witch,” but not guilty of practicing witchcraft. She was set free.2

This witchcraft trial was an exceptional event in the Quaker colonies. Pennsylvania had no laws against witchcraft in the seventeenth century. Its Quaker leaders showed great hostility to accusations, and actively suppressed persecutions of the sort that raged in New England with much encouragement from ministers and magistrates during the late seventeenth century.3

Popular belief in witchcraft was so strong in Pennsylvania that the governing elite felt compelled to act from time to time. In 1719, the justices of Chester County were specifically empowered to inquire into “witchcrafts, enchantments, sorceries and magic arts.” But the purpose of that order was mainly to discourage belief in magic itself, rather than to punish alleged malefactors.4

Still, ancient beliefs survived to the end of the eighteenth century. When the courts failed to act, mobs found other means to punish eccentric people who were feared as witches. In 1749, when a court refused to punish a man accused of wizardry, a riot occurred in Philadelphia. As late as 1787, an old woman was dragged from her house by a mob of youths, and stoned to death for witchcraft in the streets of Philadelphia.5 In Burlington, New Jersey, a gigantic sycamore of great age was long remembered as the “witch tree,” after an old woman was allegedly hanged from its branches by a mob.6

Here was a paradox that ran deep in the Quaker colonies. Friends who founded Pennsylvania were unwilling to persecute witches themselves, but unable to prevent persecutions by others. No witch was ever ordered to be executed by the courts of any Quaker colony. But witches continued to be mobbed, hanged and even stoned to death as late as 1787.

Prophecy and divination were also practiced by the ordinary people of Pennsylvania. In 1695, Robert and Philip Roman were brought before the monthly meeting, and later Robert Roman was presented by the grand inquest of Chester County, “for practicing geomancy according to Hidon, and divining with a stick.” For those offenses he was fined five pounds, and ordered to deliver to the court his learned books—“Hidon’s Temple of Wisdom, Scott’s Discovery of Witchcraft, and Cornelius Agrippa’s Geomancy.” There were also at least a few conjurers, witch doctors and fortune tellers among the Teutonic immigrants who founded Germantown. Their services were in demand by people seeking the recovery of stolen goods, the whereabouts of buried treasure or the removal of spells.7

But Quakers had no need of the devil to explain the existence of evil in the world, nor any use for geomancy to predict the future. Few believing Christians of any faith have ever shown so little interest in the black arts. Quakers commonly regarded the wrongs of the world as the work of man rather than the Devil—and especially as the product of carelessness, ignorance and human error.8

Members of the Society of Friends, particularly in the second period of their history, believed that error would be overcome by the magic of the inner light. Historian Frederick Tolles writes that there was a strong “tendency of the Friends to delimit the area of supernatural action and thus to widen the realm in which natural causes operated.”9

White magic, no less than black magic, was equally condemned by them. A Friend who turned to a conjurer or fortune teller could be disowned by the meeting. Quakers were also intensely hostile to astrology. For a believing Friend, the brightest heavenly stars paled against the shining of the light within.10

But the Quakers were not entirely liberated from magic. One particular variety of supernatural belief came to be very widely shared among them. The idea of the Inner Light led them to that form of superstition which is commonly called spiritualism today. In the seventeenth century there were repeated instances of attempts by Quakers to communicate with the dead, and even to raise them from the grave. In Worcestershire, for example, one English Quaker dug up the body of another, and “commanded him in the name of the living God to arise and walk.” There were many similar events in which Quakers attempted to resurrect the dead.11

They also believed in the healing power of the holy spirit. Keith Thomas writes that “for the performance of spectacular miracles there was no sect to rival the Quakers. Over a hundred and fifty cures were attributed to George Fox alone, and many other Friends boasted similar healing powers. … The early days of Quakerism had been marked by healing miracles on a scale comparable to those of the early church; they helped to make the Friends numerically the most successful of the sects.”12 One historian observes that “there are traces too of the Hermetic tradition, a belief that man has fallen out with the creation but that in a state of perfection (of restoration) unity can once more be achieved and nature’s secrets revealed.”13

Quakers also believed in reincarnation. Their concern for the welfare of animals was sometimes connected to this belief. It was written of Isaac Hopper that:

One day when he saw a man beating his horse brutally he stepped up to him and said, very seriously, “Dost thou know that some people think men change into animals when they die?”

The stranger’s attention was arrested by such an unexpected question and he answered that he never was acquainted with anybody who had that belief. …

 

“But some people do believe it,” rejoined Friend Hopper; “and they also believe that animals may become men. Now I am thinking that if thou shouldst ever be a horse, and that horse should ever be a man, with such a temper as thine, the chance is thou wilt get some cruel beatings.”14

 

In consequence of these various beliefs, two very different and even hostile sets of attitudes toward magic coexisted in the Quaker colonies, sometimes within the same head. That ambivalence continued for many centuries—even to our own time.

Image Delaware Learning Ways:
Quaker Ideas of Learning and the Light Within

 

The faith of the Society of Friends, for all its heavy stress upon the spirit, was also solidly grounded in reason. “Since nothing below a man can think,” Penn wrote, “man in being thoughtless must needs fall below himself.”1 Quakers believed that reason was part of the inner light. This idea of the “light within” led them to think about learning in a special way. Their attitudes toward knowledge, books, reading and schooling were curiously mixed—a classical study in cultural ambivalence. Even that most literate of Friends, William Penn, warned the young members of his family that “much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.”

This idea of reason as a “natural candle” led Penn to advise his own children not to read too much:

Have but few books, but let them be well chosen and well read, whether of religious or civil subjects … reading many books is but taking off the mind too much from meditation. Reading yourselves and nature, in the dealings and conduct of men, is the truest human wisdom.2

That opinion must be taken in context. It was typical of William Penn to declare his dislike of “much reading” by writing a book against it. He clearly expressed a conflict within Quaker minds between the light within and the enlightenment of learning.

Another ambivalence about reading in this Protestant culture arose from the central place of one book in particular, which diminished the relative importance of all others in the minds of Friends. Thus, Thomas Chalkley in 1727 scolded his son-in-law, “I perceive thou art inclined to read pretty much: I pray thee, that thy chief study in books may be in the holy Scriptures. Let all other books (tho’ of use and good in their places) be subservient to them.”3

Yet a third sort of ambivalence also appeared in Quaker attitudes toward the act of reading itself. In 1744, an American Friend named Elizabeth Hudson rended herself for “having some taste of books, and indeed found I had too high a relish for them, they being very engrossing of our time.” Elizabeth Hudson found books to be curious, interesting, even enticing. But she regarded them as “needless” distractions from the serious business of life.4

All of this was very different from normative attitudes in both Massachusetts and Virginia. The Quakers never shared the obsessive interest in learning which was so strong in puritan New England. At the same time, they disagreed with the first gentlemen of Virginia, who favored higher learning but feared common literacy. The Quakers reversed these judgments. By and large they favored literacy and feared learning but were painfully ambivalent about both attainments.

Those Quaker attitudes were transplanted to the Delaware colonies, and entered deep into the cultural grain of middle America. Their operation may be observed in actual levels of literacy and schooling in the Delaware Valley. For the entire population, rates of literacy in the Quaker colonies ranked below Massachusetts, but above Virginia. In Chester County and also Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, roughly half of all adults were unable to sign their own names, a proportion intermediate between New England and the Chesapeake colonies. Similar patterns appeared among German pietists and English Quakers. Historian Alan Tully finds that rates of literacy among these two ethnic groups were “not radically different,” and very slow to change through the first century of settlement.5

The distribution of literacy in the Delaware Valley showed large differences by gender; surprisingly so, given the Quakers’ concern for the spiritual equality of the sexes. The proportion of women who were unable to write their own names was twice that of males in the Pennsylvania counties of Chester and York. In urban Philadelphia, the disparity between men and women was not so great, and rates of literacy were generally higher than in the rural counties. But inequalities of gender were striking even there.6

Large differences also appeared in literacy by social rank. At the top were Quakers such as James Logan, an enthusiastic bibliophile who collected one of the largest libraries in the British America. “Books are my disease,” he once confessed. Logan lovingly assembled a collection of 3,000 volumes which were left as a public trust called the Loganian Library in a special building near the State House. One scholar who has studied this collection writes that “no collection of books in colonial America … was better chosen for breadth and catholicity; none was nearly so rich in rare editions of the classics, or the great works of the scientific tradition.”7

In lower ranks, however, illiteracy was very common, and also highly persistent in the Delaware Valley. As late as 1837, long after literacy was universal in New England, a legislative committee in Pennsylvania found that among factory children throughout the state, “not more than one third can either read or write.”8

Here was a social paradox which rooted itself in the regional life of the Delaware Valley. The egalitarian ideas of the Inner Light and liberty of conscience weakened the formal institutions of literacy. That weakness in turn created cultural inequalities—for the rich had many resources and the poor had few. This paradox of egalitarian inequality became a central part of the culture of middle America.9

Another expression of this paradox were the rural school ways of the Delaware Valley, which were a product of Quaker ideas and English experiences in the American environment. In England’s North Midlands, as we have seen, many humble people who became Quakers regarded educational institutions as alien growths. Throughout that region, churches and schools were in the hands of a foreign elite. As a consequence, ordinary people tended to be strongly hostile to institutions of formal education. This attitude contributed to the Quakers’ suspicion of a learned clergy, and indeed of learning itself. It was reinforced by their religious beliefs. Historian Frederick Tolles observes that the Quakers made “all men bearers of the Inward word, a belief which diminished the importance of outward words.”10

These beliefs shaped the school ways of the Quaker colonies in an extraordinarily persistent way. Pennsylvania and West Jersey had nothing like New England’s school laws, or the comparatively high rates of enrollment that existed in Massachusetts. But at the same time, there was nothing comparable to the Virginia elite’s fear of education. Schooling was perceived in Pennsylvania as a matter of conscience which every sect, family and individual was expected to work out in its own way.

This is not to say that Quakers were hostile to schooling. Both William Penn and Thomas Budd wrote at length about education—a subject on which they had strong views. They did not like the prevailing practices in English schools. “We press their memory too soon,” Penn himself wrote, “and puzzle and strain and load them with words and rules to know grammar and rhetoric and a strange tongue or two that it is ten to one may never be useful to them; leaving their natural genius to mechanical, physical or natural knowledge uncultivated and neglected, which would be of exceeding use and pleasure to them through the whole course of their lives.”11

Pennsylvania’s “Frame of Government” empowered the governor and council to “erect and order all public schools” in the province. An act of 1683 required that all children must be taught to read and write by the age of twelve and trained in a useful trade or skill, no matter where rich or poor. Stiff fines were threatened for noncompliance, and a “Friends Public School” was opened to poor children without fee.12

Some Quakers wished to go much farther. Thomas Budd in 1698 proposed a system of Quaker schools in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and a requirement that all children attend every day (half session on Sunday) for seven years. Budd also proposed that both girls and boys should be educated (in separate classes), and that the schools should offer vocational training “in all the most useful arts and sciences. …” The boys were to be “instructed in some mystery or trade, as the making of mathematical instruments, joinery, turnery, the making of clocks and watches, weaving, shoemaking or any other useful trade.” The girls were to learn “spinning of flax and wool, and knitting of gloves and stockings, sewing, and making of all sorts of useful needlework, and the making of straw work, as hats, baskets, etc.” Budd believed deeply in educational equality. “To the end that the children of the poor people, and the children of Indians, may have good

Image

Hexagonal schoolhouses were commonly used in the Delaware colonies by both English Quakers and German Pietists. They were smaller than New England schoolhouses and different in their interior design. The children were seated in circles rather than rowsan arrangement that by its very nature was less hierarchical and more communal and an expression of different attitudes toward learning, authority and children in the Quaker colonies. Many of these hexagonal schools were constructed of wood, and have disappeared. This example was made of stone, and survived to the twentieth century near Newtown, in Chester County. The drawing follows an old photograph made before 1930 by Eleanor Raymond, and published in Early Domestic Architecture of Pennsylvania (1930, rpt. Exton, Pa., 1977).

learning with the children of the rich people,” he wrote, “let them be maintained free of charge to their parents.”13

This plan failed to find broad support in the Quaker colonies. On the subject of education, no public laws of any importance were passed in Pennsylvania from 1700 to 1776. John Woolman observed, “ … meditating on the situation of schools in our provinces, my mind hath at times been affected with sorrow.” But the remedy that he recommended—private charity in place of public support—was itself part of the problem.14

The result of these Quaker attitudes was a profusion of sectarian schools, supported by the private efforts of individual religious groups. Quaker education itself developed as a series of local schools, which were attached to individual meetings and neighborhoods. A great many of these schools were founded. One historian estimates that approximately 60 regular schools were run by Quaker meetings by 1776, and an equal number of neighborhood schools were also supported by Quakers.15 As other ethnic and religious groups were invited to settle in the Delaware Valley, they were encouraged to found their own church-related educational institutions. In the process, many sectarian school systems developed in Pennsylvania. They were less comprehensive than New England’s town schools, but more so than Virginia’s hierarchical system which created one track for the elite, another for ordinary English people, and a third for black slaves.16

Another consequence of these Quaker attitudes was a cultivated disinterest in higher education. Of all the major Christian denominations in early America, the Quakers were the slowest to found colleges. Every major Protestant denomination was more active in this field. Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, Dutch Reformed and Methodists all founded colleges before 1800. The Quakers had no requirement for a learned ministry, and little respect for higher learning.

This also became part of Pennsylvania’s folkways. Of all the northern colonies, Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Jersey were comparatively inactive in the field of higher education. Before the American War of Independence four colleges were founded in New England, and three in New York and East Jersey. But only one existed in the Delaware Valley—the present University of Pennsylvania, which had little support from Quakers. Higher learning was regarded with suspicion even by Quakers as erudite as William Penn. His aphorisms often returned to this subject:

[Universities are] signal places for idleness, looseness, prophaneness, prodigality and gross ignorance.

We are at pains to make them scholars but not men, to talk rather than to know, which is true canting.

We pursue false knowledge and mistake education extremely.

Children had rather be making of tools and instruments of play, shaping, drawing, framing, etc., than getting some rules of propriety of speech by heart.

If man be the index or epitome of the world, as philosophers tell us, we have only to read ourselves well to be learned in it.17

At the same time, Penn gave strong support to practical education:

Let their learning be liberal. Spare no cost, for by such parsimony all is lost that is saved, but let it be useful knowledge such as is consistent with truth and godliness, not cherishing a vain conversation or an idle mind; but ingenuity mixed with industry is good for the body and mind too. I recommend the useful parts of mathematics, as building houses, or ships, measuring, surveying, dialing, navigation; but agriculture especially is my eye. Let my children be husbandmen and housewives.18

These opinions could easily be misunderstood. They developed not from an absence of concern for education, but from the very opposite. Anne Whitall Cooper wrote in 1761, “as the right education of children and the nurture of youth is of good consequence to them and the succeeding generations, we pressingly exhort Parents and Heads of Families to preserve such useful learning for their children, as their abilities will admit, and to encourage them, as well by example as Precept.”19

That attitude gave more encouragement to families and meetings than to schools and the state. It also supported sectarian schools better than public schools, and lower schools more than higher education. It rested upon the belief that education like politics was a matter of conscience. These priorities had a central place in the pantheon of Quaker values, and entered deeply into the culture of an American region.

Image Delaware Food Ways:
Quaker Ideals and North Midland Traditions

 

This regional culture was both a mind-set and a material order. It strictly regulated most ordinary acts of everyday life—even waking and sleeping, cooking and eating.

Consider food for an example. Quaker food ways seemed at first sight to be exceptionally plain and simple. But historian William Weaver observes from long study of this subject that “in Quaker terms, there is nothing so complex as simplicity.” Here again, the plain style became almost baroque in its cultural elaboration.1

Quaker food ways began to take form in the first period of this religious movement. The founder George Fox himself categorically condemned all “feastings and revellings, banquetings and wakes.”2 Indulgence of the appetite was thought to be a “pampering the lower self.”3 A simple diet was recommended on the highest Christian authority. Margaret Fell wrote: “Christ Jesus saith that we must take no thought what we shall eat.”4 The plain style was further reinforced by Quaker principles of Christian charity. “Is this the Saints’ practice,” asked Nayler, “ … living in excess of apparel and diet … when your brethren want food and raiment?”5

In the second period of Quakerism, William Penn and others of his generation developed this doctrine of culinary asceticism in copious detail. “Luxury has many parts,” he warned, “and the first that is forbidden by the self-denying Jesus is the belly.”6 Penn’s advice to his children devoted an entire chapter to this theme, and revealed how very indulgent a Quaker’s thoughts could become on the subject of self-restraint. He wrote:

Eat therefore to live and do not live to eat. That’s like a man, but this below a beast.

Have wholesome but not costly food, and be rather cleanly than dainty in ordering it.

The recipes of cookery are swelled to a volume, but a good stomach excels them all, to which nothing contributes more than industry and temperance.

If thou rise with an appetite, thou are sure never to sit down without one.

The proverb says that “enough is as good as a feast,” but it is certainly better, if superfluity be a fault, which never fails to be at festivals.

The luxurious eater and drinker who is taken up with an excessive care of his palate and belly. … so full is he fed that he can scarce find out a stomach, which is to force hunger rather than to satisfy it.

Penn offered the same advice on the subject of drink.

Rarely drink but when thou art dry; nor then, between meals, if it can be avoided.

The smaller the drink, the clearer the head and the cooler the blood, which are great benefits in temper and business.

Strong liquors are good at some times and in small proportions, being better for physic than food, for cordials than common use.

All excess is ill, but drunkeness is of the worst sort: it spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men; it reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous, and mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a man, because he is so long void of reason, that distinguishes a man from a beast.7

These epigrams were conceived within an ontology of sensual restraint which lay very near the center of Quaker values:

It is a cruel folly to offer up to ostentation so many lives of creatures as make up the state of our treats, as it is a prodigal one to spend more in sauce than in meat.

The most common things are the most useful, which shows both the wisdom and goodness of the great Lord of the family of the world.

What therefore he has made rare, don’t thou use too commonly, lest thou shouldst invert the use and order of things, become wanton and voluptuous, and they blessing prove a curse.

“Let nothing be lost,” said the Saviour; but that is lost is misused.

Neither urge another to that thou wouldst be unwilling to do thyself, nor do thyself what looks to thee unseemly and intemperate in another.

The central theme in this philosophy was clear and consistent. Food and drink were not to be consumed for pleasure but only for subsistence. Common things were best, and moderation was to be cultivated in their consumption.8

Quaker meetings sternly enforced this idea of temperance in diet and drink. Lapses were punished severely, and offenders were required to stand before the meeting and to take shame upon themselves, as William Kay was made to do in Morley meeting:

Having a weight upon my spirit because of my miscarriages at thy house in being overtaken with wine. This testimony I now give out against myself that I did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord …. I take to myself the shame, and clear the people of God and their way.9

Excess was prohibited in everything except moderation itself, which was recommended without reserve by the moralists of Pennsylvania. Feasting, which had so large place in the folkways of Virginia, was condemned by Delaware Quakers. The result of these injunctions was a spirit of culinary austerity that persisted in the folkways of the Delaware Valley until the twentieth century. “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting” wrote Anne Cooper in 1762.10

Quakers also refused to touch foods that were tainted by social evil. Some did not use sugar because it had been grown by slave labor. Others banned salt from their tables, because it bore taxes which paid for military campaigns.11 Benjamin Lay, a Quaker eccentric who lived in a cave, refused to drink tea or wear animal skins or even to use wool. Joshua Evans refused to eat the flesh of any creature, and drank only broth and gravy. Few Quakers were as radical as Lay and Evans, but many practiced some small act of symbolic sacrifice. Anne Mifflin, for example, gave up butter because she believed that it was “corrupting” to the spirit.12

This Quaker austerity was severely tested by the cornucopia that opened before them in America. One wrote home in 1677 that there was “plenty of fish and fowl, and good venison very plentiful, and much better than ours in England, for it eats not so dry, but is full of gravy, like fat young beef.”13 Others reported “peaches in such plenty that some people took their carts a peach-gathering,” and “great store of wild fruits, as strawberries, cranberries, hurtleberries which are like our billberries in England but for sweetness; they are very wholesome fruits. The cranberries [are] much like cherries for color and bigness … an excellent sauce is made of them for venison, turkeys and other great fowl, and they are better to make tarts than either gooseberries or cherries.”14

The rivers of the Delaware Valley teemed with fish, especially “fine rock and perch, caught with hook and line.” Shad choked the streams in their spring spawning runs.15 The sky was darkened by flocks of fowl, that were captured easily in nets and carried to market by the cartload. In 1829, an early historian of Philadelphia informed his incredulous contemporaries that “his forefathers … saw a flock fly over the city so as to obscure the sun for two or three hours, and many were killed from the tops of the houses.”16 As late as 1763 a Jersey Quaker brought down thirty pigeons with a single round of bird-shot.17

But Quaker austerity was more than a match for American abundance. Edward Shippen wrote, “We eat so moderately … that the whole day seems like a long morning to us.”18

At an early date in the eighteenth century the cuisine of the Delaware Valley began to settle into a fixed pattern, in which the Quaker ideal of simplicity combined with a style of traditional cooking by humble folk in England’s North Midlands which has persisted in that region even to the twentieth century.

A quantitative survey of regional food ways in Britain finds that just as baking was specially characteristic of East Anglia, and frying of southern and western England, so boiling has been predominant in the north. The leading British expert on this subject writes, “ … today, the northerner still prefers to boil where the southerner roasts or grills—the cooking pot as always, resisting the advance of the oven.”19

These boiled breakfasts and dinners became an important part of Delaware food ways. John F. Watson remembered from his childhood in the Delaware Valley during the mid-eighteenth century that “in the country, morning and evening repasts were generally made of milk, having bread boiled therein, or else thickened with pop-robbins—things made up of flour and eggs into a batter, and so dropped in the boiling milk.”20

Other important parts of Quaker cuisine were boiled dumplings and puddings. So often did they appear on the table that Israel Acrelius called them “Quakers’ food.”21 Peter Kalm also observed that boiled apple dumplings were a daily dish in the Delaware Valley. Pot-puddings of many kinds were also prominent in this diet. The cookery books of this region made a specialty of puddings and dumplings.22

The Quaker colonists also introduced from England a special form of food-preservation which came to be characteristic of the

Delaware Valley. This was a method of dehydration by boiling, simmering or standing. The classical example was the foodstuff that became famous throughout America as Philadelphia cream cheese. In its traditional form, it was not truly a cheese in the usual sense, for it was made without rennet or curds. Cream or milk was warmed gently over a slow heat and allowed to stand between cloths for several weeks, until it had lost much of its moisture and become semi-solid. “True cream cheese,” writes William Weaver, was “nothing more than partially dehydrated sour cream.” He writes that “the technique for making cream cheese was brought to Pennsylvania on a large scale during the late 1600s by the English and Welsh settlers.”23

Fruits and vegetables were also preserved in a similar way. The Quakers were fond of “apple cheese” as they called it, which was much like apple butter. The pulp of the fruit was thickened and partly dried by slow cooking, and seasoned with sugar and spices. “Cheese” in the Delaware Valley as in the North Midlands became a generic term for “any sort of food thickened or partially dehydrated by slow cooking or pressing.” Special favorites were plum cheese, pear cheese, walnut cheese and lemon cheese.24

Lemon cheese, also called lemon butter, was in Weaver’s words “perhaps the one dish that Quakers in the Middle-Atlantic States identify as a symbol of their cookery.” It was a heavy custard which appeared on Delaware tables not as a desert but as part of the main course. A variant called orange cheese or orange butter was (and is) a Christmas dish in Quaker households.

Dehydration was also used by the Quakers to preserve their meats. A favorite staple was dried beef, which when properly prepared would keep for several years.25 Weaver writes that “Quaker dried beef could be purchased in country stores almost everywhere in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and … became … firmly labeled as a Quaker food in the Middle Atlantic region.” Dried beef was often served as a “sauce” on puddings and dumplings; in the eighteenth century it was called “Quaker gravy.”26

Quaker cooking was not, of course, the only food way in the Delaware Valley. Earlier occupants kept their own customs, and German immigrants introduced another culinary tradition in the eighteenth century. There was much borrowing back and forth among these various ethnic groups. Quaker cooks quickly adopted compatible German dishes such as scrapple—a boiled pot pudding of meat and buckwheat which became a part of the regional cuisine. But the Quakers themselves and their English customs set the tone for a distinct style of Delaware food ways, which persisted in this region for many generations.27

Image Delaware Dress Ways:
The Quaker Idea of “Going Plain in the World”

 

“The Calico! O the Calico!” wrote Anne Cooper in 1762. “I think tobacco and tea and calico may all be set down with the [keeping of] negroes, all one as bad as another.”1

To strangers, the cultural values of the Quakers were most visible in these distinctive attitudes toward dress, which became a vital part of Quaker identity and an important expression of their faith. The idea of “going plain in the world” made its appearance during the first period of Quakerism, as part of George Fox’s gospel. His followers took up this teaching with high enthusiasm. In many a North Midland town the visit of a Quaker evangelist was followed by an event called the “burning of the braveries,” in which the people made a bonfire of their ribbons and silks.2

During the second period of Quakerism, the Society of Friends developed George Fox’s taste for simple clothing into dress codes of fantastic complexity. Quakers believed that clothing in all its forms was an emblem of Adam’s fall—a “badge of lost innocence.”

William Penn argued that “guilt brought shame, and shame an apron and a coat”:

[As] sin brought the first coat, poor Adam’s offspring have little reason to be proud or curious of their clothes, for it seems their original was base, and the finery of them will neither make them noble nor man innocent again … our first parents … were then naked and knew no shame, but sin made them ashamed to be no longer naked.

Since therefore guilt brought shame, and shame an apron and a coat, how low are they fallen that glory in their shame, and that are proud of their fall. For so they are that use care and cost to trim and set off the very badge and livery of that lamentable lapse. … if a thief were to wear chains all his life, would their being gold and well made abate his infamy? To be sure, his being choice of them would increase it.3

 

This idea was reinforced by another principle. Quakers believed that clothing should be only what was “needful” “to cover their shame” and “fence out the cold.” Every ornament not “needful” was systematically searched out and condemned. Quakers generally agreed that excess of dress was “unscriptural.” Penn asked:

How many pieces of ribbon, feathers, lace bands and the like had Adam and Eve in paradise or out of it? What rich embroideries, silks, points, etc., had Abel, Enoch, Noah and good old Abraham? Did Eve, Sarah, Susanna, Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary use to curl, powder, patch, paint, wear false locks of strange colors, rich points, trimmings, laced gowns, embroidered petticoats, shoes and slip-slaps laced with silk or silver lace and ruffled like pigeons’ feet?4

To all of these reasons for “going plain,” Quakers added yet another argument that a primary purpose of fashion was to arouse the sexual passions which they feared and despised. “It’s notorious,” Penn wrote, “how many fashions have been and are invented on purpose to excite to lust, which … enslaves their minds to shameful concupiescence.”5

As if these objections were not enough, Quakers added the argument that costly costumes created envy in the world and divided one Friend from another. They also believed (in company with most others of their age) that the stock of wealth was fixed, and that one person’s extravagance caused the impoverishment of another. “If thou art clean and warm, it is sufficient,” wrote William Penn, “for more doth rob the poor.”6

Further, Quakers argued that attention to superficial things diminished a deeper concern for the life within. Isaac Norris of Philadelphia in 1719 instructed his son in London: “Come back plain. This will be a reputation to thee and recommend thee to the best and most sensible people—I always suspect the furniture of the inside where too much application is shewn for a gay or fantasticall outside.”7

Moreover, it was important to Quakers that they should simply be different from others in the world. In 1726, the female Friends of the Philadelphia yearly meeting drafted an open letter to all women of their persuasion, condemning “vain conversations, customs and fashions in the world. “Dear Sisters,” they wrote, “These things we solidly recommend to your care and notice, … that we might be unto the Lord, a Chosen Generation, a Royal priesthood, an Holy Nation, a Peculiar People.”8

When Quakers translated their ideal of “going plain” into actuality, they adopted a special form of simple dress which derived from the folk costume of England’s North Midlands. George Fox himself wore the costume of a North Country shoemaker, including heavy leather breeches and a doublet of distinctive cut which became a symbol of both the man and his movement. Fox was called “the man in the leather breeches,” and was thought to wear them all the time, “except a little one hot summer.”9

George Fox’s costume was widely imitated by other male Quakers for many years. Ancient leather breeches were handed down from father to son. A Yorkshire Friend in the nineteenth century recalled, “ … when I was a lad there was a vast [many] still sitting in their fathers’ leather breeches and more than one I kenned had breeks their grandfathers had had for their best and there was a vast of good wear in ‘em yet.”10

Other humble people in the North Midlands wore simple trousers of a broad cut, with a wide leather apron in front. This costume was brought to the Delaware Valley and was worn by farmers for many years. A European visitor found Quaker farmer John Bartram dressed in “wide trousers and a large leather apron.”11

The conventional costume of male Quakers also derived in other ways from the dress of farmers and artisans in the north of England. The common fabric in the north was a plain homespun called “Hodden gray.”12 One variety, called penistone, was a course woolen fabric named after a village in Yorkshire. In the Delaware Valley, penistone was one of the first textiles to be manufactured on a large scale. Its soft gray color set the tone for Quaker clothing through generations.13 So normal did this costume seem that when Mary Penington had a vision of Jesus, the Saviour appeared before her as “a fresh lovely youth, clad in grey cloth, very plain and neat.”14

Quaker meetings in England and America enforced the rule of simplicity in dress with regulations of high complexity. The Pennsylvania Council entertained a proposal for restricting all men to only two sorts of dress through the year.15 Male Friends were forbidden to wear “cross pockets” on their coats and “needless” pockets of any sort. They were warned against broad hems, deep cuffs, false shoulders, superfluous buttons, fashionable creases, wide skirts and cocked hats.16 The refusal of Quakers to use tricks of tailoring created a garment of curious profile called the “shad-belly coat” in the Delaware Valley. The question of male headgear was much debated among Quakers. Men were encouraged to wear plain broad brimmed beaver hats, undyed and uncocked. So many adopted this fashion that American Quakers in the early eithteenth century were called “broadbrims” or “men with broad hats and no pockets.”17

Many meetings also wrestled with the difficult question of wigs. Hairless Friends were permitted to wear modest periwigs, but only after they had consulted with elders and solemnly affirmed that “necessity and not voluptuousness has brought them to the use of them.” Even these “needful” wigs were expected to be “such as in color and shape resemble their former hair as need be,” and were not to be excessively long, full, bushy, proud or powdered. Quakers who kept their own hair were generally discouraged from wearing any wigs at all.18

For women, even more elaborate dress codes were recommended. The women’s meetings discussed at length every imaginable aspect of feminine costume. Fashionable hair styles and fancy hats were condemned. Women of all ages were encouraged to wear plain hoods, which in the eighteenth century were replaced by bonnets of extreme severity. Handkerchiefs were worn modestly over the top of the bodice. Quaker women were expected to wear aprons when they appeared in public—“either of green or blue or other grave cloth colours and not white … nor any silk aprons.19 Dresses were to be of simple cut and plain colors. Special warnings were issued against “the wearing of stript or branched stuff or silk, or long scarves, or any other things which may lead us into the fashions of the World.”20

In the eighteenth century, Quakers discouraged the use of dyes, particularly indigo, because it was produced by slave labor. Bright dyes were condemned as excessively proud, and dark dyes were forbidden because they were thought to hide dirt. The New Jersey Quaker John Woolman conducted a lifelong campaign against the use of dye-stuffs on this ground:

I have been where much cloth hath been dyed [he wrote in his journal], and have, at sundry times, walked over the ground where much of their dye-stuffs has drained away. This hath produced a longing in my mind that people might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of person, and cleanness about their houses and garments. …

Real cleanliness becometh a holy people; but hiding that which is not clean by coloring our garments seems contrary to the sweetness of sincerity. Through some sorts of dyes, cloth is rendered less useful. And if the value of dye-stuffs, and expense of dyeing, and the damage done to cloth were all added together, and that cost applied to keeping all sweet and clean, how much more would real cleanliness prevail.21

 

Image

This Quaker wedding dress was made in the mid-eighteenth century and still survives in Philadelphia. It had no buttons, belt, sash, decorations or adornments of any kind; but it was designed with grace and refinement and cut from fine silk. The dress was worn with a handkerchief folded modestly over the bodice in accordance with the recommendation of the many women’s meetings. The source is John A. Gallery, ed., Philadelphia Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 17.

Neatness and cleanliness were also encouraged in other ways. Amelia Gummere remembered that Friends were “as notable for the neatness as for the old-fashioned cut of their garments. Their linen was always fine and clean.”22

Quakers were also forbidden to have commerce in clothing that was denied to them. This was the case in both England and America. The Cheshire quarterly meeting as early as 1699 agreed to very strict rules in that respect:

A question having been proposed to this meeting whether any friend may make, sell or buy anything which it is not consistent with truth or that friends cannot wear, which matter came to this result—that the making, buying or selling striped, figure, printed silks, stuffs or cloths or anything else that friends cannot wear is altogether inconsistent with truth and for future to be avoided. Liberty being only given that such as have any such by them do dispose thereof and for the future buy no more.23

Quaker hostility to changing fashion caused them to cling to the clothing styles of the past. Amelia Gummere wrote that “it may be set down as a safe rule, in seeking for a Quaker style or custom at any given time, to take the worldly fashion or habit of the period preceding.”24

Always, some rebelled against these rules. A few restless souls called “gay Quakers” wore whatever pleased them. But most Friends, even the most affluent, attempted to preserve something of “going plain.” One who allowed himself the luxury of silver buttons insisted they should not be “wrought” (engraved). In 1724 a German printer noted that affluent Quakers in Pennsylvania wore plain clothing “except that the material is very costly, or even is velvet.”25 “Plain” did not mean cheap. Many Quakers, including William Penn himself, combined exceptionally refined taste with the plain style, and were willing to spend large sums for clothing of good quality.26

Quaker dress ways were invented in the North Midlands of England. But they survived longer in the New World than the Old, and became more uniform in the Delaware Valley than they had been in any part of Britain. As early as 1770, an English

Quaker was startled by the sight of his first American meeting—“such as I had not seen before—so consistent in appearance of dress and uniformity,” he wrote. He noted that conformity in dress was much stronger among Quakers in America than in England.27 When Brissot de Warville visited Philadelphia yearly meeting in 1788, he also observed that 90 percent of the Quakers were dressed in plain homsepun.28 As late as 1985, long after Quaker costume was generally abandoned in England, one historian observed that “stylized plain dress only lingers now within certain groups of Friends in the United States of America.”29

The Quakers were not the only people who adopted the plain style in the Delaware Valley. Many German pietists had similar dress ways. Mennonite men of various sects were required to wear simple clothing, dark colors, plain suits, and broad-brimmed hats. Women were expected to wear modest dresses with an apron, a triangular Bruschttuch (breast cloth) folded over the bodice and a little kapp on the back of the head. The fabric and pleats of the kapp were unique to each little sect and local community. Many Pennsylvania Germans adopted plain clothing of some sort or other, similar in tone and feeling to the costume of English Quakers.

During the eighteenth century, the plain dress of the Quakers was much admired by others. In the year 1784, for example, a Latin adventurer named Francisco de Miranda was traveling through the United States. One Sunday he amused himself by attending a Quaker meeting, and was captivated by the women he saw there. In his journal he wrote:

At three o’clock went to the temple of the Quakers, in whose company I remained for two hours, without anybody speaking a single word. I entertained myself all this time by examining slowly the dress and the countenances of the female concourse and I can assure you with all ingenuousness that neither more simplicity, cleanliness and taste in the first nor more natural and simple beauty in the second can be imagined. I am firmly persuaded that the coloring of Rubens and the carnations of Titian can never imitate what nature offers here in the hue and complexion of these simple Quaker women, who have not a grain of powder or drop of oil on their persons.30

Many Pennsylvanians who were not themselves Quakers or German Pietists tended to imitate these dress ways. Benjamin Franklin, an immigrant from Puritan Massachusetts, adopted the Quakers’ idea of “going plain,” and conformed to so many articles of their dress that he was often mistaken for a Quaker himself. So also did the Presbyterian Benjamin Rush, the Freethinker Thomas Paine, and others of various denominations. In more moderate forms, the ideal of simple dress spread westward from the Delaware Valley into the American midlands, and for many generations became part of the culture of an American region.

Image Delaware Sport Ways:
The Quaker Idea of Useful Recreation

 

Libertarian as the Quakers may have been on many questions, they were exceptionally intolerant on the subject of sport. The statutes of Pennsylvania forbade many forms of sport outright, under threat of severe criminal punishment. Its laws agreed upon in England banned “all prizes, stage plays, cards, dice, may games, masques, revels, bull-baitings, cock-fightings, bear-baitings and the like.”1

Most colonies in British America enacted laws on the subject of sport, but none were quite as strict as those of Pennsylvania. The legendary blue laws of New England paled by comparison with those of the Quaker province, which gave their courts unlimited power to punish any sort of amusement “which excites the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness and irreligion.”2

Quaker meetings also acted to restrain their members from idle pursuits of every kind. The Yorkshire quarterly meeting warned its members “to shun all publick diversion (of the bowling green, long room or any other places for plays, gaming or dancing) or any vain sights and shows whatsoever not agreeable to the gravity of our profession.”3 Morley meeting added an anathema against the “running of races” as “unfruitful works of darkness.”4

Quakers also deeply disliked the ball games that flourished in New England. Anne Cooper Whitall was much provoked when the men in her family amused themselves with a ball. “O how I have been grieved this day because of their playing at ball,” she wrote in her diary,”[I] do believe that they [don’t know what] ‘tis to be a Quaker.”5

Much as they detested these “needless” games, the Quakers reserved their deepest disapproval for blood sports. They insisted that no person had the “right to make a pleasure of that which occasions pain and death to animal-creation.”6 Killing for the pot was permitted; killing for pleasure was absolutely condemned. The York quarterly meeting delivered a testimony against unnecessary hunting as “not only vain but cruel … inconsistent with the feelings of humanity and the duties of Christians.” It warned darkly that Friends who continued to hunt would be “dealt with.”7

Quakers also opposed horse racing, mainly on the grounds that this sport was cruel to the animals by “over-forcing creatures … beyond their strength.”8 They condemned even exhibitions of captive animals as hurtful to their feelings. When a traveling showman exhibited a baboon in a barrel to the people of Pennsylvania, Quaker diarist Elizabeth Drinker took a peep and wrote, “ … it looked so sorrowful, I pity’d the poor thing, and wished it in its own country.”9

During the eighteenth century, underground blood sports began to appear in Philadelphia. Butchers in the Northern Liberties even introduced bullbaiting. But that brutal sport was stopped by a courageous mayor of Quaker upbringing, “Squire” Wharton, at some considerable risk to his own skin:

He went out to the intended sport seemingly as an intended observer … when all was prepared for the onset of the dogs he stepped suddenly into the ring, and calling aloud, said he would, at the peril of his life, seize and commit the first man who should begin; at the same time calling on names present to support him at their peril, he advanced to the bull and unloosed him from the stake. He then declared that he would never desist from bringing future abettors of such exercises to condign punishments. They have never been got up since.10

For all their hostility to blood sports and needless games, the Quakers were not totally opposed to physical diversion. Though they generally condemned the idea of “sport,” they encouraged other forms of “recreation” which they regarded as “useful” and “needful.”

Quakers gave much encouragement to recreation as a form of physical exercise. William Penn urged that “children can’t well be too hardy bred: for besides that it fits them to bear the roughest Providences, it is more masculine, active and healthy.”11 Quaker schools required physical exercise as part of the curriculum. George Fox at his death left the Philadelphia meeting sixteen acres, partly to be used “for a playground for the children of the town to play on.”12

For similar purposes, Quakers also encouraged “needful” and “useful recreation” among adults. They were among the first people in America to take up swimming and bathing. They also cultivated ice-skating in the winter, a recreation which became immensely popular on the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. “During the old fashioned winters,” Watson wrote, “ … the river surface was filled with skaters of all colours and sizes mingled together and darting about here and there.”13

Quakers also allowed hunting and fishing for subsistence, and made a point of extending opportunities to the entire population. The “laws made in England” guaranteed to all inhabitants “liberty to fowl and hunt upon the lands they hold, and all other lands therein not enclosed; and to fish in all waters in the said lands … with liberty to draw his fish on shore on any man’s lands.”14

Perhaps the most characteristic form of recreation among the Quakers was gardening, a “gentle recreation” which attracted many members of this culture. They argued amongst themselves in their accustomed way about the comparative morality of raising vegetables, fruits and flowers, but many devoted themselves to horticulture with an extraordinary passion. Historian Keith Thomas writes that “the early Quakers were often buried in their gardens” and that the Society of Friends produced “a quite disproportionate number of botanists, plant-collectors and nurserymen.”

Quakers such as Peter Collinson and John Bartram became leading horticulturalists in both England and America.15 But even with their interest in “needful” and “useful” diversions, Quakers never imagined that avocations were the important things in life. William Penn, as always, summarized their attitudes in an epigram. “The best recreation,” he wrote, “is to do good.”16 These people also found their higher forms of “re-creation” in activities which other cultures called work.

Image Delaware Work Ways:
Quaker Ideas of Cumber and Calling

 

If Quakers made play into work, they also made work into a form of worship. Their attitudes toward work in general, and also their accustomed work ways were as distinctive as their ideas on most other subjects. Here again, their customs were introduced to the Delaware Valley within the first generation of settlement. In conjunction with similar folkways among German pietists, these practices became the basis of a regional economy which differed from New England and the Chesapeake.

One important component of this regional culture was an attitude which strongly encouraged industry and condemned idleness. William Penn, visiting an Irish prison in 1669, found that the Quakers confined there were toiling away in their cells at work of their own devising—and the rhythm of their work was interrupted only for worship. “The jail,” he wrote, “by that means became a meeting-house and a work-house, for they would not be idle anywhere.”1

This ethic of industry was reinforced by the idea of serving God with one’s best talents. John Woolman wrote, “ … our duty and interest are inseparably united, and when we neglect or misuse our talents, we necessarily depart from the heavenly fellowship.” This idea had developed from Martin Luther’s concept of the calling (beruf), which had an important place in the cultural thinking of many Protestant denominations. It was exceptionally strong among the Quakers.2

Yet another important idea was “discipline,” a word which often appeared in Quaker writings. The diaries of Friends in England and America tended to take the form of spiritual exercises in which Quakers attempted to acquire absolute dominion over their acts. An example was a young English lad named John Kelsall, who at the age of fourteen had “a great conflict concerning sleeping and a drowzy spirit in meetings. I was sometimes sorely beset with it, and much adoe I had to get over it. … Sometimes I would take pins and prick myself, often rise up and sometimes go out of doors, yea I would set myself with all the strength I could get against it.”3

Also important was an attitude which encouraged extreme austerity. The Quakers, more than any major Protestant denomination, fostered a style of life which Max Weber called worldly asceticism—the idea of living in the world but not of it. Work itself became a sacrament, and idleness a deadly sin. Wealth was not to be consumed in opulent display, but rather to be saved, invested, turned to constructive purposes. Restraints were placed upon indulgence. The most extended form of this belief was to be found not among the Puritans with whom it is often associated, but among the Quakers.

But the Weber thesis is much too simple to capture the complexity of Quaker thinking about work. An important theme in Quaker journals, even of highly successful merchants and manufacturers, was that business should not be overvalued. This had been the warning of George Fox:

There is the danger and temptation to you of drawing your minds into your business, and clogging them with it, so that ye can hardly do anything to the service of God, but there will be crying, my business, my business! And your minds will go into the things and not over the things.4

Quaker diarists were constantly reminding themselves to “live more free from outward cumbers,” as John Woolman phrased it. The idea of “cumber” was an interesting one, which often recurred in Quaker thinking. Thomas Chalkley tried to strike the balance in a sentence. “We have liberty for God, and his dear Son, lawfully, and for accommodation’s sake, to work or seek for food or raiment; tho’ that ought to be a work of indifferency, compared to the first work of salvation.”5

These attitudes may on balance have provided a more solid ethical foundation for capitalist enterprise than the more monistic attitudes that Max Weber attributed to the Quakers.6

Further, Quakers also insisted that business ethics must be maintained at the highest level of honesty. Monthly meetings appointed committees to monitor the business ethics of members. In 1711, for example, the York quarterly meeting agreed:

It is desired by this meeting that each monthly meeting take care that two honest friends be appointed in every particular meeting to inspect friends’ faithfulness to truth in the several testimonies thereof, and especially touching friends dealings in commerce and trading, in order to prevent any from contracting and running into more or greater debts than they can make payment of in due time, or launch out into matters in the world beyond their abilities, nor be overmuch going with their desire for earthly things.7

Members of Quaker meetings on both sides of the Atlantic were disciplined for “dishonest dealing.” In Break meeting, a Friend named Luke Hanks was disowned for “breaking his word time after time in his trade.” Many of these proceedings dealt with members who failed for one reason or another to pay their debts. The Quakers had a horror of debt, which they felt to be a palpable evil in the world. Falling into debt beyond one’s ability was regarded as a moral failing of the first degree.8

At the same time, Quakers also condemned the spirit of avarice in creditors. William Penn gave much attention to this in his advice to his children—who stood specially in need of it. “Cov-etousness is the greatest of monsters,” wrote Penn. “A man … [who] lived up to his chin in [money] bags … is felo de se and deserves not a Christian burial.” It is interesting that Penn also condemned the miser as “a common nuisance, a weir across the stream that stops the current, an obstruction to be removed by a purge of the law.”9

In all of these ways, the ethics of the Quakers condemned unrestrained capitalist enterprise, and put narrow limits upon its operation. Nevertheless, Quaker beliefs provided a strong support for industrial and commercial activity. So also in more tangible ways did the structure of the Society of Friends. Quakers tended to help one another. They loaned money at lower rates of interest to believers than to nonbelievers, and sometimes charged no interest at all “to those who have no capital of themselves and may be inclined to begin something.”10 It is interesting that Quakers also developed systems of insurance against commercial risks, and played a major role in the development of the insurance industry. The oldest business corporation still existing in America was the Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire—founded in 1752, and incorporated in 1768.11

International ties throughout the Atlantic world also gave Quaker merchants many advantages in the eighteenth century. “By virtue of their commercial, religious, personal and family contacts,” historian Frederick Tolles writes, “the Philadelphia Quakers were in close touch with the entire north Atlantic world from Nova Scotia to Curacao and from Hamburg to Lisbon.”12

In all of these ways, the Quakers provided an ethical and cultural environment which strongly supported industrial and capitalist development. Frederick Tolles writes from long acquaintance with the records of Quaker capitalists, “One is probably justified suggesting that in the conduct of business, the Quaker merchants were extremely cautious and prudent, meticulously accurate in details, and insistent upon others being so. It is not difficult to understand how men who exhibited these traits in their commercial dealings (no matter how generous and sympathetic as individuals and friends) should have acquired a reputation for driving a hard bargain.”13

In England Quakers played a role far beyond their numbers in the industrial revolution. The great banking houses of England were those of Quakers. The largest private bank in Britain was developed by descendants of the great Quaker writer Robert Barclay. Lloyd’s Bank was also owned by Quakers, together with

Image

Attitudes toward time, work, and land among English Quakers and German Pietists appeared in the buildings that still stand on many Pennsylvania farms. Settlers in other cultural regions threw together temporary wooden buildings with the utmost economy of time and materials. On Pennsylvania farms, even the smallest outbuildings were built for the ages, with heavy stone walls and strong slate roofs. These structures combined simplicity of design with a concern for permanence that was very rare in other cultures of Anglo-America. Quakers and Pietists took a long view of their temporal condition. They husbanded their land, which today after three centuries of cultivation is still the most fertile acreage in the eastern United States. Their solid stone houses, barns and even small outbuildings still stand as monuments to a world view that was an important part of their folkways.

many financial houses in the City of London. Industrial enterprise in the north of England was also often organized and run by Quakers.14

The same thing happened in the New World. Quakers founded the first bank in British America, and made Philadelphia the most important capital market in the New World until the emergence of New York in the early nineteenth century. From the beginning, the Delaware Valley also became a hive of industry—more so than New England. Even before the founding of Pennsylvania, the Quakers who settled in New Jersey created an extraordinarily complex industrial economy within a few years of their arrival. One observer reported in 1681, “ … they have also coopers, smiths, bricklayers, wheelwrights, plowrights and millwrights, ship carpenters and other trades, which work upon what the country produces for manufactories. … There are iron-houses, and a Furnace and Forging Mill already set up in East-Jersey, where they make iron.”15 Another wrote in 1698 that in the Quaker communities of Burlington and Salem, “cloth workers were making very good serges, druggets, crapes, camblets, plushes and other woolen cloths. Entire families [are] engaged in such manufactures, using wool and linen of their own raising.”16 Both the North Midlands of England and the middle colonies of Pennsylvania and New Jersey became the industrial heartlands of their nations.

Image Delaware Time Ways:
The Quaker Idea of “Redeeming the Time”

 

Closely related to these attitudes toward work were Quaker ways of thinking about time. In place of the Puritan idea of “improving the time,” and the Anglican notion of “killing the time,” the Quakers thought in terms of “redeeming the time.” This concept of temporal redemption had a complex meaning. Fundamentally, Quakers tried to purge time of sin and corruption. They also sought to raise time above the world.1

The Quaker idea of “redeeming the time” began with a reform in the way that time was reckoned. One of the distinguishing features of the Society of Friends was the special way in which it recorded the passing of the months and days. Quakers abolished the ancient calendar of the Christian West, and adopted a new system which was carefully purged of every vestige of what they regarded as pagan corruption. The traditional names of months and days were abolished as “needless” and “unscriptual.” In Quaker calendars (after the Gregorian reform was adopted), January became merely “First Month,” and December was simply “Twelfth Month.”2 The week began not with an Anglican Sunday or a Puritan Sabbath but a Quaker “First Day,” and it ended on “Seventh Day.” In Quaker diaries and letters, events were dated with the utmost simplicity by this method. “Eleventh of eleventh month, 1758, this day I set out,” wrote John Woolman, in a typical passage.3

During the seventeenth century, these customs had been kept by many sects of Christians, including English Puritans, who disliked the pagan origin of the calendar and found a warrant for their numbering system in the Book of Genesis.4 But this custom of numbering rather than naming the months and days took root specially among the Quakers. For many years after the founding, court records and other public documents in Pennsylvania and West Jersey continued to be dated in this manner.5

In company with other groups of radical Christians, including the Puritans in New England, Quakers also abolished many religious holidays. They did so partly because these celebrations seemed corrupt and “needless” to them, and also for a deeper reason. “All days are alike holy in the sight of God,” Robert Barclay declared. William Penn agreed, “ … we utterly renounce all special and moral Holiness of Times and Days.”6

Quakers also condemned traditional English folk festivals such as May Day, which they regarded as a corrupt and pagan event, inconsistent with “Truth.” Even Christmas was excised from the Quaker calendar, as it had been by the Puritans. The Leeds meeting, for example, urged its members in 1702 not to keep Christmas as a family holiday:

Friends of this meeting having under their serious consideration of days and times set up in the times of darkness and ignorance, which since we were a people we have born testimony against; but whereas some amongst us have not been so cleare in their testimony against the observation thereof as they ought: Therefore in the love of god and zeal for the Truth we advise all friends of our meeting that they be zealous in their testimony against the holding up of such days. And that they keep their servants at work, as also they do not go themselves nor suffer their servants to visit their relations at such times.7

The redemption of time had yet another meaning. Like the Puritans, Quakers were deeply interested in making the best use of time, which they regarded as a precious and perishable gift. They marveled at the ways in which other people squandered time. William Penn’s writings included many disquisitions on the value of time. On one occasion, he wrote:

There is nothing of which we are apt to be so lavish as of time, and about which we ought to be more solicitous, since without it we can do nothing in this world. Time is what we want most, but what, alas, we use worst, and for which God will certainly most strictly reckon with us when time shall be no more.8

On another occasion he argued:

What would such be at? What would they do? And what would they have? They that have trades have not time enough to do the half of what hath been recommended. And as for those who have nothing to do, and indeed do nothing (which is worse) but sin (which is worst of all), here is variety of pleasant, of profitable, nay, of very honorable employments and diversions for them. Such can with great delight sit at a play, a ball, a masque, at cards, dice, etc., drinking, reveling, feasting, and the like, an entire day; yes, turn night into day and invert the very order of the creation to humor their lusts. And were it not for eating and sleeping, it would be past a doubt whether they would ever find time to cease from those vain and sinful pastimes till the hasty calls of death should summon their appearance in another world. Yet do they think it intolerable and not possible for any to sit so long at a profitable or heavenly exercise?9

Like the Puritans, the Quakers tended to seek precision in their reckoning of clock time. In the inventory of Edward Astell, a Cheshire Quaker who died in 1680, the most valuable item of personal property was a “brass clock” worth two pounds ten shillings—twice the total value of his plate.10 From as early as 1670, Quakers in the Pennines were making wooden clocks for households unable to afford any other instrument.11

More than their neighbors, the Quakers were morning people. They carefully organized their daily routines and kept schedules which contrasted sharply with the time ways of Virginia gentlemen. Edward Shippen in 1754 described the temporal routine of his household as follows:

My son Jo [Joseph Shippen] and myself rise every morning at about Sun rising, having prepared over night some dry hickory for a good fire—we then sit close to our business til close to 9 o’clock and we find that we can do more by that time than in all the rest of the day. …

We eat so moderately, without tasting a drop of liquor, that the whole day seems like a long morning to us. …

 

That we may be sufficiently refreshed with sleep, we have agreed upon ten o’clock at night for going to bed and so after eating a light supper and drinking a little wine we lay ourselves down with light stomachs, cool heads and quiet consciences.12

 

This Quaker idea of a routine which made “the whole day seem like a long morning” would have filled many an English gentleman with horror.

In some of these temporal attitudes, Quakers and Puritans were very much alike. But there were also important differences between the two Protestant denominations. Quakers were at special pains to avoid what they called the idolatry of time. It was not a Quaker who said that “Time is Money,” but the Boston-born son of New England Puritans. To become totally absorbed in the affairs of the world was for a Quaker to lose sight of the main thing. They often reminded themselves of “the uncertainty of temporal things.”13

They did not believe that one should devote every possible minute to one’s calling. A Quaker naturalist named John Rutty often upbraided himself in his diary for devoting too much time to his work. One day he wrote: “Instituted an hour’s retirement every evening, as a check to the inordinate study of nature.”14

Quaker aphorisms also generally condemned haste. William Penn’s proverbs had a distinctly different tone from those of Poor Richard:

Have a care therefore where there is more sail than ballast.

It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things. … Let us begin where she begins, go her pace, and close always where she ends.

Be not rash, but firm and resigned.

Busyness is not our Business.

Choose God’s Trades before men’s.

So soon as you wake, retire your mind into a pure silence, from all thoughts and ideas of worldly things.15

Time, for Quaker moralists, was too important to be squandered on haste. The American Quaker John Woolman, on a visit to England, was shocked by the obsession with speed which he observed in that society:

Stagecoaches frequently go upwards of one hundred miles in twenty-four hours; and I have heard Friends say in several places that it is common for horses to be killed with hard driving. … Some boys who ride long stages suffer greatly in winter nights, and at several places I have heard of their being frozen to death. So great is the hurry in the spirit of this world, that in aiming to do business quickly and to gain wealth the creation at this day doth loudly groan.16

Quakers took a longer view of their temporal condition. They were deeply conscious of their place in the continuum of generations, and described themselves as “trustees” of the world.

Do we feel an affectionate regard to posterity? And are we employed to promote their happiness? Do our minds, in things outward, look beyond our own dissolution? And are we contriving for the prosperity of our children after us? Let us then, like wise builders, lay the foundation deep …,17

The time ways of the Quakers were closely linked to their faith, and to the forms of a culture which they planted in the New World. The rhythms of life among Friends in the Delaware Valley differed from those of Massachusetts Puritans and Virginia Anglicans, but were similar to the time ways of England’s North Midlands.

A leading example was the season of marriage. In the seventeenth century, every Western culture had its “marrying time,” which was deeply embedded in its temporal folkways. In New England, as we have seen, the season of marriage showed a single peak in the late fall and winter—much as in East Anglia and the south of England. But the Quakers came in large numbers from the North Midlands, where the pattern of marriage had long been different, with two peak periods in the spring as well as the fall.18 This Midland pattern was transplanted to the Delaware Valley, where the marriage cycle also became bimodal, with two high seasons from March to May and September to November.19

Other differences in Delaware time ways appeared in the conception cycle. In the households of New Jersey Quakers, fertility varied less through the year than among Virginia Anglicans or New England Puritans. Magnitudes of monthly variance in conceptions (and probably in coitus) were much lower than in other cultures, with only a vestigial trace of the spring peak and summer nadir which appeared throughout Christian Europe. In the jargon of social science, Quakers “deseasonalized” fertility before other people. This pattern was connected to Quaker attitudes toward sex within marriage: particularly to sexual asceticism and to their exceptionally early adoption of fertility control. Here again, the Quakers differed from their neighbors to the north and south.

Image Delaware Wealth Ways:
Quaker Ideas of the Material Order

 

The wealth ways of the Quakers revealed a deep irony in their system of social values. On the one hand, these good people had an abiding belief in spiritual equality. On the other, their ideals and institutions slowly created a system of material inequality which was increasingly at war with their own intentions.

Throughout the Quaker colonies, land was distributed in a manner very different from that of Massachusetts and Virginia. In Pennsylvania and Delaware, William Penn’s land policy was meant to serve two purposes. The first was to provide a source of capital for the founding of his colony—even a “holy experiment” needed a material base. The second purpose was to create a rural society of independent farming families without great extremes of wealth or poverty. Despite many difficulties and defeats along the way, Penn succeeded remarkably in that design.1

To capitalize his colony, William Penn hoped to sell land in large blocks of 5,000 or 10,000 acres to rich English buyers. Most of these tracts came with strings attached. Residence was normally required for continued possession. Absentee owners were compelled to subdivide their tracts into smaller holdings for individual settlers. A proprietary Land Office and a Board of Property were made responsible for managing the system.

Between 1681 and 1685, Penn actually sold about 715,000 acres to 589 “First Purchasers,” many of whom were affluent Quakers in London and Bristol. Perhaps half of these buyers did not come to America, and a large number of purchases were forfeited for nonpayment or nonresidence.2 Many tracts were subdivided among “underpurchasers” who actually occupied the land. Most holdings in Pennsylvania were between 100 and 500 acres. The average was about 250 acres—twice as large as town grants to individual families in Massachusetts, but less than half the average size of land patents in Virginia during the seventeenth century.3

William Penn’s system proved to be a highly efficient way of promoting settlement. As early as the year 1715, it was reported that no unsettled land remained within fifty miles of Philadelphia. The proprietor and his agents distributed their land very rapidly, at the same time that they prevented the growth of a small landowning oligarchy. The proprietor explained:

The regulation of the country being a family to each five hundred acres. … many that had right to the land were at first covetous to have their whole quantity without regard to this way of settlement, tho’ by such wilderness vacancies they had ruined the country, and then our interest of course. I had in my view, society, assistance, busy commerce, instruction of youth, government of people’s manners, conveniency of religious assembling, encouragement of mechanicks, distinct and beaten roads, and it has answered in all those respects, I think, to an universal content.4

For a long period, the distribution of wealth in the Delaware Valley continued to be more egalitarian than any other region of British America. Tax lists in rural Chester County showed that the richest 10 percent held only 23.8 percent of assessed taxable wealth in 1693—an unusually small share by comparison with other cultures. In the Chesapeake colonies, as we have seen, the richest 10 percent held more than two-thirds of the taxable wealth.5

The pattern of wealth-holding was not perfectly uniform throughout the Delaware Valley. Wealth was more concentrated in urban Philadelphia than in rural Chester County. But even the metropolis of the Delaware Valley was remarkably egalitarian by comparison with other seaport cities in the American colonies. The richest 10 percent held only 36 percent of the wealth in Philadelphia during the late seventeenth century, according to the evidence of probate records. In Boston, by comparison, the top

10 percent owned more than half of the assets in the town. In Virginia, they possessed two-thirds or more.6

This pattern of wealth distribution was maintained in part by inheritance customs. In cases of intestacy, the laws of West Jersey and Pennsylvania at first followed the biblical pattern of double partible inheritance, widows’ thirds, and small shares for prodigal children. But in subsequent statutes, the double partible rule yielded to the principle of equal shares for all children. This law of intestacy in the Quaker colonies conformed to actual practices which were more egalitarian than in New England or the Chesapeake. The norm in Quaker families was equal division of the estate—not only between the first-born son and his brothers but also (for personal property) between brothers and sisters. By and large, daughters did not inherit land. But they were given “portions” at marriage and a share of the personal estate.7

Similar patterns also appeared in the wills of English Quakers. Thus, Dionnis Davy, a Quaker of Steeton, Yorkshire, left one-third of his property to his wife Alice, and the rest he “did give unto his children equally.”8 There were many variations. Other Quakers assigned small landholdings to a single heir, but divided their personal estate equally; James Sanderlands of Cheshire in 1692 left his house to his wife, his lands to a son, and his personal estate to be equally divided among all his sons and daughters.9 Quakers often remembered their grandchildren, who shared equally in small gifts of esteem. John Hart of Nottingham in 1712 left equal legacies to his grandchildren to be paid when they reached the age of twenty-four; if any died, the remaining share was to be divided equally among the survivors.10 Edmund Gibson left all his estate to “Hannah my loving wife,” for her lifetime, and then to be sold and the proceeds divided equally among all grandchildren, both male and female.11 There were many other arrangements: sometimes a surviving son received all real estate, and a surviving daughter the personal estate.12 Quakers who owned small rural properties would leave the farm to one child with instructions that payments must be made to other children.13

While inheritance practices among English Quakers varied in detail from one family to another, there were also strong general trends. First, widows usually received their “third” (sometimes adjusted to a quarter or a half) “according to the custom,” as many documents noted. Second, primogeniture was uncommon and partible inheritance was the general rule. Third, daughters normally received their inheritance in forms other than land. Fourth, grandchildren were often remembered in at least token ways. This pattern developed not merely from Quaker beliefs but from a fusion of those religious ideas with inheritance customs in the North Midlands of England. Among families of middling and lower ranks throughout that region, partible inheritance had long been a common practice. To this tradition, Quakers added the extra weight of a religious imperative.14

In the New World, Quakers moved even farther away from primogeniture and closer to the partible ideal. One study finds that no fewer than 87 percent of English and Welsh Quaker families in Pennsylvania with more than one son practiced simple partible inheritance.15

Quakers in both England and America deliberately used inheritance as an instrument of communal control over the young, specially in regard to the problem of outmarriage. Some meetings required members to disinherit children who wed nonbelievers, or at least to refuse to give marriage portions. Thus, the Cheshire Quarterly Meeting agreed:

If any friends child marry any that’s no friend the parents of such child shall not communicate by way of a portion unto such without the advice and consent of the Quarterly Meeting, or whom they shall depute excepting at their decease at which time the said parents are at liberty to do as they shall see meet.16

American Friends also did not hesitate to disinherit children who left the fold. The affluent Quaker William Wynne, for example, ordered that half of his large personal estate should go to his wife, and that the other half should be divided equally among all his children except his daughter Tabitha Wynne who had “fallen away from friends.” Tabitha received only a token legacy of fifty shillings; her brothers and sisters each got more than fifty pounds. In 1748, an observer noted that disinheritance for religious reasons was very common among Quaker families in the Delaware Valley.17

The execution of a will was a social event that involved many more people than the testator alone. Quakers often consulted some learned Friend in the neighborhood, who helped them to prepare the document and to shape its contents. John Woolman remembered “an ancient man of good esteem in the neighborhood who came to my house to get his will written.” This neighbor owned slaves, and Woolman refused to draw up the will until their freedom was assured.18

Quaker wills often included charitable bequests. This occurred in small estates as well as large ones. Philanthropy was an important part of this culture—more so than in New England or Virginia. In all of these various ways, the inheritance customs of Quakers in the Delaware Valley were an instrument of equality.

As time passed, the pattern of wealth distribution in the Delaware Valley began to change, moving slowly in the direction of greater inequality. The trend was very gradual until after 1750. In some rural areas of the Delaware Valley it did not begin until the nineteenth century; a few remote counties actually shifted in the opposite direction. But in most parts of the Delaware Valley, inequality of material condition increased after 1750.

Tenancy also tended to increase throughout the Delaware Valley after the mid-eighteenth century. Comparatively few tenants had lived in that region during the first and second generations. But by 1760, perhaps one-third of families in older counties of Pennsylvania did not own the land they farmed.19 In cultural terms, however, the institution of tenancy was not the same in the Delaware Valley as in the Chesapeake colonies. Rhoda Barber remembered that tenancy was not a permanent but a transitional status in the Quaker colonies. She wrote:

The people who had served a time with the owner of the land or had been employed to work for them seemed to claim a kind of patronage from their master. They seldom left the place but contrived to get a little dwelling in the neighborhood, often on the land of their former master. They had a little garden and potato patch, their rent was so many day’s work in harvest.20

Tenancy in Chester County rose to a peak circa 1760, then leveled off and declined until the War of Independence. This was so because land was easier of access for small holders in Pennsylvania than in the Chesapeake.21

Even so, the central tendency in the Delaware Valley was toward increasing inequality. Quaker moralists complained bitterly of this trend. John Woolman warned tirelessly against the concentration of riches, and argued that “Large possessions in the hands of selfish men have a bad tendency, for by their means too small a number of people are employed in things useful … while others would want business to earn their bread, were not employments invented which, having no real use, serve only to please the vain mind.”22 Joshua Evans wrote angrily of prosperous Haverford and Merion, “Here they build large farms but little meeting houses.”23

Ironically, Quakers such as Joshua Evans and John Woolman were themselves the principal beneficiaries of the trend which they condemned. The leading victims were immigrants who arrived at a later date. At the bottom of society in the Delaware Valley a proletariat slowly began to form—a growing underclass of very poor people.24

The Quakers always showed much solicitude for the poor. Probably no other English culture was so strongly committed to philanthropy. From the start, charity for the poor had been a deep concern of the Society of Friends. This sect did more to relieve poverty in proportion to their numbers than did their more affluent Anglican and Calvinist neighbors. In England, monthly meetings maintained a “publick stock” for the support of those in need, and collections were also taken for a “national stock” which was maintained by the London yearly meeting. Women’s meetings were specially active in this work. Each month, every member was expected to pay something, if only a penny or two. Among the Quakers, charity became an engrained cultural habit.25

Charity was always an important part of their world, perhaps because so many of them had been poor themselves. Studies of American philanthropy repeatedly find that the poor give a larger proportion of their assets to charity than do the rich. Among Friends, charity also arose from their exceptionally strong sense of responsibility toward other “creatures.” Most Quaker charity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries went to indigent Friends. But as early as 1683, the Philadelphia meeting was actively relieving the needs of non-Quakers.26 Where possible, an attempt was made to put people to work rather than merely to give them alms. The Chesterfield monthly women’s meeting in 1698, for example, invited the men’s meeting to “assist them in raising some money to buy some tow … to set some poor friends to work so they may not be burdensome to friends as they have been.” But among Quakers there was an exceptionally strong sympathy for the unfortunate, and a determination to relieve their needs.27

Here was yet another irony. The Quakers created a social system in Pennsylvania which gave them increasing opportunity to exercise their charitable impulses. They became deeply concerned about a class of paupers which their own values and institutions had helped to create. Some Quakers understood this system very well. John Woolman observed that “the money which the wealthy receive from the poor, who do more than a proper share in raising it, is frequently paid to other poor people.”28

This intricate cultural system of wealth and poverty was constructed in the Delaware Valley during the first decade of settlement. It survives to this day.

Image Delaware Rank Ways:
Stratification Within a Single Order

 

On the subject of property, Quakers tended to be highly conventional and even conservative. But on questions of social rank, they were radical and revolutionary. In the early stages of this movement, Quaker pronouncements about rank sent a thrill of horror through the possessing classes. “Woe unto you that are called Lords, Ladies, Knights, Gentlemen, and Gentlewomen …,” English Quaker James Parnell warned in 1655, “Woe unto you … who are called Mister and Sir and Mistress. … Because of your much earth, which by fraud, deceit and oppression you have gotten together, you are exalted above your fellow-creatures, and grind the faces of the poore. And they are as slaves under you, and must labour and toyle under you, and you must live at ease.”1

In the second generation of Quakerism, the rhetoric became more muted, but underlying attitudes remained the same. Even a Quaker as high-born as William Penn published gentle polemics against the idea of social orders in general and aristocracy in particular. “What a podder [pother] has this noble blood made in the world …,” he declared, “methinks nothing of man’s folly has less show of reason to palliate it.”2

William Penn detested distinctions of “blood” and “birth.” He insisted that England’s structure of hereditary social orders was an organized absurdity, and a contradiction in terms. He argued:

Since virtue comes not by generation, I neither am the better nor the worse for my forefather, to be sure. … To be descended of wealth and titles fills no man’s head with brains nor heart with truth. …

Oh, says the person of blood, it was never a good world since we have had so many upstart gentlemen. But what should those have said of that man’s ancestor when he first started up into the knowledge of the world? For he, and all men and families, aye, and all states and kingdoms too have had their upstarts, that is, their beginnings. …3

Deep as was his disdain for aristocracy, William Penn reserved his strongest contempt for plutocracy, “Never esteem any man or thyself the more for money,” he wrote, “nor think the meaner of thyself or another for want of it.”4

But Penn was no egalitarian. He believed that a society should be run by an aristocracy of Christian virtue. “Pray let nobility and virtue keep company, for they are the nearest of kin,” he wrote.5 Most of all, he believed that every individual should be judged for what he was and did. “A man, like a watch, is to be valued for his goings,” he declared.6

Many Quakers shared Penn’s thinking on social rank. They expressed their hostility to England’s system of social orders most eloquently not in words but acts. The ritual displays of social deference required in Anglican Virginia were actively discouraged in the Delaware Valley. Old customs such as “capping” and “kneeing” were condemned by Quakers. Many steadfastly refused to give “hat honor” to those of high social rank. In place of bowing, curtseying, scraping, and uncovering, Quakers substituted the ritual of the universal handshake—a decency which Friends extended to everyone—even their social superiors.7

In England, the stubborn refusal of the Quakers to give “hat honor” was punished with a brutal force which tells us that these rituals had deep meaning in the seventeenth century. In 1655, for example, the high sheriff of Lancashire, John Parker, routinely bullied and beat Quakers who did not bare their heads to him. While out riding one day, Sheriff Parker met a Quaker tenant named James Smithson who refused to remove his hat.

“Knowest then me not?” the sheriff demanded.

“I know thee,” the Quaker replied.

“Who am I?”

“Thou art my Landlord.”

“Am I so!” the sheriff said. “But I will teach thee.”

The Sheriff swung his heavy rod and struck James Smithson full in the head. Then he pulled off the Quaker’s hat, and “did continue striking him on the head till his rod broke off so short that he cast away what was left of it and stroke him with his hands while he pleased.”

A little later Friend Smithson met the sheriff again, and once more refused to give hat honor. “Is there no honor belongs to a landlord?” the sheriff asked plaintively.

“I honor thee with my rent,” Smithson replied, “other honor I have not for thee.”

Once again the sheriff “struck him in the head with a rod, and pushed off his hat and did strike him in the head and face til the blood came.”8

“Hat honor” was merely one of many rituals of subordination which Quakers denied to their social superiors. Another was the use of the second person plural, the pronoun “you,” which in many European languages implied deference. When Quakers used “thee” and “thou” in place of “you” they sometimes set off exceptionally violent reactions. A Quaker servant named Richard Davies remembered that his master did not much mind, but his mistress was infuriated:

When I gave it [thee and thou] to my mistress, she took a stick and gave me such a blow upon my bare head, that it made it swell and sore for a considerable time; she was so disturbed at it, that she swore she would kill me, though she would be hanged for me; the enemy so possessed her, that she was quite out of order; though beforetime she seldom, if ever, gave me an angry word.9

Quakers also refused to use social titles. They did not call any mortal “master,” “mister,” “sir,” or “ma’am.” They would not address titled aristocrats as “my Lord,” for they recognized only one Lord. They disdained to call dukes “Your Grace,” for they believed that England’s ducal families were deficient in the only grace that mattered. They also resisted calling gentlemen and high officeholders “your honor,” or “your excellency.” In America, as in England, they insisted that “all these titles and styles of honor are to be rejected by Christians because they are to seek the honor that comes from above, not the honor that comes from below.”10 Everyone was addressed simply as “Friend” without distinctions of age, estate, gender, office or rank.

Quakers also objected to other ranking customs—in particular to the fulsome language of courtesy which flourished in the seventeenth century. A famous example was set in 1656 by George Fox while a prisoner at Launceston Castle. One morning, while taking his exercise on the castle green, the great Quaker was greeted by his jailor, an English gentleman named Major Ceely, who swept off his hat and said civilly: “How do you do, Mr. Fox? Your servant, Sir.” This courtesy brought a rude reply. “Major Ceely,” said the Quaker, “take heed of hypocrisy and a rotten heart, for when came I to be thy master and thee my servant? Do servants use to cast their masters in prison?”11

The Quakers found many reasons for condemning these courtesies—because they were literally false, lying, deceitful, hypocritical; because they rewarded evil and made a ceremony of sin; because they gave attention to empty honors; and because they distracted people from important distinctions that were not of this world.12

Quakers made this challenge in a generation which raised these rituals of social inequality to their highest level. Historians of manners believe that in no other period did elites demand so rigorous an etiquette of inequality as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.13

In the Delaware Valley, Quaker rank ways rapidly became part of an American regional culture, and set it apart from both New England and the Chesapeake colonies. In the words of historian Gary Nash, traditional “patterns of elitism, hierarchy and deference had tended to decay” in the early decades of Pennsylvania’s history.14 In terms of the England’s hereditary ranking system, the Quaker ideal was a society with a single order. In their own terms, they did not seek to create a world of social equality, but rather to maintain a new system of moral distinctions in which men and women were ranked according to virtue and merit.

Image The Delaware Comity:
Patterns of Migration, Settlement and Association

 

On the day after William Penn arrived in Pennsylvania, he called his colonists together, and solemnly pledged to protect their full “spiritual and temporal rights.” In return, he asked only two things. The first was that they should try to stay sober. The second was that they should keep up a “loving neighborhood” with one another.1

This notion of “loving neighborhood” was an ideal of high importance in the Delaware Valley. It became the cultural cement of a special type of comity which combined Quaker ideas and North Midland traditions. This Delaware comity differed from those of New England and the Chesapeake in many ways—in patterns of settlement, migration, association and social bonding.

The ideal settlement in the Delaware Valley was one where every family lived separately upon its farmstead, but was not entirely isolated from others. Houses were to be built in small clusters which became the nuclei of rural neighborhoods—a pattern still to be seen throughout the Pennsylvania countryside.

This form of settlement had long existed in the north of England—a pattern equally distinct from the town life of East Anglia and the manorial villages of Wessex. Nucleated towns were comparatively rare in the North Midlands. So also were landed estates with a great house surrounded by a cluster of close-built cottages. The economy of the northern counties required smaller units and more open settlements.2

In America, this North Midland pattern was modified and reinforced by Quaker ideals. William Penn intended that homesteads should be grouped in “townships” of five or ten “for near neighborhood.” The houses were to be close-built on lots of ten acres, and surrounded by individual farmlands of 450 acres each. The purpose was to combine material autonomy with spiritual community. “Before the doors of the houses,” Penn explained, “lies the highway, and cross it every man’s 450 acres … so that conveniency of neighborhood is made agreeable with that of the land.”3 Near the center of each township, he ordered common meadows and pasturelands.

Penn’s idealized townships were different in scale from New England towns, which tended to be at least six miles on a side and 20,000 acres in area—sometimes much larger. The townships of Pennsylvania were originally intended to cover only about 5,000 acres, and to include only about fifty people. They were not self-governing. The vision of the founder was a quiet open countryside dotted with small clusters of independent farms. By 1685, more than fifty of these little townships had actually been planted in Pennsylvania.

The proprietor’s official policy received a mixed reception from his fellow Quakers. Most liked the idea of private property, fee simple tenure, moderate land grants of approximately the same size, and restriction of ownership to actual residents. But they did not favor nucleated farming towns, communal pastures or common meadows. Against the wishes of their Proprietor, the people of Pennsylvania proceeded to create their own pattern of land distribution: small farms scattered in clusters across the countryside without the common lands that Penn had wished to

Image

see. In the process, historian James T. Lemon observes that “the Quakers firmly established the pattern for all who followed in the eighteenth century, indeed well into the twentieth.4

Within a generation Penn’s colonists had moved beyond the Delaware Valley into the interior of Pennsylvania where rolling hills and valleys followed one another like waves of the sea. Across this corrugated countryside, the steep and barren hillsides remained uninhabited. Many stand empty even to this day. Each fertile valley became a unit of settlement with a distinct cultural character. A case in point is Big Valley, a beautiful crescent of fertility near the present geographical center of Pennsylvania. Today Big Valley is Pennsylvania Dutch territory. The names on the mailboxes are Zook and Peachey and Hostetler. An eighteenth-century Swiss-German dialect is still spoken from one end of the valley to the other. North of Big Valley across Stone Mountain lies Nittany Valley, which has a very different culture. In the eighteenth century its settlers were Presbyterians and Anglicans who came mainly from the borderlands of North Britain. Today, the young people of Nittany Valley still unconsciously pronounce some of their vowels in the old north British way. Very few Quakers settled in either of these places but patterns of settlement in Big Valley and Nittany Valley were similar to those that English Friends had planted on the banks of the Delaware. This Pennsylvania pattern became typical of an entire American region.

A similar tendency also appeared in patterns of internal migration. A distinctive “migration regime” was introduced to the Delaware Valley by English Quakers. Rates of geographic mobility were higher in this region than in Massachusetts or even Virginia. Most of this incessant movement consisted of local, short-distance migration.5

Here again, the Delaware Valley resembled England’s North Midlands. Studies of migration in England do not easily admit of controlled comparison with America. But comparable evidence exists for the parish of Clayworth (Nottinghamshire) in the midland region which contributed so heavily to the peopling of Pennsylvania.

It is interesting to observe that rates of persistence in Clayworth were almost exactly the same as in Pennsylvania’s Chester and Lancaster counties.6

These patterns of migration and settlement also supported a distinctive system of association. The comity in Pennsylvania was not as close or interactive as in New England, or as intense as the court days and county meetings of the Chesapeake colonies. Quaker meetings cautioned their members against “needless” socializing. The Morley women’s meeting urged that “friends keep clear in needless visits to the World, or to one another, in their childbed or other times, in giving or receiving [visits] where there is no need.”7 The Cheshire quarterly meeting agreed:

A question being put to this meeting whether frequenting christenings, gossipings, housebringings and such like festivals justifiable or allowable, the Answer is no, and the judgment of the meeting is that no such thing ought to be practised that if any friend be found in the practice thereof that care be taken speedily to deal with them.8

The diaries of individual Quakers showed similar attitudes. John Kelsall entered into his journal, circa 1700, “I could not endure to see people take too much liberty in talk, laughter and such like things.”9 In the same spirit, American Quaker Anne Cooper Whitall wrote:

Converse as much as may be with God, with his holy Angels, with thy own conscience: and complain not for want of company. … Decline you may crowds and company, for frequent discourse, even of news or indifferent things, which happens upon such occasions, is sometimes destructive to virtue.10

Many Quakers were uncomfortable about “keeping company,” even with other Friends.

Still, Penn’s idea of “good neighborhood” was held in high esteem. “Useful” gatherings were encouraged. “Raisings” of meetinghouses and barns and homes were common among both English Quakers and German Pietists from an early date in the eighteenth century. These raisings were a classic form of “needful” association.11

Rhoda Barber also remembered from her youth in early eighteenth-century Pennsylvania the affection that existed among the Quaker families of her neighborhood:

The place not being as closely settled as now people seemed more affectionate to each other. I well remember when a death anywhere in the neighborhood seemed to cast a gloom over all even if it was the lowest class, and some of every family must attend the funeral. The neighbors for many miles around all were known to each other. A person from a distance was easily recognized and excited curiosity to know who they were and from whence they came.12

The Quaker comity, as historian Sydney James has taught us, was conceived as a system of association for “a people among peoples”—that is, “an organized segment of the population which kept morality and good order in its own ranks, expected no special favor from the government, and thought other elements should do likewise.” This pluralistic ideal came to be generally accepted throughout the Quaker colonies. It was not the product of ethnic expediency, but a highly principled idea, supported by strong moral imperatives.13

Local comities multiplied rapidly in Pennsylvania. The countryside, in consequence, took on an exceptionally open character. But the internal structure of each comity was tightly closed and strictly regulated. Reputation became all important in this system. For Quakers, a good reputation was a matter of “honor.” Loss of honor created intense feelings of shame.

Quaker ideas of honorable behavior were far removed from what historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown calls “primal honor.” They had nothing to do with the celebration of valor, or virility, or the exaltation of rank. Honor in that sense was the opposite of Quaker values.14 But in another way Quakers were as deeply mindful of “honor” and “reputation” as others of their age. Thomas Mifflin was set to writing in his copybook about “the sense of honor, by which we regard the approbation of men, and are uneasy under censure.”15 Isaac Norris explained his hesitation in a business transaction by writing, “I can’t tell if it would be accounted honorable if we should be concerned in shipping upon your order.”16

A Quaker’s honor was far removed from the code of chivalry that existed among Virginia gentlemen. It was also not the same as the contractual code that was kept by New England’s specially elected saints. Instead it was a reputation for Christian love, peace, “good neighborhood,” godliness, and doing good to others. As such, it became profoundly important to their comity. Joseph Oxley instructed his children:

There is much beauty in beholding brethren and sisters living in love, endeavoring to help one another, as occasion may require … in so doing, my children, your peace will flow in upon you abundantly, and your reputation and honour will be renowned among men. The Lord will delight himself in you.17

In this culture, as in every other of the same era, “reputation and honor” were urgently important. When a Quaker lost honor, he was compelled to stand before his brethren and to “take shame upon himself,” or be expelled from their association. The social operation of honor, reputation and shame was similar in some respects among Quakers, Puritans and Anglicans in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. But the substance of these social ideas differed very much from one group to another.18

In all of these many ways, the interplay of North Midland experiences, Quaker ideals and the values of a generation combined to create a very special comity in the Delaware colonies. The topography of Pennsylvania imposed its physical frame; North Midland experiences defined different orbits of association and levels of internal migration; Quaker beliefs contributed a pluralistic ideal of “a people among peoples,” and also an austere conception of comity in which a special conception of honor, reputation and shame played a major role. Many of these characteristics persisted in midland America for many generations. Some survive even today.

Image Delaware Order Ways:
The Quaker Idea of Order as Peace

 

Quaker ideas of comity called into being a special conception of social order, which was defined not in terms of unity (as among Puritans) or of hierarchy (as by Anglicans) but in another way. Order, in their thinking, was a condition of social peace.

This notion did not exist among Quakers in the earliest stages of the movement. The first English Friends were not a people of peaceable disposition. Nor were their principles pacifistic. But in 1651 the Puritans locked George Fox in a dungeon for refusing to fight at the battle of Worcester. Thereafter, the testimony of peace became an important part of Quaker teachings. In 1659, when England appeared to be hovering on the brink of yet another Civil War, George Fox sent this epistle to his friends:

Ye are called to peace, therefore follow it … seek the peace of all men, and no man’s hurt … keep out of plots and bustling and the arm of the flesh, for all these are amongst Adam’s sons in the Fall, where they are destroying men’s lives like dogs and beasts and swine, goring, rending and biting one another and destroying one another, and wrestling with flesh and blood. From whence arise these wars and killing but from the lusts?1

From these teachings the Quakers created a new idea of social order which they carried to the Delaware Valley. This idea was thought by others to be impossibly utopian, and doomed to failure in the New World. In some respects it did fail. But in other ways it succeeded beyond the intention of the founders, and became the framework for a system of social order throughout the American midlands.

As always, the leading exponent was William Penn himself. He defined order as a system which “enjoins men to be just, honest, virtuous; to do no wrong, to kill, rob, deceive, prejudice none; but to do as one would be done unto.”2 The same idea was written into the laws of West Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, which made their officers responsible for maintaining “good order,” by which was meant a condition of social peace in which each individual was forbidden to intrude upon the quiet of another person.3

This was a revolutionary idea in its own time—a conception of order in which everyone did not have to believe the same creed or to fit into a single hierarchy. Here was an open idea of order, grounded in the golden rule and the doctrine of the “light within.” To Anglicans this Quaker idea of order appeared to be dangerously permissive; to Puritans it seemed a contradiction in terms. But an idea of order as mutual forbearance defined its own obligations, which the Quakers enforced very strictly in their colonies. Their conduct of this experiment was more tough-minded than either their admirers or their critics have believed.

To keep the peace and to guarantee mutual forbearance, the Quaker founders of the Delaware colonies created a novel set of ordering institutions which were compatible with their ideals. The most important orderkeepers in Pennsylvania were county sheriff’s and coroners. These officers were not controlled by a small clique of county gentry as in Virginia, nor elected by the consensus of a local community as were the constables of New England. Pennsylvanians selected their sheriff’s by a more complex method. Each county held a popular election in which more than one candidate was required to appear. Of the two leading vote-getters, the governor appointed one as sheriff. Terms of office were short—normally one year. After 1730 rotation in office was required; a sheriff could serve no more than three years running, and then became ineligible for another three years. These elections were often sharply contested. In 1764, one member of the Proprietary party wrote to another about Lancaster County, “I wish the unhappy contests about Sheriff could be reduced to two

Competitors on our side … it would unite our friends to act with more spirit.”4

Implicit in this method of selection was a sense of separation between the state and society, an idea of distance between central and local government, and also an assumption of diversity of interests and values. The Pennsylvania sheriff became a sort of social referee whose task was to maintain the peace among different groups.

Sheriff’S were not the only orderkeepers in the Delaware Valley. County justices were also appointed by the Proprietor. As a deliberate act of proprietary policy, these justices were mostly Quakers, long after that religious denomination had ceased to be a majority of the population. As late as 1764, Richard Peters wrote to the Proprietor Thomas Penn, “By your having always given the Preference to the Quakers in the Commissions of Peace, and every favour you could bestow on them, they have obtained great influence in the Country.”5

These justices were assisted by another set of public officers who were unique to the Quaker colonies. They were called peace makers. Disputes of a noncriminal nature were referred to them for arbitration under the direction of the court.6 Disputes between Quakers themselves were arbitrated in a different way, under the direction of their meetings. Members of the Society of Friends were generally forbidden to “go to law” against one another. If they insisted upon doing so, they were sometimes punished by expulsion from meeting. This combination of order-keepers—sheriff’s, justices, peace makers and arbitrators—was unique to the Delaware Valley.

Forms of disorder in the Delaware colonies also differed from other regions of British America. There were no crimes of conscience in the Quaker colonies before 1755, and comparatively few crimes against morality or order.7 In the court of Chester County, crimes against authority consisted mainly in acts of defiance to peace officers in the performance of their duty. These cases were punished severely; Quakers had no illusions about the need to maintain the authority of their ordering institutions. Abraham Effingwell, for the offense of “menacing the Majestracy [sic] of this County” was ordered to receive “twenty one lashes at the Public whipping post on his bare back well laid on and 14 days imprisonment at hard labour in the house of correction.”8

But if crimes against public morality were comparatively uncommon in Pennsylvania, a great many people were punished for violating the private rights of others. The court docket of Chester County was crowded with cases of trespass, trover and case, in which these old forms of common-law pleading were turned to new purposes by a pluralistic culture.9 In the Delaware Valley, crimes against property and crimes against persons tended to be roughly equal in their incidence, unlike New England where property crime predominated and the southern colonies where personal crimes were more common.10

Treatment of the disorderly also differed in the Quaker colonies from other parts of British America. The founders broke decisively with the harsh capital laws of England.11 In Pennsylvania and West Jersey the number of hanging offenses was reduced from more than two hundred in English law to merely two—treason and willful murder. When the Quakers lost control of their colonies the number of capital crimes increased, but their number remained small by comparison with other colonies. After the Revolution, Pennsylvania led the Western world in the cause of penal reform. As early as 1794 it abolished the death penalty for all offenses except murder in the first degree.12

At the same time that the laws of the Quaker colonies were comparatively mild as regards capital punishment, they punished very harshly acts of disorder in which one citizen intruded upon the peace of another. In Pennsylvania, penalties for crimes of sexual violence against women were exceptionally severe. The lash was used abundantly in that colony, and such was its shame and horror that in 1743 a man who was brought to the whipping post took out a knife and cut his throat before the assembled crowd, rather than submit to a public flogging.13 Samuel Breck remembered the terrible spectacle of public punishments in Philadelphia during the eighteenth century:

The large whipping-post, painted red, stood conspicuously and permanently in the most public street in town. It was placed in State street, directly under the windows of a great writing-school which I frequented, and from them the scholars were indulged in the spectacle of all kinds of punishments. …

Here women were taken from a huge cage, in which they were dragged on wheels from prison, and tied to a post with bare backs, on which thirty or forty lashes were bestowed amid the screams of the culprits and the uproar of the mob.

 

A little further in the street was to be seen the pillory, with three or four fellows fastened by the head, and standing for an hour in that helpless posture, exposed to gross and cruel insult from the multitude, who pelted them incessantly with rotten eggs and every repulsive kind of garbage that could be collected. These things I have often witnessed.14

 

In these customs of lash and whipping post, the order ways of the Delaware Valley superficially resembled those of Massachusetts and Virginia. But the same instruments served different ideas of social order.

Further, the Quakers adopted penal practices which were designed not to punish the offender but to rehabilitate him. The object was not to isolate the criminal from society, but to restore him as rapidly as possible. In the 1690s, prisoners in Philadelphia’s house of correction were allowed to leave their cells during hot weather.15 The courts of Pennsylvania and West Jersey also used peace bonds in a special way, issuing them in lieu of an indictment as an alternative to a criminal proceeding.16

Something of this Quaker testimony of peace and order entered permanently into the cultural fabric of the Delaware Valley. After the Revolution, the people of that region were persuaded to adopt many Quaker ideas on the subject of crime and punishment. Rates of violent crime remained comparatively low. Orderkeepers continued to function as referees between different cultural groups. The idea of order continued to be defined in terms of peace and mutual forbearance, rather than unity or hierarchy.

Through many vicissitudes, there was a sense in Pennsylvania that peace was the inexorable will of Providence. Thus, one Quaker wrote to a friend, “The blessings of plenty and peace which we hitherto enjoy should thankfully engage us in the returns of gratitude to that good providence which protects us, without the assistance of the sword.”17 The reality of life in the Delaware Valley appeared to confirm this mood of optimism. A Portuguese visitor to eighteenth-century Philadelphia wrote, “ … the quiet that reigns in the midst of this infinity of people is worthy of note.”18 In all of these ways, the customs of the Delaware Valley owed much to the interplay of Quaker values and English traditions in a new American environment.

Image Delaware Power Ways:
The Politics of Commission Government

 

Quakers generally controlled the government of Pennsylvania for a period of sixty-seven years (1682-1755). During that era, they created a political system which differed very much from New England and Virginia. Many institutions in this polity were formed as early as the year 1725; some continued to exist for more than two centuries. Long after the Quakers relinquished the reins of power to other groups, their legacy survived in the political institutions and folkways of an American region.1

The English Quakers brought to America a habit of intense public activity, and a highly developed set of political principles. Despite the accusations of their enemies, they were not a sect of seventeenth-century anarchists. “Certainly,” wrote Isaac Norris in 1710, “every thinking man must believe that government [is] absolutely necessary; daily experience proves it whenever any number of people are got together.”2

In William Penn’s words, the Quakers believed that politics was “a part of religion itself, a thing sacred in its institution and its end.”3 The Philadelphia yearly meeting repeatedly reminded its members that they were bound by the principles of their religion in public affairs as well as private business.4

The political meaning of these religious principles was, however, a matter of dispute. Quakers quarreled furiously among themselves on public questions. On one occasion, William Penn beseeched them, “For the love of God, me, and the poor country, be not so governmentish!”5

So deep did these disagreements become in Pennsylvania, that to James Logan it seemed as if the “powers had brake loose from their center,” and the vessel of sovereignty had shattered into its separate shards of individual conscience.6 Quakers insisted that a believing Christian had a sacred duty to stand against evil in government, and that individual conscience was the arbiter of God’s truth. The ideology of Quakerism justified political opposition in a way that was not the case in other English cultures. The political culture of Pennsylvania was defined not only by Quaker principles themselves, but also by a prolonged quarrel over their purposeful application.

One consequence was the emergence of political parties in Pennsylvania at an early date. By 1701, two stable parties were functioning in that province. Both consisted mainly of Quakers. The Country party found its following mainly among farmers and artisans in the counties. The Proprietary party was closely linked to the Penn family and was led by their agent James Logan in alliance with leading Quaker merchants in the city of Philadelphia.

These parties nominated candidates, contested elections, issued manifestos, recruited stable followings and defended positions of high principle. The major issues that divided them would be the classical constitutional questions of American politics: the powers of the Proprietor and the Assembly, the relative importance of property rights and personal liberties, the control of the judiciary. Both parties claimed to be defending their liberties in a classical conflict between two Whig ideologies.

After the death of William Penn in 1718 this first American party system disintegrated. A brief period of partisan inactivity followed. By the mid-1720s Pennsylvania politics were dominated by two new parties, called the Quaker party and the Gentlemen’s party. The Quaker party drew its support from English Friends and German Pietists who shared many values and purposes in common. The Gentlemen’s party won the support of Anglican merchants, rough seamen and Scots-Irish immigrants as well as the non-Quaker bourgeoisie of Philadelphia. These parties also nominated candidates and contested elections for many years. Altogether, the first and second party systems of colonial Pennsylvania lasted longer than either the first or second party systems in American national politics.

Another part of this political culture was the politics of ethnicity. This arose among the Quakers as early as the 1680s in tensions between Welsh and English Quakers. So suspicious were these two groups of one another that the English majority deliberately drew the county boundaries of Pennsylvania so as to split the Welsh settlements. The townships of Haverford and Radnor were made part of Chester County, while Merion was placed in Philadelphia County. This was done to keep the Welsh Quakers from controlling an entire county—the earliest instance of gerrymandering in American history.7

In the eighteenth century, when William Penn’s agents recruited German Pietists to Pennsylvania, and the unwelcome Scots-Irish also began to arrive in large numbers, ethnic factors became increasingly important in Pennsylvania politics. Once again, an institutional framework already existed. The legitimacy of ethnic pluralism was recognized by the Quakers, many of whom thought of themselves as “dissenters in their own land.” This idea encouraged the rapid development of political pluralism in Pennsylvania.

Another part of the Quaker legacy was a special set of local institutions. The founders of Pennsylvania drew selectively upon traditional English institutions in ways which were consistent with their Quaker principles. For purposes of local government, they abolished the Anglican parish, but preserved the English county and adapted it to their own goals. At first, the founders placed most local administration into the hands of county justices who were appointed by higher authority.

That system did not last very long, for it was unacceptable to the Country party. In a series of statutes (1718, 1725, 1728) the Assembly created a new system of local government by county commissions. These officers were at first appointed by the legislature, and after 1725 chosen by the people. Every county had three commissioners, one of whom was elected each fall, together with nominees for sheriff and coroner. The power to tax was vested in the county commission, in conjunction with county assessors who were annually elected.8

Pennsylvania’s system of county commissions worked very differently from New England’s town meetings and Virginia’s government by court and vestry. The polity of Pennsylvania lacked the institutional machinery to enforce conformity as in New England.9 It also did not develop the strong oligarchical tendencies of Virginia’s politics. Popular elections occurred very frequently in Pennsylvania. By 1775, voters were being asked to cast their ballots as often as five times each year. The result was a culture where “residents were actively and constantly involved in the political process” in a way that differed from other colonies.10

Turnouts of taxable adult white males in Pennsylvania tended to be lower than in Virginia, but higher than in New England on the average. Rates of participation fluctuated from year to year, rising perceptibly during heated party battles in the 1740s and 1760s. But on the whole, participation was comparatively stable, with nothing like the staccato rhythm of surge and decline that happened in small New England towns.11

Another component of this political culture was the Whig ideology of England’s Restoration era which rooted itself more firmly in Pennsylvania than in either Massachusetts or Virginia. William Penn was himself a staunch English Whig who supported the election of Algernon Sydney, and was said to have rescued Locke and Trenchard from imprisonment. The leaders of all political parties in Pennsylvania called themselves Whigs. Historians Caroline Robbins and Frederick Tolles found in their studies of Quaker libraries repeated proof of a “persistent fondness” for the classical works of what Robbins called the commonwealth tradition: Trenchard’s and Gordon’s Independent Whig, and Cato’s Letters.12

Elements of this ideology came to be shared widely throughout the American colonies. But in Pennsylvania it took a special form. Among its features were a unicameral legislature, and annual assemblies which met upon their own adjournment. Another component was the ideal of minimal government. Andrew Hamilton wrote in 1739, “ … we have no officers but what are necessary, none but what earn their salaries, and those generally are either elected by the people or appointed by their representatives.”13 To this idea was added minimal taxes, which tended to be lighter in Pennsylvania than in most other colonies. In 1692 a proposed tax of a penny on the pound, which amounted to four-tenths of 1 percent of assessed wealth, was rejected as “a great tax,” ruinous of “liberties and properties.”14

The idea of minimal government was carried farther in Pennsylvania than in any other colony. There was no legally established militia until after the 1750s. In one period, when interest from a land bank provided an alternative source of revenue, there were nearly no taxes at all. The legislature of Pennsylvania passed fewer laws before 1750 than any other assembly in British America, and its courts were less active in the work of enforcement than most provinces. In each of these practices the Quaker colonies differed from most other parts of British America.15

This system of institutionalized dissent, organized parties, political pluralism, commission government, light taxes, and minimal government was firmly constructed before 1740. It was the work of Quakers, and the combined product of their Christian beliefs, English traditions and generational experiences in the late seventeenth century. In 1756 many leading Quakers withdrew from politics, and nominal control of the colony passed into other hands. But the political culture which they created still flourishes. It is one of the Quakers’ enduring legacies to the American Republic.

Image Delaware Freedom Ways:
The Quaker Idea of Reciprocal Liberty

 

In 1751 the Assembly of Pennsylvania celebrated an anniversary. The Charter of Privileges, which William Penn had granted his settlers in 1701 to guarantee their liberty, was exactly half a century old. To mark the occasion, the legislature ordered that a great bell should be purchased for the Pennsylvania State House.

Today, that building is better known as Independence Hall, and the great Quaker bell is called the Liberty Bell. Both of these symbols are associated in the popular mind with the American Revolution. But in fact they were the products of an earlier period of Anglo-American history; and they were meant to celebrate a special idea of liberty which was unique to the Quaker founders of Pennsylvania.

The original resolution to purchase the great Quaker bell was voted by members of the Society of Friends, who made up 70 percent of the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1750. The inscription was selected by the Quaker speaker, who chose a passage from the book of Leviticus which seemed particularly meaningful to Christians of his denomination. The quotation referred to the liberty that God had given not merely to a chosen few, but to all his children, so that they might be safe in the sanctity of their families and secure in the possession of their property. The full biblical text seemed perfectly suitable to the anniversary of William Penn’s Charter of Privileges:

Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.1

Here was a libertarian idea that differed very much from the Puritan conception of ordered liberty for God’s chosen few, and also from the cavalier notion of hierarchical liberty for the keepers of

Image

The Great Quaker Bell was purchased by the Pennsylvania Assembly many years before the American Revolution. It was rung on July 8, 1776, to celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, and thereafter called the Liberty Bell. Even after it cracked while tolling the death of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1835, it continued to be used on great libertarian occasions. This historian remembers hearing it on D-Day, June 6, 1944, when its sound was carried throughout the world by radio to mark the impending liberation of western Europe. This great bell of freedom has become a universal symbol, but it was originally intended to commemorate a very special idea of liberty that was unique to the radical Protestants, both British Quakers and German Pietists, who settled Pennsylvania. The bell bears a biblical inscription, “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” It symbolized an idea of reciprocal liberty that differed profoundly from other conceptions of freedom in British America.

slaves. Quakers believed in an idea of reciprocal liberty that embraced all humanity, and was written in the golden rule.

This Christian idea was reinforced in Quaker thinking by an exceptionally strong sense of English liberties. As early as 1687, William Penn ordered the full text of the Magna Carta to be reprinted in Philadelphia, together with a broad selection of other constitutional documents. His purpose was to remind the freeholders of Pennsylvania to remember their British birthright. He urged them:

not to give anything of liberty that at present they do enjoy, but take up the good example of our ancestors, and understand that it is easy to part with or give away great privileges, but hard to be gained if lost.2

On the subject of liberty, the people of Pennsylvania needed no lessons from their Lord Proprietor. Few public questions were introduced among the colonists without being discussed in terms of rights and liberties. On its surface, this libertarian rhetoric seemed superficially similar to that of Massachusetts and Virginia. But the founders of Pennsylvania were a different group of Englishmen—a later generation, from another English region, with a special kind of Christian faith. Their idea of liberty was not the same as that which came to other parts of British America.

The most important of these differences had to do with religious freedom—“liberty of conscience,” William Penn called it. This was not the conventional Protestant idea of liberty to do only that which is right. The Quakers believed that liberty of conscience extended even to ideas that they believed to be wrong. Their idea of “soul freedom” protected every Christian conscience.

The most articulate spokesman for this idea was William Penn himself. Of nearly sixty books and pamphlets that Penn wrote before coming to America, half were defenses of liberty of conscience. Some of these works were among the most powerful statements ever written on this subject. One ended with a revealing personal remark: “ … tis a matter of great satisfaction to the author that he has so plainly cleared his conscience in pleading for the liberty of other men’s.”3

Penn’s idea of liberty of conscience was a moral absolute. It was summarized in many of his epigrams:

Conscience is God’s throne in man, and the power of it his prerogative.

Liberty of conscience is every man’s natural right, and he who is deprived of it is a slave in the midst of the greatest liberty.

There is no reason to persecute any man in this world about anything that belongs to the next.

No man is so accountable to his fellow creatures as to be imposed upon, restrained or persecuted for any matter of conscience whatever.

For the matters of liberty and privilege, I propose … to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief, that the will of one man may not hinder the good of the whole country.

These ideas of liberty of conscience were grounded in Penn’s Quaker faith. He once remarked that there was an “instinct of a deity” within every human soul which needed no forcing from the hand of mortal man. Further, the idea of the inner light led him to believe that everyone possessed the power of telling truth from error. The optimistic fatalism of Quaker faith persuaded him that truth would inevitably overcome error if it were left free to do so. Penn’s “liberty of conscience” was not a secular liberalism that valued freedom for its own sake. It was a means to a greater end: the triumph of Christian truth in the world.

William Penn’s personal experience of religious persecution gave him other reasons for believing in religious liberty. His own sufferings convinced him that the coercion of conscience was not merely evil but futile, and deeply dangerous to true faith. “They subvert all true religion,” Penn wrote, “ … where men believe, not because ‘tis false, but so commanded by their superiors.”4

These memories and experiences were not Penn’s alone. In the period from 1661 to 1685, historians estimate that at least 15,000 Quakers were imprisoned in England, and 450 died for their beliefs. As late as the year 1685, more than 1,400 Quakers were still languishing in English jails. Most “books of sufferings” recorded punishments that continued well into the eighteenth century—mostly fines and seizures for nonpayment of tithes. These records also revealed that the cruelest persecutors of the Quakers were Anglican clergy:

John Lingard of Stockhall [Derbyshire] the younger was imprisoned Darby Gaols at the suit of William White priest of Chapell of Fritt [sic] who himself seized upon him as he was reaping his own corn the last corn harvest and detayned him until the officers came who carried him straightaway to Derby gaol. …

The said priest had formerly himself broke into the said John Lingard the elder’s house forcing the outward door from the hooks and broke an inward door at the same time in pieces and hath taken his corn by his own hands, carrying it away on horseback.5

For their refusal to pay tithes, Quakers were often fined far beyond the amount in question; sometimes all of their property was confiscated. In 1672, English Quaker William Cooper refused to pay a few shillings in tithes, and was fined five pounds fifteen shillings, “for which they sold his cow, corn, hay and household goods to the coat he should have worn.”6

Many Quaker immigrants to Pennsylvania had experienced this religious persecution; they shared a determination to prevent its growth in their own province. The first fundamental law passed in Pennsylvania guaranteed liberty of conscience for all who believed in “one Almighty God,” and established complete freedom of worship. It also provided penalties for those who “derided the religion of others.” The Quaker founders of Pennsylvania were not content merely to restrain government from interfering with rights of conscience. They also made it an instrument of positive protection. Here was a reciprocal idea of religious liberty which they actively extended to others as well as themselves.7

Liberty of conscience was one of a large family of personal freedoms which Quakers extended equally to others. William Penn recognized three secular “rights of an Englishman”: first, a “right and title to your own lives, liberties and estates; second, representative government; third, trial by jury.”8 In Pennsylvania, these liberties went far beyond those of Massachusetts, Virginia and old England itself. In regard to the right of trial by jury, Penn insisted that every free-born Englishman had a right to be tried by his peers; that a jury had the right to decide questions of both fact and law; and that the law could not be used to punish a jury for its verdict. The laws of Pennsylvania also guaranteed the right of every freeman to a speedy trial, to a jury chosen by lot in criminal cases, and to the same privileges of witnesses and counsel as the prosecution. These ideas went far beyond prevailing practices in England and America.9

The protection of property was also a principle of high importance to William Penn. The seizure of Quaker estates for nonpayment of tithes was condemned not merely as an infringement of rights of conscience, but also as a violation of the rights of property. Others have seen a conflict between personal rights and property rights. William Penn did not. The laws of the Quaker colonies reflected his belief that the two rights were both part of one libertarian heritage. The Charter of Privileges in 1701 decreed that no person could be “at any time hereafter, obliged to answer any complaint, matter or thing whatsoever relating to property before the governor and council,” except in “the ordinary course of justice.”10

As regards the right of representative government, the Quaker colonies also went beyond other provinces in British America. One of the fundamental laws of Pennsylvania required that taxes could be imposed only by consent of the governed, and that all tax laws expired automatically after twelve months. These rules expressed the Quaker principle of reciprocal liberty, and their libertarian application of the golden rule, in the idea that no taxes should be levied upon the people except those which they were willing to impose upon themselves.

In all of these ways, the Quakers extended to others in America precisely the same rights that they had demanded for themselves in England. Many other libertarians have tended to hedge their principles when power passed into their hands. That sad story has been reenacted many times in world history, from New England Puritans to French Jacobins to Israeli Jews who have cruelly denied to others the rights they demanded for themselves. The Quakers behaved differently. They always remained true to their idea of reciprocal liberty, to the everlasting glory of their denomination.

The Quakers of the Delaware Valley also differed from other English-speaking people in regard to race slavery. The question was a difficult one for them. The first generation of Quakers had been deeply troubled by slavery, but many were not opposed outright. The problem was compounded in the Delaware Valley by the fact that slavery worked well as an economic institution in this region. Many Quakers bought slaves. Even William Penn did so. Of the leaders of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting for whom evidence survives, 70 percent owned slaves in the period from 1681 to 1705.11

But within the first decade of settlement a powerful antislavery movement began to develop in the Delaware Valley. As early as 1688, the Quakers of Germantown issued a testimony against slavery on the ground that it violated the golden rule.12 In 1696, two leading Quakers, Cadwalader Morgan and William Southeby, urged the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to forbid slavery and slave trading. The meeting refused to go that far, but agreed to advise Quakers “not to encourage the bringing in of any more Negroes.” As antislavery feeling expanded steadily among Friends, slaveowning declined among leaders of the Philadelphia yearly meeting—falling steadily from 70 percent before 1705, to only 10 percent after 1756.13

The Pennsylvania legislature took action in 1712, passing a prohibitive duty on the importation of slaves. This measure was disallowed by the English Crown, which had a heavy stake in the slave trade. In 1730 the Philadelphia yearly meeting cautioned its members, but still a few Friends continued to buy slaves. Other Quaker antislavery petitions and papers followed in increasing number. A close student of this material finds that Quaker “anti-slavery reformers never contended that slavery was economically unsound.” They insisted that it was morally corrupt, and at war with the deepest values of Christianity. The argument came down to the reciprocal principle of the golden rule. Quakers argued that if they did not wish to be slaves themselves, they had no right to enslave others.14

Delegations from Quaker meetings throughout the Delaware Valley were sent to slaveholders, urging a policy of compensated manumission. The evidence of private journals and public testimony shows that many Quaker slaveholders were profoundly troubled by this question, which haunted them even in their dreams. But a few continued to hold out, and the near unanimity that was needed for agreement could not be obtained.

The turning point came in 1758. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting recorded a “unanimous concern” against “the practice of importing, buying, selling, or keeping slaves for term of life.”15 This was the first success for the cause of abolition anywhere in the Western world. “The history of the early abolitionist movement,” writes historian Arthur Zilversmit, “is essentially the record of Quaker antislavery activities.”16

Quakers also took an active interest in the welfare of former slaves. Many masters helped to support their slaves after manumitting them. Others compensated them for their labor during slavery. When Abner Woolman (the brother of John Woolman) in 1767 freed two slaves his wife had inherited, he decided to pay them a sum equal to the amount that the estate had been increased by their labor, and asked the Haddonfield (New Jersey) meeting to help him compute a just sum.17

The antislavery ideas of the Quakers were shared by others throughout the Delaware Valley. Attitudes of German Pietists were similar to those of English Friends. Quaker abolitionists such as John Woolman and Anthony Benezet carried the cause to others in the Delaware Valley. In 1773, non-Quakers joined Friends within the Pennsylvania legislature in trying to stop the trade in human flesh by imposing a prohibitively high duty on slaves. Once again it was disallowed by British imperial authorities. In January 1775, one of the first acts of Pennsylvania’s Provincial Convention, when freed from British oversight, was to prohibit the importation of slaves. After a protracted legislative process, the Assembly also passed a bill in 1780 for the gradual abolition of slavery. Here was yet another expression of the idea of reciprocal liberty which Quakers made a part of the political folkways of the Delaware Valley.18

The Quakers were among the most radical libertarians of their age. But they were not anarchists. Penn himself wrote in his Frame of Government that “liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.”19 Penn instructed his governor to “rule the meek meekly, and those that will not be ruled, rule with authority.”20

The Quakers radically redefined the “rights of Englishmen” in terms of their Christian beliefs. But they never imagined that they were creating something new. Penn and others in the colony wrote always of their rights as “ancient” and “fundamental” principles which were rooted in the immemorial customs of the English-speaking people and in the practices of the primitive church.

In the conservative cast of their libertarian thinking, the Quakers were much the same as Puritans and Anglicans. But in the substance of their libertarian thought they were very different. In respect to liberty of conscience, trial by jury, the rights of property, the rule of representation, and race slavery, Quakers genuinely believed that every liberty demanded for oneself should also be extended to others.

One leading student of this subject summarizes the vital principle of Quaker liberty in a sentence: “Men will reciprocate if treated kindly and justly.” This, he writes, was “the basis of Quaker dealings with other men.”21

This idea of reciprocal liberty continues to exist in the United States. It has changed in many ways, becoming more procedural and less substantive in its conception. It has been appropriated by those who believe that the republic itself should not associate itself with any creed other than that of secular liberty itself. This idea of ethical neutrality is profoundly different from the purposes of the Quakers. But in that modern form, the idea of reciprocal liberty still flourishes in healthy competition with other principles of freedom in America today.