NORTH MIDLANDS TO THE DELAWARE

 

Image The Friends’ Migration, 1675-1725

 

My friends, that are gone or are going over to plant and make outward plantations in America, keep your own plantations in your hearts.

—George Fox

ON A BRIGHT SPRING DAY in the year 1677, “the good ship Kent,” Captain Gregory Marlowe, Master, set sail from the great docks of London. She carried 230 English Quakers, outward bound for a new home in British North America.

As the ship dropped down the Thames she was hailed by King Charles II, who happened to be sailing on the river. The two vessels made a striking contrast. The King’s yacht was sleek and proud in gleaming paintwork, with small cannons peeping through wreaths of gold leaf, a wooden unicorn prancing high above her prow, and the royal arms emblazoned upon her stern. She seemed to dance upon the water—new sails shining white in the sun, flags streaming bravely from her mastheads, officers in brilliant uniform, ladies in court costume, servants in livery, musicians playing, and spaniels yapping. At the center of attention was the saturnine figure of the King himself in all his regal splendor.

On the other side of the river came the emigrant ship. She would have been bluff-bowed and round-sided, with dirty sails and a salt-stained hull, and a single ensign drooping from its halyard. Her bulwarks were lined with apprehensive passengers—some dressed in the rough gray homespun of the northern Pen-nines, others in the brown drab of London tradesmen, several in the blue suits of servant-apprentices, and a few in the tattered motley of the country poor.

As the two ships passed, the King shouted a question across the water.

“Are all aboard good Quakers?” he asked.

“Yes,” came the reply, “we are all Friends.”

The King wished them godspeed for America, and the two vessels drew rapidly apart—two different parts of England sailing on their separate ways.1

Many months later, the emigrant ship Kent reached her destination and dropped anchor in the River Delaware. Her weary passengers splashed ashore and planted a new settlement which they named Bridlington, after a village in Yorkshire from whence many of them had come. It is now the city of Burlington, New Jersey.

Image The Friends’ Migration: Numbers and Proportions

 

The colonization of West Jersey marked the start of yet another English folk-wandering, which might be called the Friends’ migration. Individual Quakers had begun to appear in the American colonies as early as the 1650s, only a few years after the Society of Friends had been founded in England. The earliest American Friends were mostly wandering evangelists and missionaries who were punished cruelly in the Puritan and Anglican colonies, just as they had been at home.2

The larger movement called the Friends’ migration began in earnest during the year 1675 when the first full shipload of Quakers disembarked in West Jersey, at a place which they named

Salem (from the Hebrew Shalom) “for the delightsomenesse of the land.” Other ships soon followed carrying some 1,400 people called Quakers to West Jersey by 1681.3

In the year 1682 the scale of this migration suddenly increased when twenty-three ships sailed into Delaware Bay with more than 2,000 emigrants who founded the colony of Pennsylvania. One of these vessels was the ship Welcome, which carried William Penn himself and 100 other Quakers on a ghastly voyage where smallpox was also a passenger and thirty died at sea of that dread disease. The Welcome was followed by ninety shiploads of settlers in three years from 1682 to 1685.4

The Friends’ migration continued into the early eighteenth century. Altogether, as many as 23,000 colonists moved to the Delaware Valley during the forty years from 1675 to 1715.5 The majority of these emigrants were either Quakers or Quaker sympathizers. So large were their numbers that in some parts of Britain’s North Midlands the number of Friends declined rapidly because of migration to America. In Derbyshire, for example, the Quaker population reached its peak in the 1690s and fell sharply thereafter for several generations. The leading historian of the Society of Friends in that county concludes that emigration was the primary cause of this depopulation.6 In parts of Wales the impact of the Friends’ migration was even greater. Monthly meetings of Welsh Quakers expressed deep concern about “runnings to America.” The historian of one small community in Penllyn, Wales, writes of the exodus for America that “It is not sufficient to say that Quakerism declined in Penllyn; it received a mortal blow.”7

During the early eighteenth century, the number of American Quakers increased very rapidly—doubling every generation. By the year 1750 Quakers had become the third largest religious denomination in the British colonies. Their 250 meeting houses were more numerous than the churches of any other faith except Congregationalists (465) and Anglicans (289). After the mid-eighteenth century the number of Quakers in British America continued to rise in absolute terms, but began to fall relative to other religious groups. Among all American denominations, Quakers slipped to fifth place by 1775 (with 310 meetings); ninth place by

1820 (350 meetings); and sixty-sixth place by 1981 (532 meetings). But in early America, the Friends were not a small sect.8

These Quaker immigrants were accompanied by many other colonists who were not members of the Society of Friends, but sympathized with the values of the sect.9 Throughout the Delaware Valley, in eastern Pennsylvania, West Jersey, northern Delaware and northeastern Maryland, travelers noted that Quaker meetings attracted a large attendance from neighbors who did not choose to join in any formal way or to subject themselves to its rigorous discipline. In 1742, for example, an English Quaker observed in West Jersey that “the meetings were very large and [with] great comings in of other people besides Friends, for 20 or 30 miles around in the country.”10 In Maryland’s Cecil County (the northeastern corner of that colony), the same traveler attended another Quaker meeting and noted that “abundance of people besides Friends were there.”11 Quaker schools throughout the Delaware Valley drew many children of other denominations. As late as 1795 Joshua Evans visited New Brunswick, New Jersey, and noted in his diary that “many of the people hereabouts have had an education among Friends, and are Friendly.”12

Together, these two groups of Quakers and Quaker sympathizers came to constitute a majority of English-speaking settlers in the Delaware Valley by the end of the seventeenth century. In 1702, James Logan reckoned that half the people of Pennsylvania were Quakers, and the rest were divided among many smaller groups. That guess, together with general estimates of population in these colonies suggests that at least 13,000 people were either Friends or “Friendly” in the Delaware Valley by 1700. This population increased very rapidly. By 1766, Benjamin Franklin estimated that between 60,000 and 70,000 Quakers lived in Pennsylvania alone. Many more dwelled in the neighboring colonies of West Jersey, northern Delaware and northern Maryland.

Other people who settled in the Delaware Valley were distinctly “un-Friendly” and showed no sympathy with Quaker beliefs and customs. This category included a large part of the population in Philadelphia, which attracted the human flotsam and jetsam that washed ashore in every seaport city during the eighteenth century. These “un-Friendly” immigrants appeared in growing numbers after 1716, and moved quickly to the interior of the colony. By the mid-eighteenth century, meetings of the Society of Friends were outnumbered by churches of other denominations throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But in the Delaware Valley, the dominion of Friends and “Friendly” continued long enough to imprint a large part of their culture and institutions upon this region.

Image The Friends’ Migration: Religious Origins

 

The central truth about the Friends’ migration was its religious purpose and inspiration. In large part this movement was a flight from persecution by a people who had suffered severely for their faith. Quaker monthly meetings in England kept special “Books of Sufferings” which recorded the many acts of oppression against them. After 1675 some of the worst abuses of physical violence had come to an end, but persecution of another kind continued—much of it at the hands of Anglican clergy whose income was threatened by Quaker refusal to pay church taxes. Friends were jailed in large numbers, and many had their property seized in amounts far beyond the tithes themselves.1

Persecution played a major part in driving Quakers to America, but it was never the leading cause. The primary religious goals of the Friends’ migration were positive rather than negative. An historian observes that the founders of the Delaware colonies wished “to show Quakerism at work, freed from hampering conditions.”2

The great majority of leaders in Pennsylvania and West Jersey shared this sense of collective inspiration, but among ordinary immigrants religious motives tended to be more personal and individual. Many came to America as a direct result of spiritual experiences. In the year 1711, for example, a sixteen-year-old London Quaker of humble rank named Jane Hoskins fell desperately ill of a fever. As she lay delirious in “a sore fit of sickness nigh unto death,” the image of God appeared before her and said, “If I restore thee, go to Pennsylvania.” Jane Hoskins later wrote, “ … the answer of my soul was, wherever thou pleasest.” On her recovery, she borrowed passage money from another Friend and boarded an emigrant ship for the Delaware.3

For Quakers such as Jane Hoskins the Friends’ migration became a spiritual pilgrimage that differed very much from the secular movements of our own time. Jane Hoskins did not count the material costs and benefits of coming to America, except in the most incidental way. She thought of herself as a servant of God’s will, and embarked upon her westward voyage in a mood of optimistic fatalism, perfectly secure in the spiritual values of her faith.

To understand the culture that developed in the Delaware Valley, one must know something of the religious beliefs of Quakers such as Jane Hoskins. Quakerism, as we call it today, was a highly articulated form of Christianity, very different from Puritan and Anglican beliefs in its theology, ecclesiology and biblical exegesis.

To understand those differences one might begin with the way that Quakers read the Bible. All Protestants were children of the Book. The Bible was the foundation of their faith. But Quakers, Calvinists and Anglicans drew very differently upon that common source. The beliefs of the Quakers came from the New Testament. One of the most important Quaker texts, Robert Barclay’s Apology (1675), contained 821 biblical citations, of which 656 (80%) referred to the New Testament. In Barclay’s Catechism, 93 percent of biblical references were to the New Testament, and only 7 percent to the Old. This pattern differed very much from that of Anglicans and especially Puritans, who made heavy use of both books.4

Closely linked to the Quakers’ biblicism was their theology, which also set them apart from Puritans and Anglicans. The Society of Friends always maintained an official hostility to formal doctrine, and never required subscription to a creed. But Quakers developed what Barclay called a “system of religion,” which repudiated the Five Points of Calvinism, and many Anglican dogmas as well. At the center of this Quaker “system” was a God of Love and Light whose benevolent spirit harmonized the universe. One American Quaker copied the following couplet into his commonplace book:

For love in all things doth Oneness call,

Thinking no evil, but pure good to all,

Yea, love is God, and God is love and light.

Fullness of pleasure, joy and great delight.5

The Puritans worshiped a very different Deity—one who was equally capable of love and wrath—a dark, mysterious power who could be terrifying in his anger and inscrutability. Anglicans, on the other hand, knelt before a great and noble Pantocrator who ruled firmly but fairly over the hierarchy of his creatures.

A central tenet of Quaker theology was the doctrine of the inner light, which held that an emanation of divine goodness and virtue passed from Jesus into every human soul. They believed that this “light within” brought the means of salvation within reach of everyone who awakened to its existence. Most Quakers rejected the Calvinist principle of limited atonement. They believed that Christ died not merely for a chosen few, but for all humanity. Quakers also rejected the Calvinist ideas of inexorable predestination, unconditional election and irresistible grace. They agreed that people could spurn the spiritual gift that was given to them. “Man’s destruction is of himself,” wrote Thomas Chalkley, “but his salvation is from the Lord.”6

Quakers were twice-born Christians. They believed that salvation was attained through a process of spiritual conversion. Many were deeply troubled in their youth until they felt themselves to be born again. David Cooper recalled that “when very young, I experienced two spirits in strife in me.” Benjamin Ferris remembered that “when I was about four or five years old I had many solitary hours alone by myself thinking of an endless world after death.”7

The psychology of conversion among Quakers was similar in some respects to that of Calvinists. But it was not precisely the same. Most Quakers had little doubt that salvation could be achieved by individual effort, and that the instruments had been placed by God in their hands. Once converted, they felt a sense of optimistic fatalism about the world to come. There was less of the brooding salvation-angst and violent mood-swings of hope and despair that troubled so many Puritans.

The ecclesiology of the Quakers was an extension of their theology. They invented a system of church government which differed radically from those of Anglicans and Puritans. Quakers condemned what they called a “hireling clergy,” and “steeple house ways.” They repudiated all sacraments, ceremonies, churches, clergy, ordinations and tithes, and maintained no ministers in the usual sense—only lay missionaries and exhorters whom they were sometimes called ministers. But the Quakers were not Christian anarchists. Of the many radical sects who appeared in seventeenth-century England, they were one of the few to survive beyond the era of their birth, largely because they also created an exceptionally strong set of religious institutions.

The Society of Friends was organized as a complex structure of meetings—men’s meetings and women’s meetings, meetings for worship and meetings for business, monthly meetings, quarterly meetings and yearly meetings. They recognized a need for leadership by elders and overseers, whose task was to teach, counsel and support. But authority belonged to the society itself; Quakers created a rigorous system of collective discipline which regulated marriage, sex, business ethics, dress, speech, eating and drinking, politics, and law. Special attention was given to the rearing of the young—an important factor in the survival of Quakerism, and in the culture that it created in the Delaware Valley.8

These Quaker beliefs were not static. They changed in many ways through time. Four distinct stages might be distinguished in the history of this Christian denomination. The first was the seedtime of a revolutionary sect (ca. 1646-66), when Quakerism tended to be radical, primitive, militant, aggressive, evangelical and messianic. The second stage (ca. 1666-1750) was the time of flowering, when the Society of Friends became increasingly institutional, rational, progressive, optimistic, enlightened, liberal, moderate, political and actively engaged in world, without losing its piety and godly purposes. The third stage (ca. 1750-1827) was an era when Quakers turned inward upon themselves and grew increasing sectarian, exclusive, quietist and perfectionist. A fourth stage of denominational division and maturity followed the Hicksite separation of 1827.9

Of these four stages, the most important for American history was the second (ca. 1666-1750), when the cultural institutions of the Delaware Valley were created. The guiding principles of Quakers in this period were not the revolutionary, messianic ideas of the first stage, nor the inward-looking ideas of the third stage, but something in between. In this second stage, Quaker ideals were exceptionally open, outgoing, and liberal in an eighteenth-century sense.

The special teachings of Quakerism in this second period entered deeply into the culture of the Delaware Valley. Friends and neighbors alike embraced the idea of religious freedom and social pluralism. They favored a weak polity and strong communal groups. Most came to share the Quakers’ concern for basic literacy and their contempt for higher learning. They also accepted Quaker ideas of the sanctity of property, equality of manners, simplicity of taste, as well as their ethic of work, their ideal of worldly asceticism, their belief in the importance of the family and their habits of sexual prudery. All of these attitudes became exceptionally strong in the folkways of an American region.

After 1750, the Society of Friends turned inward, and distanced itself not merely from other people in the present, but also from its own past. It increasingly developed ideas of unyielding pacifism, withdrawal from politics, extreme sectarian discipline, and extravagant ways of “going plain” in the world. But the more open and liberal spirit of Quakerism’s second period survived apart from the Friends themselves, in the culture of an American region which they did so much to create.

Image The Friends’ Migration: Ethnic Origins

 

The Quaker idea of a universal “inner light” within all humanity encouraged a spirit of fraternity with other people. They addressed everyone as “Friend,” and welcomed others of many different backgrounds to live beside them. From the start, European settlers in the Delaware Valley were very mixed in their ethnicity. Even before the first English Quakers arrived, a diverse population had already gathered there. William Penn wrote in 1685, “ … the people are a collection of Divers Nations in Europe: as, French, Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Danes, Finns, Scotch, French and English, and of the last equal to all the rest.” By 1700, the proportion of English and Welsh colonists had risen from one-half to about two-thirds of the population. But a pattern of ethnic diversity persisted throughout the colony’s history. It was actively encouraged by William Penn himself, and accepted by his co-religionists.1

The Quakers, unlike Puritans and Anglicans, were comfortable with ethnic pluralism. In the seventeenth century, the Society of Friends was an evangelical movement which sent missionaries in search of converts throughout the world. From its birthplace in England, it spread rapidly to Wales, Ireland and many parts of Protestant Europe. In the seventeenth century, the Quakers had nothing like the Puritans’ Hebraic idea of a chosen people, nor anything comparable to the Anglican gentry’s fierce pride of rank and nationhood. They looked upon all humanity as their kin.

This attitude was reinforced in the Delaware colonies by a diversity of origins among the Quakers themselves. Most were English, but many came from other nations. A sizable minority were Irish. Nearly 10 percent of immigrants registered in Philadelphia County were from Ireland. Among Quaker missionaries who were recognized by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 16 percent were Irish. The proportion of Irish Quakers was smaller in rural Chester and Bucks counties, but even larger in other localities. The town of Newton, West Jersey, was largely settled by Friends from Ireland; surrounding lands were called the “Irish Tenth.”2

Also numerous were Quakers from Wales, who colonized a broad area called the “Welsh Tract” west of the Schuylkill River. They came mainly from comparatively prosperous parts of Merioneth, and also from Radnor and Montgomeryshire in east Wales. Few were from poor and backward regions such as Anglesey and Carnarvon. Many spoke Welsh and took great pride in their ethnic origins, even as they were also strong converts to the Society of Friends.3

Dutch and German Quakers were also recruited actively by William Penn, who had traveled as a missionary in the Rhine Valley. As early as 1683 thirteen families settled Germantown, north of Philadelphia, where their leader Francis Daniel Pastorius founded the first non-English-speaking Quaker meeting in Pennsylvania. These people came mostly from Protestant communities in the lower Rhineland such as Krefeld and Kriegsheim, and spoke a mixed German-Dutch Rhenish dialect called “Krefeld-Hollandisch.”4

The Germantown district (a cluster of small communities) became exceptionally diverse in its religion and ethnicity. Within a two-mile stretch of Germantown’s Great Road, churches were built by Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, Quakers, Dunkards and Calvinists. But within this mixture, Quakers were two-thirds of the population in 1690. During that year a Dutch Reformed clergyman came to Germantown and wrote that “this village consists of forty-four families, twenty-eight of whom are Quakers, the other sixteen of the Reformed [including] the Lutherans, the Mennists [Mennonites] and the Papists who are very much opposed to Quakerism.”5

After 1715, non-Quaker colonists began to arrive in growing numbers. Among them were North British Borderers who have been called Scotch Irish (inaccurately, as we shall see). The Quakers heartily disliked these people and hurried them on their westward way. Other non-Quaker immigrants also arrived from Protestant communities in western Germany, Switzerland and Alsace mostly during the mid-eighteenth century; half of all Germanspeaking colonists in Pennsylvania arrived within a period of five years from 1749 to 1754.6

By 1760, English Quakers were a minority in the colonies they had founded, and the Delaware Valley had become a cultural mosaic of high complexity. Some of these other ethnic groups, however, shared much in common with Quaker culture. Many had been recruited by William Penn because of this affinity, and had remained in the Delaware Valley because the Quaker colonies were congenial to their own ways.7

There was little conflict between German Pietists and English Quakers. Benjamin Franklin’s slur upon the Germans as a race of “Palatine Boors” was the attitude of a transplanted New England Yankee—not a member of the Society of Friends. Quakers by and large welcomed German settlers and lived comfortably beside them. German-speaking elites, for their part, rapidly assimilated English culture. Daniel Pastorius wrote to his sons, “Dear Children, John Samuel and Henry … though you are of high Dutch Parents, yet remember that your father was naturalized, and you born in an English Colony, consequently each of you [is] anglus natus, an Englishman by Birth.” Many Pennsylvania Germans anglicized their names. In Germantown, for example, the family of Zimmermann became Carpenter, Rittinghuysen became Rittenhouse and Schumacher became Shoemaker. Intermarriage frequently occurred between children of different nationalities who shared the same religious faith. English, Irish, Welsh, Dutch and German Quakers rapidly became an extended cousinage.8

Germans of other Christian denominations did not intermarry with Quakers so freely, but they came to terms with the Quaker establishment in different ways. Germans did not run for the Pennsylvania Assembly; they cast their votes for Quaker candidates and supported the “Quaker Party.” For many years, German Protestants and English Quakers tended to stand together in the politics of Pennsylvania. This cultural alliance dominated the Delaware Valley for nearly a century.9 It also supported the dominion of an English-speaking Quaker elite, which firmly maintained its cultural hegemony in the Delaware Valley for seventy years. Of the first generation, Rufus Jones writes that “we hear nothing of any men of prominence in these early days except Friends.”10

From 1675 to 1745, the dominion of this elite tended to grow stronger rather than weaker. An indicator was the composition of the Pennsylvania Assembly. In the year 1730, British Quakers made up 60 percent of that body. That proportion rose to 80 percent in 1740, and reached its peak in the year 1745 at 83 percent. It was 75 percent as late as 1755 when many Quakers withdrew from politics. Even after that event, the proportion of Quakers in the Assembly as high as 50 percent until 1773.11

In short, the English Friends who founded West Jersey and Pennsylvania welcomed immigrants of different national origins, but remained firmly in control of their colonies long enough to shape the character of the region. For eighty years, they wrote the laws, distributed the land, decided immigration policy and created institutions which still survive to the present day. Most important, the Quakers also established the rules of engagement among people of different ethnic groups. These governing principles developed from Quaker ideals of association, order, power and freedom. Even as the Quakers became a minority of the population, their values remained embedded in the institutional structure of the Delaware Valley for centuries to come.

It is easy to misunderstand the culture that the Quakers created in the Delaware Valley. Alan Tully warns us that “because of the dynamic nature of Pennsylvania society, observers have mistakenly described the social organization of the colony as fragmentary and weak. In fact, Pennsylvania possessed a strong, coherent and flexible community structure. … Because different individuals identified with, and felt they belonged to, the local community as they perceived it, Pennsylvania society had a cohesiveness that appearances belied.”12

Further, the Delaware Valley appeared at first sight to be a melting pot which attracted many different ethnic and religious groups. But the Quaker founders deliberately created a coherent cultural framework which allowed this pluralism to flourish. They did so in a highly principled way, and their organizing principles survived long after the Quakers themselves dwindled to a small minority.

Image The Friends’ Migration: Social Origins

 

Every year from 1681 to 1686, more than a thousand English emigrants arrived in West Jersey and Pennsylvania. The annual numbers were roughly the same as in the Puritan migration to Massachusetts, and not unlike the movement to Virginia. But the social origins of the Delaware settlers differed from those of other colonists.

The Friends’ migration was not as much of a family affair as in New England, but more so than in Virginia. In Pennsylvania, two early immigrant registers show that the proportion who arrived in nuclear families was 39 percent in Philadelphia, and 58 percent in Bucks County. In that respect, the movement to the Delaware was intermediate between migrations to Massachusetts and the Chesapeake.1

As to social rank, the same sources show that Pennsylvania’s immigrants tended to be men and women of humble origin, who came from the lower middling ranks of English society. Their social status was similar to that of English Quakers in general.2

Bishop Sheldon observed in 1669 that most Quakers were “very mean, the best scarce worth the title of Yeomen.”3 This opinion, shorn of its pejoratives, was true in one sense and false in another. In registers of immigration kept for the counties of Bucks and Philadelphia, only a few people called themselves yeomen, and not one described himself as a gentleman. Most were husbandmen, craftsmen, laborers and servants. Bishop Sheldon was correct in thinking that very few Quakers were high-born, but he was mistaken in his belief that they were mostly of “the meanest sort”—a common error of perception among Anglican clergy who were the Quakers’ most impassioned enemies.4

Marriage registers kept by Friends in both England and Pennsylvania showed similar patterns of social rank. In rural neighborhoods, most male Quakers called themselves husbandmen. A majority in urban areas tended to describe themselves as manual workers, artisans, tradesmen and small shopkeepers of various kinds. In the marriage records of Philadelphia, for example, only one man in ninety called himself a gentleman, and only one a laborer. The rest were mainly craftsmen, tradesmen and merchants.5

Welsh Quakers who came to Pennsylvania appear to have been of higher social rank than their English brethren—or at least these Welshmen thought of themselves in more exalted terms. Of 163 emigrants from Merioneth, 14 (8.5%) called themselves gentlemen, and 42 (26%) described themselves as yeomen. But most gave no rank or occupation; probably the majority were husbandmen or laborers. Few appear to have been artisans.6

Altogether, this evidence confirms the carefully balanced conclusion of historian Frederick Tolles that the majority of immigrants to Pennsylvania were “persons in moderate or humble circumstances, some of them on the edge of destitution.” Even the leaders were of comparatively modest beginnings. Here was a pattern very different from Massachusetts and Virginia.7

This difference in social origins was partly due to the structure of migration to the Quaker colonies. Meetings of Friends in England subsidized the passage of at least a few poor families. Thus, when Richard Torr asked for money to carry his family to America, the Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting agreed that “he only sojourns here in the city of York & scarce owned as members any Meeting in this County, yet in pity to them this meeting is willing to give 40 shillings. … He is only to have it if he goes, and not for any other purpose.”8 The Chester Quarterly Meeting in 1699 paid £8.12.2, “the charge of Barbara Janney & her daughter’s passage into Pennsylvania with other expences.” This support was not undertaken on a large scale. But it provided passage money for at least a few Quakers who must otherwise have stayed home.9

Other Quakers were supported by private arrangements with individual friends. A case in point was the Quaker servant girl Jane Hoskins whose passage to Pennsylvania in 1712 was paid by another Friend:

One Robert Dane, Welchman with his wife and two daughers, were going to settle in Philadelphia; a friend told me of their going, and went with me to them. We soon agreed, that he should pay my passage and wait until I could earn the money on the other side of the water, for which he accepted my promise without note or bond, or being bound in indenture.10

The Quaker founders of Pennsylvania showed no hostility to servants, such as had existed among the leaders of Massachusetts Bay. As a consequence, people too poor to pay their own way came in larger numbers to the Delaware than to New England.

The social filter of the Friends’ migration also tended to screen out English elites, mainly because Quaker principles had little appeal to families of high rank. An exception serves to illustrate the rule. The rich and well-born English Quaker Mary Penington described the tension that existed between her rank and her religion. She wrote:

One night as I lay in my Bed it was said in me, “Be not hasty to join with these people called Quakers.” For many months I was under some exercise of Mind, not that I disputed against the Doctrines they held, but I set myself against taking up the cross to the language, fashions, customs and honours of the world—for indeed my station and connections in life made it very hard.11

William Penn was often reprimanded by other English gentlemen for mixing with Quakers. In 1671 Sir John Robinson told him:

I vow Mr. Penn I am sorry for you. You are an ingenious gentleman, all the world must … allow you that, and you have a plentiful estate. Why should you render yourself unhappy by associating with such a simple people?

To this complaint, Penn answered that he favored “honestly simple” people above the “ingeniously wicked.” In the Friends’ migration, he found the company that he preferred to keep.12

Image The Friends’ Migration: Regional Origins

 

The Quaker founders of Pennsylvania and West Jersey came from every part of England. But one English region stood out above the rest. The Friends’ migration drew heavily upon the North Midlands, and especially the counties of Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. In one list of English immigrants who arrived at Philadelphia between the years 1682 and 1687, more than 80 percent came from these five contiguous counties. Only a few came from the south and west, and none were from East Anglia.1

The same pattern also appeared among immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County before 1687. Two-thirds came from the counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire. The rest were mainly from the vicinity of London and Bristol. None were East Anglians; the region which was so important to the settlement of Massachusetts was entirely absent from the list of Bucks County settlers.2

A similar distribution also appeared in many other lists, including land grants, marriage records, meeting certificates, ministerial rosters, servants’ registers and shipping lists. Of Quaker missionaries who were recognized by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, for example, half came from five northern counties in England: Cumberland, Westmorland, Durham, Lancashire and Yorkshire. A sizable number also came from English settlements in Ireland. But only 10 percent came from East Anglia and barely 5 percent came from those counties of southwestern England which contributed so heavily to the peopling of Virginia. Less than 10 percent came from the city of London. The evangelical side of this movement was strongest in the northern counties of England.3 That pattern also appeared among Quakers whose journals were published in the Friends’ Library, a massive anthology of spiritual autobiographies. The authors of these evangelical works came mostly from what one called the “north country.”4

A variant pattern appeared among Quakers who carried certificates from their meetings in England to Philadelphia. Approximately 300 of these documents recorded places of origin in England, of which one-third came from London, and another third were from the north of England. The rest were widely scattered. This source represented the institutional strength of the Society of Friends, and had a pronounced urban bias. Even so, one historian who has studied these certificates concludes that “the greatest stronghold” was in “the North of England.” Once again, few came from the eastern counties or the southern coast.5

Image

A different distribution appeared among the “First Purchasers” among Pennsylvania—the 589 people who bought land from William Penn before 1686. This list was not an accurate guide to the origin of actual settlers in Pennsylvania. Many who bought land from William Penn did not emigrate but sold it again to “underpurchasers” who actually took possession. Still, the list of First Purchasers was an important guide to Pennsylvania’s investors. The great majority (88%) were English, and were concentrated in major financial centers. The largest group (35) came from London and the home counties. The next biggest concentration was from the North Midlands and the county of Cheshire in particular (11% were from Cheshire alone). A third group lived in the city of Bristol and its environing counties. Scarcely any came from East Anglia, and, except for a few counties close to London and Bristol, comparatively few came from the rural south or west of England which had been so important in the founding of Virginia.6

These six population lists all referred primarily to the province of Pennsylvania. In the Quaker colony of West Jersey, the pattern of regional origins was much the same. The colonists who founded West Jersey before 1681 were about 1,400 altogether. Nearly all were reported to be Quakers. Half were said to come from London and Middlesex and half from Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.7 The settlement at Burlington was built on two sides of a stream, and the bridges across it were called London Bridge and York Bridge.8 Burlington’s founders combined two distinct groups—poor farmers and craftsmen from the north of England, and tradesmen and artisans from London.

On both banks of the Delaware River, these Quaker immigrants distributed themselves in small settlements according to their places of origin in Britain. Country Quakers from Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire settled mainly in Chester and Bucks counties. “The farmers among them, poverty stricken dalesmen from the moors of northern England,” writes Frederick Tolles, “headed straight for the rich uplands of Bucks and Chester.”9 The lands around Trenton were occupied by emigrants from the Peak District of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.10 London Quakers preferred the city and county of Philadelphia. Emigrants from Bristol founded a town of the same name on the Delaware River. Dublin Quakers occupied Newton, West Jersey.11 Emigrants from Wales colonized the “Welsh Tract,” west of the Schuylkill River.12

The origins of these immigrants may also be observed in the names that they gave to the new land. A few Quaker place names expressed their social ideals—Philadelphia, Salem, Concord, Upper Providence and Nether Providence. Other settlements preserved their Indian names: Tinicum, Shackamaxon, Shamokin. The counties were mostly given English place names, of which more than half came from the north: Chester, York and Lancaster in Pennsylvania; Burlington, Cumberland and Mon-mouth in New Jersey; and Newcastle in northern Delaware. This pattern made a striking contrast with northeastern New Jersey, where the county settled mainly by New England Puritans was called Essex. It differed also from southern Delaware, which was settled from Virginia and Maryland and culturally akin to those colonies, and where the counties were named Sussex and Kent.13

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The names of townships in Pennsylvania and West Jersey also betrayed the northern and North Midland origins of many settlers. Towns were named Aston, Billton, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Burlington, Carlisle, Chester, Chesterfield, Darby, Durham, Edgemont, Kennet, Leeds, Liverpool, Marple, Morland, Newcastle, Ridley, Sheffield, Trenton and York. Most of these names were from the North Midlands.

Quaker immigrants from Wales tended to flock together in what was called Cambry or the Welsh Tract. The earliest village names of this district defined the region of origin in the mother country: Flint, Montgomery, Bala, Tredyffrin, Radnor, Haverford, Denbigh. These place names came mostly (not entirely) from northern and eastern Wales, just across the River Dee from Cheshire.14

In the eighteenth century, other towns throughout the Delaware Valley were given the names of individual settlers. This practice rarely occurred in New England or Virginia during the early seventeenth century—an indicator of an increasing individuation of social consciousness a half-century later. Many individuals and families whose names still appear on the map of the Delaware Valley were emigrants from the North Midlands. The hamlet of Recklesstown, New Jersey, for example, was named after Joseph Reckless, a Quaker immigrant from a prominent Nottingham family. His ancestor was John Reckless, sheriff of Nottingham and a rich ironmonger and maltster who became a Quaker convert when George Fox was imprisoned in Nottingham Gaol in 1649.15 Other town names of the same sort included Dilworth-town, Shippensburg, Pennsbury, Norristown, Morristown, Smithville, Allentown, Mifflintown, Wrightstown, Harrisburg and Walnford; most of these families came from the North Midlands.

The Low Dutch and High German Quakers from the Rhineland who founded the township of Germantown named their settlements Cresheim, Crefeld and Sommerhausen, after the communities very near the present German-Dutch border which had expelled them. After 1730, other ethnic groups entered at a rapid rate, and also left their names upon the new land. A few Swedish names survived (Christiana). And in the mid-eighteenth century, Scots and Irish would leave their names upon the landscape. But the north midland origins of the Quaker colonists may still be seen in the place names of the Delaware Valley, even to our own time.

Image “The Quaker Galilee”: England’s North Midlands

 

These emigrants came not from North Midlands in general, but mainly from the Pennine moors and uplands which ran in a northerly way from the Peak District of Derbyshire to the Fells of Yorkshire and Cumbria. This was the highest ground in England. It encompassed the six counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, east Cheshire, west Yorkshire and southern Westmorland. The Pennine Moors are Brontë country. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre were set in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë had grown up in the village of Haworth. Their writings are uncertain guides to the culture of dissent in this region, but powerful evocations of its climate and terrain.

Later in the modern era, this area became the industrial heartland of Britain, a vast ganglion of gritty industrial cities such as Manchester, Bradford, Sheffield and Leeds, where large urban proletariats are now packed into close-built brick tenements that stretch mile after mile across the rolling countryside. In the seventeenth century this was a very different place—one of England’s most rural regions, thinly settled and desperately poor. The population consisted mostly of small farmers and shepherds who struggled to feed themselves and to produce a small surplus of wool for the market. Every year the wool was loaded on packhorses and sent to markets as far distant as Southampton. Even in good years there was barely enough to get by; in bad years famine lay heavy upon the land.

During the seventeenth century the north of England had the reputation of being a dangerous place. The English antiquary William Camden felt “a kind of dread” when he came to the borders of Lancashire—an apprehension shared by other travelers. There was a strong sense of insecurity in this sparsely settled land.

Isolated houses were attacked and robbed by roving nocturnal bands, and sometimes all the victims were brutally murdered to hide the crime.1 As late as the year 1680 a Yorkshire diarist recorded one such event, when a gentleman of that county, together with his mother and servants, was robbed and killed, and the house set ablaze to hide the crime: “The old gentlewoman was most burnt,” the diarist wrote, “her face, legs and feet quite consumed to ashes; the trunk of her body much burnt, her heart hanging as a coal out of the midst of it. … Some observe that all of their skulls were broken, as it were in the same place.”2

This region shared a common cultural condition, and also a common history. The North Midlands, more than any other part of England, had been colonized by Viking invaders. Historian Hugh Barbour writes, “ … in the central region of the North, the Pennine moorland, where Quakerism was strongest, the villages were mainly Norse in origin and name, and Norse had been spoken there in the Middle Ages. From the Norsemen came the custom of moots, or assemblies in the open at a standing-stone or hilltop grave, which may have influenced the Quakers’ love for such meeting places. The Norse custom was individual ownership of houses and fields: the Norman system of feudal manors imposed in the twelfth century was always resented.”3

The Norman conquest of the north had been particularly brutal, and had left a region bitterly divided against itself. Its governing families were culturally distinct from the governed, and long remembered their Norman-French origins. Many remained Roman Catholic more than a century after Henry VIII broke with the Pope. In the seventeenth century many of this elite became Royalist. But shepherds and farmers of the north thought of themselves as a race apart from their overlords. Their religion was evangelical and Protestant. They felt themselves to be aliens from the schools and churches and courts and political institutions of the region—all of which remained securely in the hands of the ruling few. This attitude entered into the theology of the Quakers, and profoundly shaped their social purposes. In some respects, the Quaker culture was that of its native region; in others it was a reaction against it.4

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The farmers and herdsmen of this region, in the words of Hugh Barbour, “had a reputation for independence” and a custom of equality among themselves. The “family and farmhands all ate together,” at simple meals of “boiled porridge and oatcakes.” They dressed alike, in simple homespun suits and dresses of a distinctive color called “hodden gray.” Their houses were sparsely furnished, and their culture made a virtue of simplicity and plain speech. All of these folkways became a part of Quakerism.5

During the disturbances of the seventeenth century, radical sects in great variety multiplied rapidly throughout the North Midlands—Baptists of many types, Muggletonians, Familists, Fifth Monarchy Men, Ranters, Seekers and Quakers. These various movements were all part of a common impulse. In 1656, when England was ruled by Puritan major-generals, the officer responsible for the north wrote to John Thurloe, “Our Fifth Monarchy men have many of them turned Anabaptist … others have renounced that and other ordinances and are termed seekers, and … sober people [fear they] will soon profess to be Quakers.”6

This was the region where the Quakers first appeared. It long remained their strongest base. The founder, George Fox (1624-91), was a Leicestershire weaver’s son who developed his doctrine of the Inner Light by 1646 and made his early converts mostly in the North Midlands. By the year 1654, 85 percent of Quaker meetings were in the northern counties of England.7

The Quakers were most numerous in the poorest districts of this impoverished region. In Cheshire, for example, Quaker emigrants to Pennsylvania came not from the rich and fertile plains in the center and southwest of the county, but mostly from the high ridges and deep valleys on the eastern fringe of the county. This was rough country, with settlements that bore names such as Bosely Cloud and Wildboarclough. In the seventeenth century, much of this region was still densely wooded, the “last refuge in England of the wolf and the boar.” The climate was more severe

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than in the lowlands—with bitter “close mists” that settled in the valleys, and the dreaded “wireglass” that glazed the ridges and killed many an unwary traveler. The sense of desolation was deepened by the forbidding appearance of small isolated farmhouses, constructed of a harsh gray-black millstone. On the steep slopes of eastern Cheshire, they may still be seen to this day.8

In Nottinghamshire, the Quakers came not from the rich alluvial lands of the Trent Valley, but from the craggy uplands. The men of the Monyash monthly meeting once wrote, “ … we are a poor, unworthy and despised people, scattered amongst the rocky mountains and dern valleys of the high peak country.”9 In Derbyshire, the pattern was also much the same. Here the Quakers lived mostly in the “coal measures” on the east side of the county, and also in the Peak District. Comparatively few came from South Derbyshire.10

In the West Riding of Yorkshire, Quakers tended to be poor dalesmen who lived in places such as Lotherdale, a secluded valley on the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire. In the seventeenth century this area was described as “perfectly inaccessible by road.” Remoteness was indeed one of its attractions. Some Quakers fled there to escape their persecutors.11

One of the great unanswered questions in Quaker historiography is to explain the regional origins of this sect. One scholar, Hugh Barbour, believes that the Scandinavian heritage of this region created an exceptionally fertile culture for Quaker evangelists. This ethnocultural interpretation has been adopted by some American scholars, while materialist explanations have found more favor among British historians. Both schools of thought are probably correct in some degree. The theology of Quakerism arose from an oppressed regional underclass which despised the foreign elite that exploited them. It also rejected the institutions of high culture that were visited upon them, and made virtues of simplicity and hard work in a hostile environment.12 The austere culture of this regional population became a fertile field for Quakerism. The values of both a region and a class were carried from England’s North Midlands to the Delaware Valley.

Image The Quaker Canaan: The Delaware Valley

 

European colonists in the Delaware Valley described the dimensions of their new world with a sense of awe. Even today, the great river startles the most jaded modern traveler by its breadth and majesty. In the seventeenth century it was thought to be a wonder of the world. Francis Daniel Pastorius wrote in 1700, “ … the Delaware River is so grand that it has no equal in Europe.” Inside its twin capes, the river opens to form a bay forty miles wide. One hundred miles upstream at Newcastle it is still nearly two miles across. The largest ships in the seventeenth century could sail inland as far as Trenton, 165 miles from the sea.1

The ecology of the Delaware Valley was exceptionally well suited to the cultural purposes of its Quaker colonists. Of all the environments of the Atlantic coast it was uniquely favorable to commercial and industrial development. The river and bay became a great common, lined with flourishing settlements. The Welsh Quaker Gabriel Thomas wrote that “between these towns, the watermen constantly Ply their Wherries, likewise all these towns have fairs in them.”2

Both banks of the Delaware River were laced with small rivers and creeks “in number hardly credible,” wrote Penn. On the western shore, the fall line lay only a few miles inland. Streams such as Brandywine Creek and Chester Creek offered many fine mill sites within easy reach of the sea. Close to Philadelphia were large deposits of building stone, coal, copper, iron ore, dense stands of oak, and walnut and chestnut. The soil was rich and fertile, a “good and fruitful land,” Penn called it, “in some places a fast fat earth, like to our best vales in England.”

Another feature of the Delaware Valley was specially important to the Quakers. The natives were friendly, and very different from the more militant tribes of the lower Chesapeake and upper New England. The Delaware Indians as the English called them, or Lenni Lenape as they called themselves, were as distinct from the bellicose Abnaki, the ferocious Pequots and the warlike Powhatan Confederacy as the Quakers were unlike Puritans and cavaliers.3 William Penn’s Indian policy would have been a disastrous failure in Massachusetts or Virginia, just as it later failed in western Pennsylvania. In the valley of the Delaware, it succeeded splendidly, not only because of the Quakers themselves, but also because of the Indians.4

A third environmental factor was the temperate climate, which tended to be favorable to European settlement. Levels of mortality were high by modern standards, and also highly unstable, but the first generation found the Delaware Valley to be healthier than England or Virginia, and not much inferior to Massachusetts. This pattern changed for the worse during the eighteenth century when malaria infested the lower Delaware Valley, and yellow fever became a great killer in Philadelphia. Death rates rose generally throughout the region, but the higher ground of Pennsylvania remained exceptionally healthy. Throughout most of the Delaware Valley, moderate levels of mortality supported stable family life—a material fact of high importance for the Quakers.5

The settlement of the Delaware Valley by members of the Society of Friends did not happen merely by historical accident. The Quakers had long looked with interest upon this region. As early as the year 1660, George Fox and a consortium of English Friends dispatched an agent named Josiah Coale to buy land from the Indians in what is now southeastern Pennsylvania. His mission failed, but he later informed William Penn about the region. George Fox himself also made a personal reconnaissance of the Delaware Valley in 1672 and found the Indians “very loving.”6 He urged Penn to plant his colony there.7

In this environment, English Quakers deliberately acquired no fewer than three American colonies—West Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. For a time they also owned East Jersey, and parts of Carolina. Some of these acquisitions were made in very strange ways. In 1674, New Jersey had been given by the Duke of York (the future King James II) to his boon companions John Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, who divided it in two parts which they inaccurately called East Jersey and West Jersey. In the same year, Lord Berkeley promptly sold West Jersey to Edward Byllinge, a London Quaker who may have been acting for the Society at large and later resold it to a consortium of Quakers. Much of the land in West Jersey was distributed to 1,400 Quaker colonists who arrived between 1677 and 1681.8

In 1682, the colony of East Jersey was bought at auction from the widow of Sir George Carteret by another group of Quakers who included the ubiquitous William Penn. The colonists of East Jersey were people of many faiths—including many Dutch settlers from New Netherlands, and a large number of New Englanders whose major settlement was named New Ark (now Newark). Largely as a consequence of incessant complaints by Puritan settlers against Quaker proprietors, imperial authorities in 1702 took over both provinces and combined them in a single royal colony called New Jersey.9

In 1681, the Duke of York was instrumental in the creation of Pennsylvania, the largest and most important of the Quaker colonies. This great province was granted to William Penn in nominal payment of a debt which the Crown had owed his father. But

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that was not the leading motive. The founding of Pennsylvania was a serious effort to settle the “Quaker problem,” by a monarch who sympathized with their plight. The original grant was larger than the present state of Pennsylvania. Altogether, Penn’s province covered about 600,000 square miles, stretching from sea to sea between the 40th and the 43rd parallels, an area six times the size of Great Britain. It later grew a little larger when William Penn was allowed to buy the colony of Delaware from the Duke of York. For many years Delaware was governed as a separate part of Pennsylvania.

From the start, the Delaware colonies were generally perceived as parts of a single region. Quakers throughout the Delaware Valley organized themselves into a single yearly meeting which met alternately on each bank of the river. When the Anglicans attempted to rescue the inhabitants from “Quakerism or heathenism” in the eighteenth century, they organized the valley into a “single missionary field.”10 The valley also became an economic unit which sent its produce to Philadelphia.11 Historian Frederick Tolles writes:

The colonial Pennsylvanian knew without being told that he lived in the valley of the Delaware. He first saw his new home from the deck of a ship sailing up the great river. … The Delaware united West Jersey, Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties (which eventually became the state of Delaware) into a single economic province, and linked it with the rest of the Atlantic community. It also unified the valley into a single “culture area.”12

Image William Penn and the Delaware Valley:
The Intent of the Founder

 

This “Delaware culture area,” as Frederick Tolles called it, developed not by some random process of social selection, but from the conscious will and purpose of its Quaker founders. The leading role was played by one founder in particular, William Penn—who served Pennsylvania, Delaware and also West Jersey as lawgiver, social planner, organizer, tireless promoter, and regulator of the immigration process. The cultural history of this region cannot be understood without knowing something about the mind and character of this extraordinary man.1

William Penn was bundle of paradoxes—an admiral’s son who became a pacifist, an undergraduate at Oxford’s Christ Church who became a pious Quaker, a member of Lincoln’s Inn who became an advocate of arbitration, a Fellow of the Royal Society who despised pedantry, a man of property who devoted himself to the welfare of the poor, a polished courtier who preferred the plain style, a friend of kings who became a radical Whig, and an English gentleman who became one of Christianity’s great spiritual leaders.

William Penn’s life began 14 October 1644, on London’s Tower Hill, in the shadow of the great castle where he would later be imprisoned for his faith. He was born into a violent world and very nearly made violence his career. The great events of his early life were wars and revolutions in which his family was intimately involved. His father was a naval officer who served both Cromwell and the King, and was rewarded by both sides with large estates in Ireland.

Penn grew up in Ireland, and believed (mistakenly) that he was of Welsh descent. But by birth and breeding he was very much an English gentleman. His Anglo-Norman family (originally De La Penne) was kin to many of the gentry who went to Virginia. By marriage he was related to Frances Culpeper Berkeley (the wife of Sir William Berkeley) who knew him well and called him “cousin.”2

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This portrait of William Penn as a young warrior was painted in 1666 (when he was 22 years old). It captures the improbable origins of the Quaker leader. He was raised in a military family, nearly became a professional soldier, and always cherished a warrior’s virtues, even when he turned against war itself. This militant Christian would always be a fighter for God’s truth, closer in spirit to St. George than to St. Francis. Penn appears in heavy armor such as he might have worn when he saw combat at Carrickfergus in the same year. The light falls upon his right arm and chest, bringing out a sense of strength. The neck cloth of fine lace adds a tone of refinement. A dark thick wig hides Penn’s unfashionable thin blond hair. The face has a delicate beauty, a candid expression, and a firm jaw. The lines of composition converge upon the eyes which are exceptionally full, deep and thoughtfuladding a hint of detachment from the world. This drawing is from an eighteenth-century copy of a lost original in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

As a youth, William Penn was trained to arms. He became so skillful a swordsman that once when attacked by a French duelist he expertly disarmed his enemy, gallantly spared his life and went upon his way, wondering if any “ceremony were worth the life of any man.” In 1666 Penn served in combat in the suppression of an English mutiny at Carrickfergus, and so distinguished himself that he was recommended for a military post.3

Penn was tempted to accept, but he was destined for a different life. Raised in a pious Protestant household to be a “Christian and a gentleman,” he had begun to have deep mystic visions as early as the age of twelve. His father sent him to Christ Church, Oxford, to temper his faith. The effect was the reverse. Penn was deeply shocked by what he called the “hellish darkness and debauchery” of Oxford. He refused to wear a black gown or to attend compulsory chapel, and was expelled for nonconformity.

Returning to Ireland, this restless young man heard the Quaker preacher Thomas Loe and was converted to that faith. His father tried to change his mind, first by “whipping, beating and turning out of doors,” then by sending him on a grand tour. Penn wavered in his faith. But after his return, the diarist Samuel Pepys (who knew him well and detested his piety) wrote cynically, “Mr. Penn … is a Quaker again, or some such melancholy thing.”

Penn quickly became a leader among Friends. He preached throughout Britain, published more than one hundred works, and was often imprisoned by the alarmed authorities. In 1668 he was locked in the Tower of London for writing a Quaker book. Penn used his time in jail to write another book called No Cross, No Crown, which many take to be his greatest work.4 Soon after his release, Penn was arrested again in 1670 for preaching outside a locked meetinghouse in London. In the trial that followed, Penn conducted his defense so brilliantly that the jurors refused to convict him even when threatened with prison themselves. The case became a landmark in the history of trial by jury.5

In 1671 Penn was arrested once more. This time he was tried secretly in the Tower and sent to Newgate, where he refused the privileges of his rank and lived in a common cell. There he finished The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, one of the noblest defenses of religious liberty ever written.6

While suffering for his faith, Penni was treated with deference by his persecutors, and affection by many of his jailors. He maintained warm personal relations with Charles II and the future James II. From his cell he courted and won the hand of Gulielma Springett, a high-born lady who was celebrated for Quaker piety and for her blonde beauty (Penn’s rivals included London’s leading Restoration rakes). Her many connections gave Penn much influence in English society and helped him secure the charter of Pennsylvania. After her death, Penn married Hannah Callowhill, a rich Bristol heiress who brought him an income of £3000 a year—enough to keep his colony afloat.

In 1671 Penn traveled in Europe, and met with German Pietists who also suffered heavily from persecution. In company with them he began to think seriously about founding a colony in America—an idea which had been stirring in his mind since 1661. He became a trustee of West Jersey, and drew up the fundamental laws of that colony. But as the sufferings of Quakers and Pietists continued in western Europe, Penn felt the need of a larger sanctuary for oppressed Christians throughout the world. He petitioned his royal friend Charles II for a colony. In 1681, Charles overruled his advisors, and granted the request. The King himself named the colony, adding with his own hand the prefix “Penn” to the proposed “Sylvania.”7

Pennsylvania and its neighboring provinces were intended to be in Penn’s words a “colony of heaven” for the “children of Light.” He did not think of his province as a retreat from the world, but as a model for general emulation. Like the Puritans of Massachusetts and the cavaliers of Virginia, Penn intended his American settlement to be an example for all Christians.

The cornerstone of this “holy experiment” was liberty of conscience—not for everyone, and never for its own sake. William Penn believed that religious liberty was an instrument of Christian salvation. It did not occur to him that liberty was to be desired as an end in itself. He excluded atheists and nonbelievers from his colony, and confined officeholding to believing Christians. Even so, Pennsylvania came closer to his goal of a non-coer-cive

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William Penn in maturity looks out upon us from this unfinished crayon sketch by Francis Place, which shows Penn as proprietor of Pennsylvania, aged 52 (ca. 1696). The face has grown very full, with fleshy cheeks and double chin. Even so, a lady called him “the handsomest best-looking, lively gentleman she had ever seen.” (Hull, 301). There is a feeling of simplicity and goodness in this gentle, kindly Quaker face. But one sees also a hint of rank and authority; and the set of the mouth and the arch of the brow are those of a man accustomed to command.

society than any state in Christendom during the seventeenth century.

Another part of Penn’s holy experiment was the renunciation of war. The Quaker colonies had no military establishment; Penn wrote to a Friend in 1685 that in the Delaware Valley there was “not one soldier, nor arm borne, or militia man seen, since I was first at Pennsylvania.”8

Penn also intended the Quaker colonies to be a political experiment for his radical Whig principles. He was no democrat, but believed deeply in the “ancient English constitution” of mixed or balanced government. Most of all he believed in the rule of law. “For the matters of liberty and privilege,” he wrote, “I propose … to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief, that the will of one man may not hinder the good of an whole country.”9

In economic terms, Penn was not interested in founding an agrarian utopia. From the start, he intended his colonies to be a hive of commerce and industry, with a “due balance between trade and husbandry.” He recruited artisans and what he called “laborious handicrafts” more actively than other colonizers, and also with greater success.10

In social terms, Penn envisioned a society where people of different beliefs could dwell together in peace. His dream was not unity but harmony—and not equality but “love and brotherly kindness.” Penn never imagined that all people were of the same condition. He expected “obedience to superiors, love to equals, and help and countenance to inferiors.” There was to be no freedom for the wicked; Penn’s laws against sin were more rigorous in some respects than those of Puritans or Anglicans.

Some of Penn’s ideas for his colony have an aura of modernity about them. But he was not a modern man. He despised the material and secular impulses that were gaining strength around him, and dreamed of a world where Christians could dwell together in love. His vision for America looked backward to the primitive Church, and also to what he called England’s ancient constitution. These were not progressive ideas.11

The result of William Penn’s holy experiment was not precisely as he intended, but he gave decisive shape to the culture of the Delaware Valley. To this day its customs still bear the imprint of his mind and personality. “An institution,” Emerson remarked, “is the lengthened shadow of one man; as … Quakerism [is] of Fox.” He might have said, “as Pennsylvania is of Penn.”12

Image “Our Mob”: Origins of William Penn’s Delaware Elite

 

For all his sense of humanity, William Penn never believed in social equality. “Tho’ [God] has made of one blood all nations,” Penn wrote, “he has not ranged or dignified them upon the Level, but in a sort of subordination or dependency.”1

That spirit of “subordination” was introduced to West Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware in the seventeenth century. Within the first generation of settlement, a small elite appeared in all of these provinces. Its core was a group of Quaker families whom Deborah Norris of Philadelphia called “our mob.”2 So tight was this Quaker “connection” that of all the men who were admitted members of Philadelphia’s Corporation (the oligarchy that ran the town) from 1727 to 1750, no fewer than 85 percent were related to one another.3

This Delaware elite had its English roots mainly in the North Midlands of England. Many of its members had emigrated from small northern villages to London and Bristol and seaports throughout the empire. After accumulating a capital, they moved again to Pennsylvania. An example was the Shippen family, who came originally from Hillam in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Edward Shippen (1639-1712) emigrated in 1668 to Boston, where he became a prosperous merchant, but was cruelly persecuted for his faith. He removed to Philadelphia, becoming one of the leading merchants in the town, and also mayor, speaker of the assembly, chief justice and president of the provincial council. His children intermarried with the leading families of the Delaware elite.4

Many of those families came from the North Midlands of England. The Dilworth, Waln, Pemberton, Harris and Morris families all hailed from Lancashire. The Sharplesses, Janneys, Simcocks, Stanfields and Brasseys were from Cheshire. The Matlocks, Buntings and Bartrams came from Derbyshire; the Yardlys and Rudyards from Staffordshire; Hopkinsons from Nottinghamshire; Holmeses from Yorkshire; Whartons from Westmorland; Kirkbrides from Cumberland; and Fenwicks from Northumberland.

Another group of Quaker families came from Bristol and its surrounding countryside—the Budds, Emlens, Aliens and the Proprietor’s secretary James Logan who had Bristol connections. Many of these families were related to William Penn through his second wife Hannah Callowhill whom he had married when he lived in Bristol.

Also of high prominence was a Buckinghamshire connection consisting of the Coxe, Pennington (Penington) and Ford families—a rich and well-born Quaker gentry. They were related to Penn himself through his first wife Gulielma Springett, whose mother and stepfather were Isaac and Mary Penington. All of these families settled in West Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Yet another group consisted of Quakers from Wales—David Lloyd and his rival kinsman Thomas Lloyd, and also the Jones, Cadwalader, Owen, Meredith and Painter families. A few other elite families migrated individually from various English counties, and from every corner of the British empire—the Norrises from London by way of Jamaica, the Carpenters from Sussex by way of Barbados, the Dickinsons from Jamaica and the Rawles family from Cornwall. In the New World they were joined by German and Dutch Quakers.

Some of this elite had first settled in Burlington, West Jersey, before 1682—including the Biddle, Morris, Read and Robeson families. Others such as the Yeates family had established themselves in Newcastle County, Delaware. Both groups gravitated toward the city of Philadelphia, which became the seat of the Delaware

Valley’s “first families.” The Philadelphia elite was linked by blood and marriage to other families who remained in the country, and dominated rural culture throughout the region, long after other ethnic groups became more numerous. This was so even in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, which rapidly acquired a large German population after 1720. By the mid-eighteenth century, only 100 Quakers were said to live in Lancaster County, but they included the Wrights, Blunstons, Barbers, Lindleys, Worrals, Webbs and Allens, who kept the government of the county securely in their own hands. Rhoda Barber remembered:

the first proprietors being all connected or related to each other, there was an harmony and friendship among them beautiful to behold and pleasing to recollect. I well remember their being at my father’s house in first day afternoon. Their entertainment was apples and cider, bread and butter and smoked beef.5

That Quaker connection, which met over apples and cider in the Barbers’ best room, dominated Lancaster for many years.

Similar Quaker elites existed in other parts of the Delaware Valley. In Bucks County, there was a Quaker connection headed by Jeremiah Langhorne which was very powerful in local affairs. A third Quaker elite controlled public affairs in Chester County. A fourth lived in the Welsh Tract. Yet another group of Quakers, including the Cox, Pennington and Ford families, were very powerful in northeastern Maryland. All of these local elites came to be connected in a great cousinage with Philadelphia’s major families: Reads, Pembertons, Logans, Norrises, Lloyds, Carpenters, Prestons, Smiths, Emlens, Powels, Morrises, Cadwaladers and Shoemakers.

By the year 1750, most members of the Delaware elite were linked to this connection in one way or another. Many were the lineal or collateral kin of Sarah Read Logan, wife of James Logan, who was to the first families of her region as Mary Horsmanden Filmer Byrd had been to the “topping families” of Virginia and Sarah Storre Cotton Mather would be to the ministers and magistrates of Massachusetts.

The Delaware elite was similar in its solidarity to those of New England and Virginia, but very different in its origin and attitudes. A remarkably large proportion were of humble rank—

The Delaware Elite

 

I. The Core Connection: Burlington and Philadelphia
(Read-Pemberton-Logan-Norris-Lloyd-Carpenter-Preston-Smith-Emlen-Powel-Morris-Cadwalader-Shoemaker)

 

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II. The Bristol Connection (Budd-Allen-Logan-Penn-Callowhill)

 

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country artisans, petty traders, tenant farmers, servants and laborers. The first William Fisher was a cordwainer; the first John Fisher, a glazier; the first Allen, a cooper; the first Biddle, a shoemaker; the first Bringhurst, a cooper’s apprentice; the first Harrison, a shoemaker; the first Hollingsworth, a servant; the first Kirkbride, a carpenter; the first Matlack, a carpenter; the first Stansfield, a farm laborer; the first West, a “girdler”; the first Wynne, a barber-surgeon; the first Zane, a sergemaker; the first Jenkins, an “emasculator of animals.” Many were husbandmen (Langhornes, Nixons, Dilworths, Walns, Brasseys, Sim-cocks). Others were small traders and petty merchants. Scarcely any of this Quaker elite came from armigerous families. The English gentry who came to Virginia were conspicuous by their absence from the Delaware Valley. There were a few exceptions. Welsh Quaker Thomas Lloyd was of an old family which claimed fifteen quarterings on its escutcheon. But few leading Quakers had solid claims to such distinctions.

Even fewer had been to a university—William Penn himself, his secretary James Logan, and a few others. But Quakers were unable to attend Oxford and Cambridge without abjuring their faith. The formal learning that was so important in defining New England’s elite had no place in the Delaware Valley.

The lack of heraldic arms and university degrees did not mean that the founders of the Delaware elite were poor. Many brought a substantial capital to the New World, and rapidly advanced from affluence to wealth, which they achieved in the Delaware Valley primarily by investing in land. “It is almost a proverb in this neighborhood,” a traveler wrote in 1768, “that ‘every great fortune made here within these 50 years has been by land.’”6

Even as this elite grew very rich, its members continued to identify themselves with their manual occupations in a manner that was very different from Virginia or New England. The first Samuel Powel was always called the “rich carpenter,” even after he had acquired ninety houses in the city and large tracts of land in the country.7 In the most affluent families young men were urged not to live in idleness. Thus, Edward Shippen of Lancaster instructed his son: “Avoid what the world calls pleasure. Pleasure is only for crowned heads and other great men who have their incomes sleeping and waking. … Go to your cousin Allen, opulent as he is, and you will find him up early and busily employed.”8

Ties of industry and commerce united this elite. Edward Ship-pen formed a commercial partnership with James Logan, trading as the firm of Logan and Shippen. Later Shippen also formed another alliance with Thomas Lawrence, as Shippen and Lawrence. In the eighteenth century the pivotal firm was Morris and Willing, with whom many elite families did business. As time passed, merchants of other backgrounds found their way to Philadelphia, but the old families retained a moral and material hegemony even to the twentieth century.

In the early years, these families were also united by religion. Their founders were nearly all Quakers. Many had felt the lash of persecution before coming to the Delaware. The first Edward Shippen had twice been whipped severely by the Puritans, merely for attending Quaker Meeting. Others had been jailed in England—an experience that shaped their attitudes toward power and liberty for years to come.9

As time passed, some children of these founders fell away from the Society of Friends. In the eighteenth century, entire families, including the Shippens, Clymers, Mifflins, Bonds, Plumsteds, Redmans, Stretells and even the Penns themselves returned to the Church of England. Other religious divisions had earlier occurred among leading Quakers over the Keithian controversy, and later between strict Quakers and “wet Quakers.”10

The Delaware elite also quarreled over politics, dividing into factions called the Proprietary and Quaker parties. But the leaders of both parties were related to one another. The Proprietary party was led by Thomas Lloyd; the Quaker party by his kinsman David Lloyd. Party rivalry pitted cousin against cousin within the narrow circle of a family argument.

This elite was more open than those of Massachusetts and Virginia. During the eighteenth century, it demonstrated strong powers of regeneration. It allowed newly rich families of old Quaker stock (Biddles, Clymers, Hollingsworth, Penrose) to move

III. The Allen-Penn-Emlen-Logan-Powel Connection

 

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IV. The Yorkshire Connection (Shippen-Plumley- Willing-Francis-MacCall-Yeates)

 

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V. The Lancashire Connection (Wain, Dilworth)

 

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steadily from the periphery to core.11 It also admitted new members who were Anglican or Presbyterian or Free Thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush. But it expected them to marry suitably (as Franklin “married” a Read and Rush wed a Stockton). These newcomers were also expected to conform to established Delaware Valley customs of dress and demeanor.

For many years, this Delaware elite remained dominant in its region. From the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, its core consisted of Quaker or lapsed-Quaker families who had arrived in the period from 1675 to 1695.12 A close student of Pennsylvania politics finds that “members of the Society of Friends dominated elective offices, held large numbers of appointive positions, and constituted a majority of the colony’s economic and social leaders,” from its founding to the mid-eighteenth century. Its social hegemony in Philadelphia has survived even to our own time.13

Image The Colonial Mood:
Cultural Nostalgia in a New Environment

 

The founders of the Delaware colonies were religious radicals, but like most American immigrants they also became cultural conservatives who were full of nostalgia for the land they had left. A sense of loss and longing for the mother country was transmitted to their children and persisted many years in the Delaware Valley.

In 1725, this colonial mood was captured in a letter from a young Pennsylvanian named John Jones to a relative in Wales. The writer had been born in America, but he showed nothing of what historians of modern immigration in the twentieth century would call the “second generation syndrome.” John Jones described his native American colony with an air of detachment, as “this woody region, this new world, … this distant and foreign land.” He continued to speak and write in Welsh many years after his parents had come to America. To his kinsman in Wales he described his nostalgia for the mother country.

I have heard my father speak much about old Wales. … I remember him frequently mentioning such places as Llanycil, Llanwchl-lyn, Llanfor, Llangwm, Bala, Llangower, Llyn Tegid, Arenig Fawr, Fron Dderw, Brynllysg, Phenbryn, Cyffdy, Glanllafar, Fron Goch, Llaethgwm, Hafodfadog, Cwm Tir y Mynach, Cwm Glan Lleidiog, Trawsfynydd, Tai Hirion yn Mignaint and many others.

It is probably uninteresting to you to hear these names of places; but it affords me great delight even to think of them, although I do not know what kind of places they are; and indeed I long much to see them, having heard my father and mother so often speak in the most affectionate manner of the kind-hearted and innocent old people who lived in them, most of whom are now gone to their long home.

 

Frequently during long winter evenings, would they in merry mood prolong their conversation about their native land till midnight; and even after they had retired to rest, they would sometimes fondly recall to each other’s recollection some man, or hill, house, or rock.

 

Really I can scarcely express in words how delighted this harmless old couple were to talk of their old habitations, their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, having been now twenty-four years in a distant and foreign land, without even the hope of seeing them more.1

 

This colonial mood became a cultural instrument of high importance in the Delaware Valley, as it had been in New England and the Chesapeake. It caused Quaker immigrants to cling to the culture which they had carried out of England.

Another part of the colonial mood was intense anxiety for the future, and a fear of cultural disintegration which so often appeared in new settlements. The ironic effect of this cultural angst was to cause much internal strife in Pennsylvania, just as it had done in Massachusetts and Virginia. Within a few years of settlement, the Delaware Quakers fell to quarreling furiously among themselves over the question of whether they needed a written creed to preserve their faith in the New World. For some, the absence of formal doctrines threatened the colony with chaos. For others, the very idea of such a creed betrayed the spiritual purposes which it was meant to protect. The result was a Quaker schism in Pennsylvania, the so-called Keithian controversy (1690-93), which took its name from George Keith, a Scottish Quaker who led the movement for a creed. Keith in turn was accused of “preaching two Christs,” and “denying the sufficiency of the Light within.” The strife caused deep divisions among the Quakers.

At the same time there were many other “wrangles” and “heats” in the early 1690s. When a gang of pirates stole a ship in Philadelphia and began to plunder the Delaware Valley, Quakers quarreled among themselves over the difficult question of how a society which renounced the use of violence could suppress crime in its midst. The leaders of Pennsylvania, after much soul-searching, decided to use force against the pirates. But the contrary-minded Mr. Keith denounced the use of arms, and another angry controversy developed in the Quaker colonies.

George Keith and his followers also published highly personal attacks upon the leaders of Pennsylvania accusing them of “spiritual and carnal whoredoms,” and describing the colony itself as “a strumpet cohabiting in the wilderness.” This assault caused Quakers who had spoken out for free expression in England to demand restraints in America. Printers were arrested for publishing “unlicensed books,” and their press and types were seized, as

Quakers struggled to preserve the cultural fabric of their colonies.2 In the end, the dissenters were defeated and George Keith left the colony in 1693. But the colonial mood continued for many years.

The culture of the Delaware Valley differed in many ways from the folkways of Massachusetts and Virginia, but the dynamics of its historical development were in many ways the same. Here again one finds strong continuities in the transit of culture from England to America, and also similar patterns of change in a new environment. Let us examine these processes in more detail, by analyzing this culture in its constituent parts. We shall begin with the speech ways of the Delaware Valley.

Image Delaware Speech Ways:
English Origins of the American Midland Dialect

 

Students of American English recognize a linguistic region in the United States today which they call the zone of “midland speech.” Its boundaries coincide exactly with the broad area of settlement that expanded outward from the Quaker colonies in the Delaware Valley. This American dialect developed largely from the language of England’s North Midlands—not from that source alone, but from a complex process of mixing and merging, in which the primary source was an English regional dialect.1

The dialect of England’s North Midlands was itself a linguistic hybrid which had evolved through many centuries from a mixture of British and Scandinavian tongues. This was a muscular speech—bluff, literal, direct, vivid, forceful and plain-spoken. It had strong and simple ways of saying things, and little use for the learned niceties of Latin and French. It also had its own distinctive patterns of pronunciation, vocabulary and syntax.

Consider syntax, for example. In the early and middle years of the twentieth century, British linguists found strong regional patterns in syntactical structures throughout rural England. East Anglians tended to say you are; but the people of Wessex preferred you be, and northerners used thee is or thou art. An East Anglian even of high station said I ain’t, but a northerner even of humble rank said I’m not, and Wessexmen of every class said I be’ent. Many verb forms were constructed differently in these regions: the past tense of the verb to grow, for example, became he did grow in East Anglia, he growed in Wessex, and he grew in the north.2

Similar regional differences also appeared in vocabulary and pronunciation. The southern married became wed in the north of England. An East Anglian would stay the night; a Wessexman would bide a while; a northerner would stop over. In the east, people were scared; in the south they were afeared; in the North Midlands they were frightened.3

In the seventeenth century, these English regional speech ways were transplanted to various parts of British America. Linguist Hans Kurath has turned up an amusing example in the onomatopoetic folk-words that are used to describe the sounds that horses make. East Anglian and New England horses neighed, a word related to the Dutch neijen. In southwestern England and the Chesapeake Bay, a cavalier’s mount was thought to whicker. Along the British borders of Cumberland and Durham, and also in the Appalachians, horses nickered. In the midlands of England and America, they were said to whinny. These regional variations have persisted into the twentieth century. Kurath observes that they might be thought of as “marker-words” or “tracers” which help us to follow the pattern of folk migration.4

The Friends’ migration brought the speech of England’s North Midlands to the Delaware Valley, where it became the basis of an American regional dialect (though not precisely the dialect itself). The epicenter of this American speech-region was Burlington in New Jersey, and Bucks County and especially Chester County in Pennsylvania, where “as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, the people of Chester still spoke in a broad Yorkshire dialect.”5

This accent did not remain static in the New World. As time passed, the rough edges of North Midland speech were rubbed off by constant friction with dialects from other parts of England. The broad northern come (pronounced coom) did not survive in Pennsylvania after the mid-eighteenth century. But less obtrusive North Midland vowels became standard in the Delaware Valley and still survive there to this day. The most familiar example is the a in dance. Here, the English north midlands and American midland speech are much the same, and different from many other pronunciations, such as the English elite dahnce, or the harsh, nasal Yankee-East Anglian daance, or the slow southern day-ence. Similar regional patterns also appear in the vowels of caught, fast, calf, aunt, fertile, got, cover, crop, God, stock, frog, earth, firm, turn, cut and enough—all much the same in North Midlands of England and the midland speech area of British America.

Other continuities also appeared in the stresses of these dialects—in de’tail for de-tail’ and particularly in sharply articulated consonants such as the post-vocalic r and t. But other consonants were often lost at the ends of words—as in learnin for learning, which is common to the midlands of both England and America.

Not only the pronunciation but also the vocabulary of the England’s North Midlands became part of American midland speech. In the word lists of Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire we find the following terms, all of which took root in the Delaware Valley: abide as in “can’t abide it,” all out for entirely, apple-pie order to mean “very good order,” bamboozle for deceive, black and white for writing, blather for empty talk, boggle for take fright, brat for child, budge for move, burying for funeral, by golly as an expletive, by gum for another expletive, cattails for the plants called bullrushes in the south of England, catawumpus for a come down, chuck for toss, chock-full for completely full, clean for entirely (as “clean gone”), clump for clod, cotton for attach, as in “to cotton on,” cuddle for caress, crib for a child’s bed called a cot in southern England, dad for father, daddy long legs for an insect that is called a crane fly in the south of England, dither for upset, dresser for chest of drawers, drat as an imprecation (“drat that person”), dumb-founded for astonished, egg on for urge on, elbow grease for industry, expect for suppose, as “I expect that’s so,” find to provide for, flabbergasted for extremely surprised, flare-up for quarrel, fuzzball for puffball, gab for talk, gallivant for go about in search of pleasure, gawk for stare, get shut on for attached to, ginger snap for a type of cookie, good grief for an expression of surprise, grub for food, gumption for determination, guts for belly, guzzle for drink greedily, heap for a large number, home-coming for a return, howsomdever for however, kindling for light wood, knuckle under for give way, lick for try, as “give it a lick,” mad for angry, nailed for caught, nap for a short sleep, nice as in “nice and short,” poke for bag, pummel for beat, quality folks for gentry, rag for tease, road for way, rumpus for tumult, scalawag for a good-natured rascal, scruff for the back of the neck, shaggareen for untidy person, sick for ill, skimpy for slight, slam for put down with violence, slugger for a person who beats, sneezlepooak for a hesitating person, spuds for potatoes, sucker for a sugar candy, swatch for a fabric sample, thingamajig for an article of unknown name, tiff for quarrel, upsa daisy as an ejaculation for a child in play, us for me (as in “wake us up …”), and wallop for beat. None of these words was invented in America, though many have been mistakenly identified as Americanisms. All were carried from the North Midlands of England to the Delaware Valley, and became the basis of an American regional vocabulary which is still in use today.6

The speech of England’s north midlands became the primary source of the midland American dialect. But it was not the only source. Another important ingredient was the special language of the Society of Friends, which added a religious imperative to regional speech ways. The use of thee and thou as the standard second-person pronoun had long been customary in the North Midlands of England. It was taken up by Quakers and given a special egalitarian meaning. Among Quakers in the Delaware Valley, this usage was observed to be different from that of English friends in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Americans said “thee is” where London Quakers said “thou art.” The American preference for “thee” rather than “thou” preserved a North Midland pattern. Historian Hugh Barbour found English Quakers in the North Midlands who wrote, “If thee will, thee may send it when thee finds freedom,” much as their American posterity would continue to do. Barbour concludes that this was both a religious and a regional usage, which established itself in the Delaware Valley.7

“The witness of Friends on points of speech,” writes historian William Braithwaite, “ … touched some of the greatest issues of their life.” They made a fetish of plain speech, and also of silence. “Let your words be few,” was the counsel of one Friend to others. Quakers also cultivated what Richard Bauman has called the “rhetoric of impoliteness,” deliberately purging their language of routine courtesies and ornaments which seemed “needless” in their special meaning of that word.8 This linguistic austerity persisted among the speech ways of American Quakers for more than two centuries. Something of its spirit entered into the regional dialect of midland America.

In addition to Quaker speech ways, many other sources flowed into American midland speech. An exceptionally large number of words were taken from the Indians. The Quakers were more open to these borrowings than were other English-speaking settlers. William Penn himself took the trouble to learn Algonkian and tried to speak with the Indians in their own tongue. More Indian place names were preserved in Pennsylvania than in other colonies.9

Other expressions were also taken from the language of Dutch, Swedish, German, and Welsh settlers. From German, for example, English-speaking Pennsylvanians borrowed not only individual words such as hex, fresh (for impudent), bum, bub, spiel and phooey, but also entire syntactical structures. A Pennsylvania German might say in English, “Throw your father down the stairs his hat.” Some of these German constructions entered English usage in the Delaware Valley—for example, those involving already, get, need, and still.10

Other new words were spontaneously invented in response to novel conditions in the New World. In all of these various ways, the northern speech ways of English settlers gradually evolved into a major American dialect. But in the process they retained many fundamental characteristics of England’s North Midland speech. The result was an American speech way in the Delaware Valley which by the mid-eighteenth century was distinct from the New England twang and southern drawl. It has preserved its character for three centuries.

Image Delaware Building Ways:
North Midland Origins of Quaker Houses

 

Similar regional patterns also appeared in the vernacular architecture of the Delaware Valley. Even today, as one travels south from Manhattan on the old highways of New Jersey, the ancient buildings that stand beside the road offer many clues to the cultural history of their region. In the neighborhood of Newark, for example, the older houses tend to be rambling wooden structures like those of Massachusetts and Connecticut, whence their builders came. But forty miles further south, as one passes through the township of Princeton, the architecture begins to change. The old houses are stone-built, and very different in their style and proportions.

These were the homes of Quakers who settled in the Delaware Valley. They represent a distinct regional vernacular.

These Quaker buildings were not the first European houses in the region. During the mid-seventeenth century, Swedish and Dutch building styles had been introduced to the Delaware Valley. But an architectural historian writes that “not until 1682, when English Quaker settlers began to arrive in numbers, did this cultural hearth assume its ultimate character.”1 In 1748, the Swedish traveler Peter Kalm observed of the Delaware Valley, “ …the houses here are commonly built in the English manner.” So they were. But the choice of English architectural models was very different from those in Massachusetts and Virginia.2

These differences were most visible in building materials. At first the houses of English settlers in the Delaware Valley were made mostly of wood. “For covering the house, ends and sides,” one wrote home, “we use clapboard, which is rived feather-edged of five foot and a half long. … this may seem a mean way of building, but “‘tis sufficient and safest for ordinary beginners.” There was nothing specially American about these early structures; they were “plastered and ceil’d, as in England.”3

Within the first generation, houses in West Jersey and Pennsylvania began to be rebuilt of more durable materials. On both banks of the Delaware River, farm houses were constructed of the beautiful gray-brown fieldstone which give the vernacular architecture of this region its special character and enduring charm. These country houses of the Delaware Valley were similar in outward appearance to farm houses in the north of England. Methods of masonry in the Delaware resembled split-cobble and field-stone farm buildings of the Lake counties, north Lancashire, west Yorkshire, east Cheshire and the Peak District of Derbyshire.4

In the New World a few changes in building materials were necessary. Lintels, doorways and window frames could not easily be made of stone, and so were constructed of wood in America. But in other ways the fieldstone farmhouses of West Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania were fundamentally like domestic buildings in the North Midlands of England.

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The vernacular architecture of the Delaware Valley was very different from that of New England and Virginia. Fieldstone walls, slate roofs and simple wood trim were all combined in a plain style that emerged from Quaker-Pietist values and North Midland traditions. Two distinctive building plans also developed in this region. One was the Quaker Plan House, which commonly had three rooms on the first floor, a corner stair, and a chimney stack with several fireplaces grouped economically together on one exterior wall. This design made efficient use of a limited space and materials, and was used in both urban and rural settings. Another was the Four-over-Four House, which tended to be a large symmetrical structure with four spacious rooms and central halls on both floors. These houses tended to appear wherever English Quakers made their homes. They were also adopted by other ethnic groups in the Delaware Valley.

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Pent roofs and door hoods contributed to the special character of Quaker architecture in Pennsylvania. Many houses and barns in the Delaware Valley were built with these small coverings extending outward above doors and windows on the ground floor. Pent roofs had been and still are common features of vernacular architecture in the North Midlands of England, from Cheshire and Derbyshire north to Cumbria.

Strong continuities also appeared in building motifs as well as materials. A striking feature of houses, meetings, and out-buildings in Pennsylvania and West Jersey were small pent roofs projecting outward from front walls above windows and doors. Some of these roofs ran the entire breadth of the house; others were no wider than the doors and windows that they protected. They were commonly supported by white-painted wooden timbers which made a pleasing contrast with the fieldstone walls. These pent roofs had been commonly found on barns, shops and houses of northern England—from the Midlands north to Lancashire and Yorkshire, where they are called “pentise” or “pentice” roofs.5 Throughout Pennsylvania and West Jersey, houses without pent roofs were often given small gabled roof hoods which projected at right angles to the wall. Hooded roofs were covered with slate and supported by strong but simple wooden frames. The same custom may still be seen in the North Midlands of England.6

Houses in the Delaware Valley tended to be built on several distinctive plans. One is called by architectural historians the “Quaker-plan” house. This tended to be a simple cottage with three rooms on the first story, a corner stair leading to a full second story, and a chimneystack with several fireplaces on one wall. This plan often appeared in the North Midlands of England. It became common throughout West Jersey and Pennsylvania, and also appeared in other American regions where Quaker emigrants settled.7

Another common “Quaker plan” was the spacious “four over four” house in the Delaware Valley, which strongly resembled larger homes throughout the north of England.8 Historian Barry

Levy has found that Quaker houses, though very plain, tended to be larger and more comfortable than homes built by Anglicans or Congregationalists. He also discovered that the homes of Quakers had more bedrooms (and beds) in proportion to living spaces. Levy concludes that Quaker homes gave more attention to privacy and domesticity than did the more “publicly oriented Anglican houses.”9

The interiors of these buildings tended to be exceptionally bright, clean, austere and spacious. Walls were plastered with a mixture of lime and hair. The houses were furnished sparsely in an almost monastic style which Max Weber called worldly asceticism. The journals of American Friends expressed a strong and persistent hostility to what Joshua Evans called “superfluities of various sorts .such as fine houses, rich furniture and gaudy apparel.”10 Quaker meetings actively intervened in these questions; one of them admonished its members that kitchens should not be decorated with “flourishing needless pewter and brass.”11

Inventories of Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean described in detail the same austerity of house furnishings—a few rush-bottomed ladderback chairs around a plain board table in the dining room; a cupboard, a few stools and a long seat in the parlor; bedsteads and benches in the bedroom; and nothing but the necessities in the kitchen.12 Amelia Gummere remembered the simple pine tables of Burlington houses in her youth, their only decoration the golden grain of the wood itself, glowing with age.13 Rugs were condemned as “vain” and “needless” decorations. Quakers called them floorcloths.14

To these building ways, other elements were later added. German Pietists introduced sturdy barns with a special style of fachwerk construction distinguished by heavy wall braces, massive floor joists and heavy roof purlins. German immigrants also used distinctive house plans—such as the flürkuchenhaus (corridor-kitchen house), with a spacious kitchen that spanned the full length of the building, and the kreuzhaus (crosshouse) where the long kitchen was partitioned into a pantry.15 Another ethnic style was the Swiss bank house, which was built into the side of a hill, with kitchens and workspaces on the ground floor.16

A distinctive style of urban architecture also developed in the Delaware Valley. Philadelphia quickly came to resemble parts of Bristol, London and Dublin in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century—brick fronts with raised entries on one side and cellarways on the other, and chaste details which created an atmosphere of simplicity, dignity, serenity and grace.

These various building traditions shared many qualities in common. All of them cultivated the plain style in sturdy structures that were designed for use rather than display. They developed within a culture that was dominated by the values of English Quakers and German Pietists. As time passed, they tended to fertilize each other within a regional style that was fully developed as early as the mid-eighteenth century.

Image Delaware Family Ways:
The Quaker Idea of the Family of Love

 

Ideas of the family among the Quakers were as distinctive as their language and architecture—and deeply interesting to historians of domestic life. Some scholars believe that the origins of the “modern American family” are to be found in the folkways of the Delaware Valley. Historian Barry Levy argues that the Quaker settlements were “the first scene of a major, widespread, obviously successful assertion of the child-centered, fond-fostering, nuclear family in early America and most likely in the Anglo-American world.”1

There is an important element of truth in this thesis. But the Quaker family must be understood in its own terms, not those of a later era. It is important to note that Quakers used the word

“family” in ways that differed fundamentally from modern meanings. They spoke of the Society of Friends itself as their “family.” George Fox characterized a Quaker meeting as “a Family of God,” and a “household of faith.” Meetings both in England and America routinely addressed each other as “brethren of one family.” These were more than mere metaphors. Quakers considered all Friends as their “near relations” and welcomed them to hearth and home. In this respect, Quaker ideas of the family were not more nuclear than those of other English colonists, but actually less so.2

In every Anglo-American culture, the nuclear family was the normal unit of residence, and the extended family was the conventional unit of thought. The Quakers were no exception to this rule. They commonly lived in nuclear households, but thought of grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces as members of their family. Relatives by marriage were not “in-laws,” but were called simply “father,” “brother” or “sister.” In these respects, the family ways of the Quakers were similar to most other English-speaking people in their own time. But the Quakers submerged the nuclear and the extended family in a larger sphere which was their “family of God.”3

Quaker family customs were also distinctive in other ways. Tests such as the descent of names show that the intensity of nuclear consciousness in Quaker families was stronger than in Anglican Virginia, but weaker than in Puritan New England. The physical composition of households in the Delaware Valley also showed a similar pattern, which was intermediate between the northern and southern colonies. An average Quaker household had smaller numbers of children than in New England, and larger numbers of servants. But by comparison with Virginia, it had more children and fewer servants.4

Quaker ideas of the family were less hierarchical than those of New England Puritans or Virginia Anglicans. Even as many Friends continued to insist that children should obey their parents, and that the young should honor their elders, they tended to think of the family and the household as a union of individuals who were equal in the sight of God. A European visitor in the Quaker household of John Bartram was astonished to find that everybody dined together at the same table—parents, children, hired men, servants and slaves:

There was a long table full of victuals: at the lowest part sat his Negroes; his hired men were next, then the family and myself; and at the head the venerable father and his wife presided. Each reclined his head and said his prayers.5

This not a system of strict equality, but it was more egalitarian than attitudes in other Western cultures.

Also, Quakers gave special emphasis to the ideal of love as the spiritual cement of the family. One first-generation Pennsylvanian wrote to his children, “There is so much beauty in beholding brothers and sisters living in Love, endeavoring to help one another, as occasion may require.” Their family correspondence was commonly a testimony of love between parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.6

Quakers repudiated the principle of fear as the cement of family relations. Puritans and Anglicans both regarded fear as a healthy emotion, and urged that it should be cultivated in relations between parents and children, and even husbands and wives. Members of the Society of Friends, however, actively condemned fear as an organizing principle of human relationships, except fear of God. They built their ideas of the family upon a radically different base.

In the words of founder George Fox, the Quakers, believed that the family should “outstrip and exceed the world, in virtue, in purity, in chastity, in godliness and in holiness; and in modesty, civility, and in righteousness and in love.”7 They tended to think of the family as a spiritual communion which was a sanctuary of goodness and love in a world of sin and hatred. Here was another belief that flowed from the sectarian thrust of their faith, with its idea of “gathering out” from a sinful world.

Moreover, Quakers believed that the members of a household should hold themselves apart from others who were not of their kin and faith. Meetings repeatedly urged Friends to insulate the family from other non-related people in the world. In 1682, for example, one Quaker meeting strongly advised “those who do not require them to guard against the admission of servants into their houses,” if those servants were not Quakers themselves.8 They were especially concerned about admitting elements of spiritual discord to the household.9 Further, Quakers tended to believe that the primary role of the family was to raise its children and to promote the spiritual health of its various members. The special intensity of the Quaker family as a child-centered institution arose directly from a religious imperative. In many ways, these Quaker beliefs seemed very close to that shimmering ideal of a “child-centered, fond-fostering, nuclear family” which would dominate thinking about familial relations in our own time. But it is important to recognize the vast distance that separated their values and purposes from those of secular American families three centuries later. The importance that Quakers gave to the ideal of familial love, to the primacy of child rearing, and to the idea of the family as a spiritual sanctuary, all derived from a system of Christian belief that belonged to the seventeenth century and not to the twentieth. The Quaker family was never thought to be an end in itself, but an instrument of God’s holy purposes in the world.

Other family ways were also introduced to the Delaware Valley, by different ethnic groups—in particular by immigrants from Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Ideas of the family among German Pietists tended to be more hierarchical than those of English Quakers, but in other respects were very much the same. In both groups one finds the same ideas of the “family of God,” and similar conceptions of “the family of love.” These ideas of the family had important implications for marriage, gender, sexuality, child rearing, age-relations and inheritance. On all of those questions, English Quakers and German Pietists together created a web of custom in the Delaware Valley which was distinctly different from prevailing practices in Massachusetts and Virginia.

Image Delaware Marriage Ways:
The Quaker Idea of Marriage as “Loving Agreement”

 

The Quakers also brought to America a strict set of marriage customs, which specified who one might marry, how and when and where and why. These questions were urgently important to the Society of Friends—so much so that its founder, George Fox, wrote no fewer than sixty epistles about marriage. Other leaders frequently addressed the same themes.

On the question of marriage partners, Quakers strongly condemned what they called “mongrel marriages” to “unbelievers.”1 Outmarriage caused many disciplinary proceedings by Quaker meetings. In 1706, for example, one English meeting recorded the disownment of a member named Bartholemew Mastin:

[He] hath gone and joyned himself in marriage with one that is not one of our profession and that we are altogether strangers to … according to the holy writ that believers should not marry with unbelievers … we do deny and disown the said Bartholemew.2

This Quaker rule against outmarriage was strictly enforced in America. For nearly two centuries, half of all the disciplinary proceedings among Pennsylvania Quakers were about problems of courtship, and marriage with “unbelievers.” The frequency of these cases increased with time.3

The rule against outmarriage was grounded not merely in a negative principle of sectarian exclusion, but in the positive idea that marriages should be founded in true Christian love. To the Quakers, love did not mean romantic attraction, sexual passion or even domestic affection. Their idea of “pure and true love” was not the Greek eros or Roman amor but the Christian caritas and pietas which were thought to be attainable only between true believers.

Quakers insisted that marriage should not be for lust. One Friend wrote in his Commonplace Book:

If thou resolute [sic] to change a single life

And hast a purpose to become a wife,

Then chuse thy husband not for worldly gain,

Nor for his comely shape or beauty vain.

If money make the match or Lust impure

Both bride and bridegroom too shall weep be sure.4

But Quaker moralists demanded that love must be a part of every marriage. They believed that marriage should be a union of “sweethearts,” a word which they often used. Further, they insisted that love should precede marriage, and not merely follow it. But this was to be the pure and undefiled love between Christians, and not a carnal appetite for the flesh.5

Quakers also condemned dynastic marriages which were made for material gain. They forbade first-cousin marriages which were commonplace in Virginia. During the eighteenth century, many Quaker meetings even discouraged unions between second cousins—a major restriction in small rural communities, and an exceptionally difficult problem for the Delaware elite.6 They insisted that a marriage must be acceptable to the family, the meeting and the entire community of Friends. The formal consent of all parents was required; without it permission to marry was refused.7 The approval of a large part of the community was also sought. One Quaker marriage certificate in England (1735) was signed by no fewer than twenty-three supporting witnesses. The marriage of William Penn and Gulielma Springett (1672) was supported by forty-six witnesses, who testified that the couple had “first obtained the good will and consent of their nearest friends and relations.” These customs were also kept in America. Members of the Delaware elite had as many as fifty witnesses; ordinary country folk often had twenty or thirty.8

These various rules were strictly enforced by the Society of Friends. One result was that marriage came late among both English Quakers and German Pietists. Mean age at first marriage was higher than among Anglicans.9

Another consequence was that many Quakers never married at all. One study of the Society of Friends in New Jersey during the eighteenth century found that 16 percent of women were still single at the age of fifty. By comparison with other colonies, these numbers of spinsters were large. In New England and Virginia, 95 to 98 percent of women married during the same period. The difference cannot be explained in terms of sex ratios. It was caused by different cultural ideas of marriage.10

Quaker ideas of marriage were also expressed in wedding rituals, which differed in many curious details from matrimonial customs in Puritan Massachusetts and Anglican Virginia. These practices changed very little during the period of American colonization. A leading authority writes, “The Society of Friends had established its marriage customs in England and … the practices were transferred intact to the New World.” The rituals of marriage within the Society of Friends developed in reaction to the complexities of Episcopal and Congregational observances. But Quaker marriages became so fantastically elaborate that Puritan and Anglican practices seemed simplicity itself.11

A proper Quaker wedding had no fewer than sixteen stages. When a man and woman agreed to marry, their first formal step was to consult their parents, which sometimes they did even before settling the question among themselves. When Pennsylvania Quaker Benjamin Ferris decided to marry, he asked his own parents first, then his future wife, and then her parents—a common sequence.12

If all agreed, the couple jointly announced their intention to marry before the women’s meeting. After an interval which gave the community time to digest the news, a female Friend formally sent a notice to the men’s meeting. The intending couple then presented themselves before the men’s meeting and announced that “with the Lord’s permission and Friends’ approbation they intend to take each other in marriage.” Thereafter, the men’s meeting consulted the parents of both partners. Unless approval was given in writing a marriage could not proceed. If either partner came from another meeting, the men’s meeting also solicited “certificates of cleanliness,” from that body. This process required a second session of the men’s meeting, so that overseers could report on their inquiries.

At this stage a waiting period was imposed—often two meetings in duration—while others were given time to make objections. After the prescribed period had passed, the men’s meeting formally considered the question, and agreed either to approve or forbid the union. This was called “passing the meeting,” and was a great event.

The wedding could now proceed. Another stage followed in which the formal preparations were made. A supper was organized for the families and close friends.13 Then, invitations were sent for the wedding itself, and the date and hour of the wedding were made known. Without this formal announcement, the wedding could not occur. On the appointed day, the marriage at last took place. It proceeded very much like a meeting for worship. People entered quietly and sat in silence, sometimes for very long periods. Those who wished to speak could rise and say what they wished, and some were moved to speak at length. Then, almost as an anticlimax, the intended couple quietly declared their agreement to marry, and spoke promises to one another in words of their own invention. After this exchange, everyone sat silently for a while, and quietly went home.

The newly married couple went to the house of the bride’s father, and lived there commonly for two weeks, receiving visitors every day. After that period had passed, the newly married couple settled in their own home, which was often built for them by friends and neighbors. Then a long period followed in which the newly married couple returned such visits as they wished. This visiting process was conducted with great care, for by returning a visit the couple announced they wished to have a continuing association. By not doing so, associations came to an end.14

The actual Quaker wedding “ceremony” was very plain, but the entire process of marriage became exceptionally complex. It was an agreement not merely between a man and a woman, but between a couple and a community.

Image Delaware Gender Ways:
The Quaker Idea of “Help-Meets for Each Other”

 

On subject of gender, the Quakers had a saying: “In souls there is no sex.” This epigram captured one of the deepest differences between the founders of the Delaware colonies and their neighbors to the north and south.1 Of all the English-speaking people in the seventeenth century, the Quakers moved farthest toward the idea of equality between the sexes. Their founder George Fox set the tone, writing in his journal as early as the year 1647:

I met with a sort of people that held women have no souls, adding in a light manner, no more than a goose. I reproved them, and told them that was not right, for Mary said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.”2

His followers developed this idea into a doctrine that differences of sex were merely carnal, that men and women were equal in the spirit, and that spiritual “power was one in the male and in the female, one spirit, one light, one life, one power, which brings forth the same witness.”3

Most Quakers wholeheartedly subscribed to these principles. A leading historian of their faith writes that “the equality of men and women in spiritual privilege and responsibility has always been one of the glories of Quakerism.”4

In consequence, the role of women within the Society of Friends differed fundamentally from other Protestant denominations. Most Christians followed Paul’s teaching: “Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection … suffer not a woman to preach.”5 The Quakers always went another way. From the start, female Friends preached equally with men, and became leading missionaries and “ministers” in their faith. The pattern was set by George Fox’s first convert, a grandmother named Elizabeth Hooten (1600-1672) who also became the Quakers’ first woman preacher and died on a mission to America at the age of seventy-two. In 1658, another Quaker missionary named Mary Fisher traveled alone through the Ottoman Empire, and even attempted to convert the Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV. Other female missionaries preached actively on both sides of the Atlantic, and shared the spiritual labor of their society.6

Quaker women suffered persecution equally with men. A serving maid named Dorothy Waugh was dragged through the streets of Carlisle with an iron bridle in her mouth to keep her from preaching to the men of that northern city. In Starford, another Quaker woman who preached to an Anglican congregation was seized by the church officers and locked in a cage, “and there she did sit seven hours, where she was pissed on, and spit on.” Near Ormskirk in Lancashire, a Quaker minister named Rebecca Barnes was beaten to death by an angry mob. In Salem, Massachusetts, Puritan magistrates ordered that Quaker Cassandra Southwick should have her children taken and sold at public auction. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged missionary Elizabeth

Hooten was severely flogged with a three-corded whip, then taken to Dedham and Watertown and whipped twice again and abandoned in the woods. Undaunted, she returned to Cambridge where she was assaulted by a mob of Harvard students and faculty, whipped severely at a cart’s tail through four Puritan towns, and left lying in the New England woods once again—bloody, battered and half-naked. An even worse fate was in store for Quaker missionary Mary Dyer, a “comely woman and a grave matron,” who defied a sentence of banishment from Massachusetts, and was hanged on a high hill in Boston, her skirt billowing in the wind “like a flag,” as one Puritan observed.7

These acts of violence against Quaker women arose in part from their headlong challenge to an entire system of gender relations. In the seventeenth century, the mere appearance of a female preacher was enough to start a riot. As late as 1763 the spectacle of “she-preaching” seemed perverse and unnatural to many Englishmen, and gave rise to Dr. Samuel Johnson’s famous canard, which was aimed specifically at female Quakers:

Boswell: I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the People called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach.

Johnson: Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.8

The Quakers themselves did not entirely escape these conventional prejudices. Their idea of spiritual equality between the sexes had its limits. The early Friends were not modern feminists, and normally expected female preachers to show a measure of modesty and restraint. It was said of Ann Camm, for example:

She had wisdom to know the time and season of her service, in which she was a good example to her sex; for without extraordinary impulse and concern it was rare for her to preach in large meetings, where she knew there were brethren qualified for the service of such meetings; and she was grieved when any, especially of her sex, should be too hasty, forward, or unseasonable in their appearing in such meetings.9

Image

Quaker women played larger roles in the Society of Friends during the seventeenth century than did females in any other Christian denomination. This scene from an old print shows a female “tub preacher” expounding Scripture to a rapt audience of both sexes. Puritans and Anglicans forbade women to preach before men.

Ann Camm was no shrinking violet. She was regarded as the “leading woman Friend in Westmorland,” and a strident critic of church tithes. Her attitude suggests the distance between her world and that of modern feminism.10

The interplay of these ideas gave rise to a unique institutional structure within the Society of Friends, in which Quaker men and women came together for meetings of worship, but sat apart in separate meetings for business. George Fox explained the reason:

There are some dark spirits that would have no women’s meetings, but as men should meet with them, which women cannot for civility and modesty’s sake speak amongst men of women’s matters, neither can modest men desire it and none but Ranters will desire to look into women’s matters.11

William Penn agreed:

Why should women meet apart? We think for a very good reason. The church increaseth, which increaseth the business of the church, and women whose bashfulness will not permit them to say or do much, as to church affairs before men, when by themselves, may exercise their gift of wisdom and understanding, in a direct care of their own sex.12

Women’s meetings were introduced to the Delaware Valley by 1681. They kept their own records, enforced their own discipline, exchanged epistles with other meetings throughout the world, ran their own system of charity, and managed their own funds, independent of male control. They became institutions of high importance in the Quaker colonies.13

In secular relations between the sexes, Quakers were unable to escape entirely the hierarchical beliefs that surrounded them. But the precept that “in souls there is no sex” proved to be an expansive principle which created a fundamentally different tone in the culture of the Quaker colonies. If the Quakers did not completely realize the ideal of gender equality, they came closer to it than any contemporary religious group in British America. Their continued striving toward that distant goal had important consequences for the regional culture of the Delaware Valley.

An example was the way in which Quakers struggled with the problem of authority within the family. Attitudes were mixed. One conservative Friend addressed husbands in the traditional Pauline language as those “who in the ordinances of God are placed to be a head over your wives.” He urged men to “rule over your wives as the weaker vessel, not domineering over them in your own perverse will, but ruling them in the fear of the lord, as those who hope to be fellow heirs with them of eternal life.”14 Some Quaker meetings also recognized special responsibilities in male heads of families. In 1677, for example, the Morley Meeting in Cheshire agreed that “It is thought good and also judged meet that every man friend who is a ruler of a family do give in a public testimony against tithes and steeplehouse lands.”15 But the meetings explicitly included wives as “rulers.” Their epistles addressed both parents as “heads of family,” and spoke of “male heads” and “female heads.” This differed from the customs of other people in the same period.16 Quakers also modified another biblical precept in the book of Genesis where woman was created as the help-meet for a man. George Fox insisted that each gender was meant to help the other. “They are helps-meet, man and woman,” he declared.17

As a rule, Quaker households were less male-dominant than those of Puritans or Anglicans. Men and women in Massachusetts and Virginia were apt to speak of their homes as “my father’s house.” Quakers spoke of “my father and mother’s house.” Father came first, but the values of the Quakers were reflected in this semantical equality among husbands and wives.

Similar attitudes also entered the institutional fabric of the Delaware colonies. The laws of the Quaker provinces were the first in America to use routinely the double pronoun “he or she.” In the culture of the Delaware Valley, women had exceptionally high status, and sometimes much power and influence as well. A good example was Susannah Wright, who inherited the property of Samuel Blunston, one of the richest Quakers in the first generation. One who knew her wrote:

Susanna Wright was a person of note in this place. Her education was superior to most in her day. She was consulted on all difficult matters, did the writings necessary in the place, was charitable to the poor in a great degree, gave medicine gratis to all the neighborhood. She lived and died in the principles of Friends.18

For a woman to be “consulted on all difficult matters” was very rare in New England and virtually unknown in Virginia. Here was another indicator that women did indeed have exceptionally high status in the Quaker colonies.

Actual practices in this region, of course, varied broadly from one ethnic group to another and even from one family to the next. Some Quaker women in Pennsylvania complained bitterly in their diaries of the soul-destroying drudgery of their lives. The Quaker Anne Cooper Whit all quoted the biblical lament:

I am like a pelican of the wilderness. I am like an owl of the desert … and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top. Mine enemies reproach me all the day and they are all against me. My days are like a shadow that declineth. I am withered like the grass. … I think there is no comfort anywhere; nothing but sorrow at home … I was very unwell and often thinks I can’t live long.19

Still more wretched was Anne Cooper Whitall’s friend Alice Hayes, who suffered many indignities from her overbearing husband:

Many trials she met with from her husband. She says sometimes when I have been going to dress my best to go to meeting, my husband would take away my clothes from me; but that I valued not and would go with such as I had, so that he soon left off that.20

Anne Cooper Whitall commented,

I do believe there is much to met with now from the men as she met with, and where will the truth get to, or who will dare to say they have it.21

But other households came closer to the ideal. Some Quaker husbands actively supported their wives in social activities that were forbidden outright to women in other Christian cultures. In Wrightstown, Pennsylvania, for example, Samuel Bownas recalled a woman who “had something to say, though but little, as a minister, and her husband thought she did not give way to her gift as [often as] she ought.” He encouraged her to speak out, and to take a leading role in her community. The range of custom was very broad in the Delaware Valley. But it was not the same range as in other English colonies.22

These gender ways arose not only from the religious beliefs of the Quakers, but also from the regional culture of England’s North Midlands. In the mother country, Quaker teachings on gender (and many other questions) found their strongest following within an area which had a distinct ethnic character, as a consequence of having been heavily settled from Scandinavia. The coastline of Lancashire and Cheshire, with its many rivers and sheltered bays, provided easy access for Norse invaders who colonized the North Midlands more densely than any other part of England. Scholars have noted a striking spatial correlation between the north midland region where Quakers flourished and the area of Viking colonization.23

In Scandinavian culture, women enjoyed positions of high social status, with full legal rights. The burial mounds of females were on a par with males of the same rank. The Norse sagas were full of strong-minded and independent women who were not culturally equal to men in all respects but who expected to be treated with equality of esteem. A notable example in Njal’s Saga was Hallgerd, a “hard-willed” and high-spoken Viking lady who talked with “confidence and ease” in the presence of men. In the Laxdaela Saga there was Unn the Deep Minded who led her male kin from Britain to Iceland. And there was the great Viking heroine Gudrun, “the loveliest woman in Iceland … the shrewdest and best spoken of women,” who inspired men with her dreams.24

In many respects the Viking women who settled England’s North Midlands were very different from the Quakers who came after them. Before the arrival of Christianity, Norse females carried daggers in their dresses and did not hesitate to use them when treated with disrespect. The sagas tell of more than one Norse warrior who returned in triumph from some epic slaughter only to be murdered by his Viking wife for a minor act of domestic incivility. But even as Quaker women turned against this violent past, they preserved the strength of character, independence of mind, tenacity of purpose and high courage of their Scandinavian ancestors, and also demanded in their different way to be treated with respect. If the Quaker doctrine that “in souls there is no sex” arose from a religious belief, that religion in turn developed within an ethnic and a regional culture which had important consequences for Anglo-American history.

Image Delaware Sex Ways:
“Not to Go into Her but for Propagation”

 

The Quaker doctrine that “in souls there is no sex” also had another meaning. Among Friends, the Inner Light was thought to be the enemy of the carnal spirit. Quakers drew a sharp distinction between love and lust. William Penn wrote, “It is the difference betwixt lust and love that this is fixed, that volatile. Love grows, lust wastes by enjoyment.”1

The meetings of Friends, often very active in the discipline of their members, heard sexual offenses less frequently than did Puritans or Anglicans; but when they did so, the punishments were severe. Fornication before marriage, a venial sin for Puritans of Massachusetts and the Anglicans of Virginia, was sometimes cause for disownment, the heaviest penalty in the power of a meeting to inflict. The Leeds preparative meeting, for example, heard only three cases of fornication in twenty years (1692-1712)—all males. But two cases ended in disownment; the third offender was allowed to remain only after receiving condemnation in two successive meetings.2

Quakers were specially interested in ending the sexual exploitation of social inferiors. George Fox in 1672 insisted that any master who had sexual relations with a female servant must marry her, “no matter what the difference in outward rank or race.”3 The meetings of Friends also specifically condemned the predatory attitude toward sexuality which had been so much a part of Virginia’s sexual customs. The Marsden monthly meeting agreed that

All men who hunt after women, from woman to woman, and also women whose affection runs some time after one man and soon after to another and so … draws out the affection one of another and after a while leaves one another and goes to others and do the same things and the doing makes them more like sodomites than the saints and is not of God’s moving nor joyning together.4

In addition to these actions by Quaker meetings, the public laws of Pennsylvania were very harsh in their repression of sexual offenses. That colony’s Law Code of 1683 included a statute against fornication which specified that both single men and women should be punished “by enjoyning marriage, or fine, or corporal punishment, or any or all of these.” This statute was more rigorous than those of Massachusetts, Virginia or England. After 1700 it was disallowed by the Crown as “unreasonable.”5

For adultery, the penalty in Pennsylvania after 1682 was a year’s imprisonment for the first offense and life imprisonment for the second. A revision in 1700 required that adulterers on the third offense should be branded on the forehead with the letter A. They were not merely required to sew the letter to their clothing as in New England. Quakers decreed that the faces of adulterers should be disfigured permanently for their crime. Quakers did not hang people for adultery, as did the Puritans, but this was because of a difference in attitudes toward capital punishment rather than toward the crime itself.6

For the offenses of sodomy and bestiality, the laws of Pennsylvania ordered single men to be imprisoned for life, and whipped every three months. Married men were ordered to be divorced and castrated. Imperial authorities also disallowed this statute as “unreasonable” and excessively severe. The Quakers were not libertarian in matters of the flesh.7

On the question of sex within marriage, Quakers were not of one mind. Some carried their sexual asceticism to the point of condemning all carnal relations between husband and wife. This was actually a prevailing view among Friends in New England for a brief period. When the missionary couple Joseph Nicholson and his wife came to Salem in 1660, they reported that most Quaker couples totally abstained from sexual relations; one couple had done so for four years; others for a year or more. The Quaker Mary Dyer who was hanged at Boston believed in total celibacy within marriage.8 This attitude survived among radical Quakers even to the late eighteenth century, and gave rise to a sect of Quaker heretics called Shaking Quakers or simply Shakers, who seceded largely on the question of marital celibacy.

Most Quakers did not believe in celibacy, but many tried to restrain sexual activity within marriage. In 1795 a Quaker named Joshua Evans had an interesting conversation with a Shaker on the morality of sex within marriage. The Shaker declared: “The manner you gratify yourselves with your wives when they are not in a capacity of conception but to gratify your lust is fornication, as it is not for multiplying.” To this the Quaker replied:

I told him if others erred they [the Shakers] did on the other hand in forbidding what Christ did not, but taught to leave father and mother and cleave to his wife. And though I did see they were in error, his remarks are worthy of serious thought, that none may abuse that privilege of marriage by gratifying lustful inclinations, with no design of multiplying, and though they carry the matter to an extreme the other way, yet in beholding the sins committed by men and women I do not wonder some are raised up who will not touch women that way. Though I told him the right path lay between us viz. to marry but not to go into her but for propagation and asked if he did not believe the same. He said yea.9

That rule of sexual restraint was often carried into practice. Abstinence for extended periods seems to have been common and even normal in Quaker families. Even between husbands and wives, the Quakers urged restraint in the exercise of “animal passions.” When English Quaker Robert Dudley married for the third time, he was visited by two Quaker spinsters of advanced age.

He was warned by one of them against too fondly indulging in conjugal delights, lest, (like Sampson formerly) he should lose the means of his strength, whilst reposing in the lap of his Delilah. The other minister felt (or thought that she felt) a like concern for both, and my friend assured me, alluded to some things about which they (as old maids) could not have been supposed to know anything. And all this too in the presence of a youth, the son and stepson of the parties!10

Behind this attitude lay an assumption that sex was sinful in itself, and that a strong physical relationship between a husband and wife threatened to weaken the spiritual foundation of a proper marriage.

Here again the tone was set by William Penn. As early as 1671, when he prepared to marry the beautiful Gulielma Springett, Penn began to be tormented by stirrings of “lust” and “lewd thoughts.” To restrain them, he wrote a paper for the men’s meeting on the eve of his marriage, in which he prayed that he and his wife “may not give way to the inordinate aboundings of affection, for that dishonors the marriage bed, yea that is a defiled bed, as well as grosser pollutions.”11

One unintended consequence of this attitude was that Quakers became the first people in Anglo-America who succeeded in controlling fertility within marriage. In the beginning, birth rates were very high in the Delaware Valley. A Welsh Quaker immigrant named Gabriel Thomas observed before 1690 that there was “seldom any young married woman but hath a child in her belly, or one upon her lap.”12 But as early as the mid-eighteenth centuryperhaps even earlier—Quakers in the Delaware Valley and also on the island of Nantucket were practicing some method of birth limitation within marriage. How they managed to do so remains unknown, perhaps unknowable. No evidence survives of coitus interruptus in any Quaker family, or contraceptive technology. But much quantitative evidence testifies to a regime of sexual abstinence, single beds, separate rooms and the control of physical contact between husbands and wives.

From an early date, Quakers also encouraged the practices that would be called prudery in the nineteenth century. Quaker meetings carefully monitored female dress and sternly forbade even the slightest hint of sensuality. In 1718 the London yearly meeting went so far as to condemn “naked necks.”13 Ordinary language was carefully purged of carnal connotation. A French traveler in the eighteenth century was startled to discover that respectable ladies of Pennsylvania could not bring themselves to speak plainly about their bodies even to their physicians, but delicately described everything from neck to waist as their “stomachs,” and anything from waist to feet as their “ankles.”14 This prudery had an important function. It lowered the general level of sexual tension in social relationships, even between husbands and wives. The Quakers of the Delaware Valley were very different in that respect from both the New England Puritans and Virginia Anglicans, but very similar to their co-believers in England.

A similar spirit of sexual asceticism was shared by many groups of German Pietists, some of whom practice it to this day. It also became part of the official culture of Philadelphia, which was very different from New York or Baltimore. For many generations, what Digby Baltzell calls “mild sexlessness in the Quaker tradition” set a tone for the sexual ideology of an American region.15

Image Delaware Child-naming Ways: Quaker Onomastics

 

Another clue to the character of this culture appeared in the ways that it named its children. Among Friends, there were no godparents and christening ceremonies as in Anglican Virginia, and no baptisms as in Puritan Massachusetts. Quakers condemned these “needless” practices as corruptions of Christianity. They put their own babies through another sort of onomastic ritual which was called the “nomination.” The infant’s name was carefully selected by the parents, certified by friends, witnessed by the neighbors, and solemnly entered in the register of the meeting. By the late seventeenth century, this event gradually became a typical Quaker anti-ceremony of the most elaborately studied simplicity. In 1694, William Penn described the custom of “nomination” as follows:

The parents name their own children, which is usually some days after they are born, in the presence of the midwife if she can be there, and those that were at the birth, who afterward sign a certificate, for that purpose prepared, of the birth and name of the child or children, which is recorded in a proper book in the Monthly meeting to which the Parents belong, avoiding the accustomed ceremonies and festivals.1

Delaware Quakers also differed from other English-speaking people in the descent of names from one generation to the next. Unlike New England Puritans, Quakers named their first-born children after grandparents. Unlike Virginia Anglicans, they were careful to honor maternal and paternal lines in an even-handed way. An example was the family of Thomas and Rachel Wharton, who came to Pennsylvania from Westmorland and Wales. They named their first-born children after grandparents on both sides of the family, and later arrivals after themselves in the following order:

Image

The eldest son was named after the mother’s father, and the eldest daughter after the father’s mother.

A son born of that union, John Wharton, married Mary Dubbins, daughter of James Dubbins. Their children were named as follows: