The Society of Friends, or Quakers as they are better known, have always stood apart from the mainstream of American religion. Because of this, they offer some important lessons about the range of religious beliefs and practices in early America. During the revolutionary era Quakers dominated Philadelphia, at the time the largest city in America and a center of support for independence. They struggled in special ways with the relations between religion and the American Revolution. Their struggles were rooted in their particular beliefs.
Quakers believed in the inner light. This was the notion that God was a spiritual presence within each individual and could speak to all humans through the words and actions of anyone. Their spiritualism led them to reject worldliness more than most Protestants, and they became easy to recognize by their use of the informal pronouns thee and thou and their refusal to doff their hats to their social superiors since they tried at all times to promote a spiritual equality. Quakers also refused to take oaths. Quaker worship also emphasized equality by letting all persons participate on the same basis. Quakers had no ordained ministers, and at services there was no public Bible reading or sermon, just silence, until the spirit moved someone to speak about a religious story or some personal experience. Women could speak as well as men, although over time, men and women came to meet for worship separately. Quakers read the Bible, but because of their highly individualized and spiritual attitudes, the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection did not have the same importance for them as for most early Americans. Most orthodox Americans considered Quaker beliefs to be radical and threatening to the social and religious order based on biblical authority. They were outcasts in many parts of America and tended to live together in separate communities, although by 1770 these communities were found all along the Atlantic seaboard.
The largest Quaker communities were in the parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey centered around Philadelphia. The English Quaker William Penn founded the city in 1682 as a refuge for fellow Quakers, and guaranteed religious toleration and freedom of conscience in the colony’s frame of government. By the 1750s, Philadelphia was a large city, remarkable for its ethnic and religious diversity. Quakers mingled on the streets with Scots-Irish Presbyterians, English Congregationalists, Swedish Lutherans, Dutch Reformed Protestants, German Moravians, Anglicans, and even Roman Catholics. If Quakers were religiously just one group among many tolerated equals, socially and politically they were Pennsylvania’s first citizens. The colonial government concentrated political power in Quaker hands. The city’s commerce was similarly focused on the tight networks of Quaker families on both sides of the Atlantic that controlled shipping and trade and made the Quakers’ countinghouses at least as important as their meetinghouses. Many Quakers felt they had declined from the intense spirituality of the group’s early days. The coming of the Seven Years’ War changed this, however.
The growing conflict with Britain after the end of the Seven Years’ War brought new problems to Quakers. One of the basic beliefs of the Society of Friends was pacifism. The duty to testify to peace at every opportunity was taken seriously by most Quakers and had been at the root of the 1755 withdrawal from colonial government. As the Stamp Act crisis began to move Americans toward independence, Quakers were caught in the middle. At first Americans pursued economic measures, such as nonimportation, which at least some Quakers were willing to support as nonviolent. Others objected to any form of resistance to the acknowledged government, including boycotts. The coming of actual war in 1775 made it even harder for Quakers to participate in the patriots’ efforts even if they disagreed with Britain’s actions. Most Quakers refused to participate in the framing of the new state governments forming after 1776 or to serve in the Continental Army or in the state militias. They were criticized by their neighbors for their principled stand against war and were fined and punished by the American governments.
Another important issue to Quakers was the abolition of slavery, which had deep roots in the Quaker belief in the spiritual equality of all believers. Many Quakers held slaves and engaged in the slave trade just like their non-Quaker neighbors, but gradually more and more Society of Friends members came to see slavery as incompatible with their religious culture. Various meetings, including the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the general governing body of the large Pennsylvania Quaker community, spoke out about the evil of the slave trade and later, of slaveholding. Woolman was one early convert to antislavery, and he wrote a treatise about slavery in 1746 that was finally published in 1754. That same year the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting issued an epistle, or letter to the community, that declared slaveholding as unrighteous. In 1758 the Yearly Meeting took the first step toward enforcing that judgment. A committee was formed to visit local meetings and individuals, to educate them about the policy, and to impose sanctions on those who continued to be involved with slavery. The committee included Woolman, and he added these duties to his other chores as a traveling Quaker minister.
The most significant antislavery activist among the Quakers was Anthony Benezet, who took the emerging antislavery feeling of the 1750s to the next level, linking it to a more general humanitarian movement. Benezet came from a French Protestant family and converted to Quakerism after his immigration to America in 1731. In 1755 he opened the first advanced school for Quaker girls and later taught in the first Quaker school for blacks. Benezet read widely and wrote on many topics. His broad interests deeply informed his stand against slavery, which he attacked with arguments drawn from many disciplines. As part of his exploration of the effects of the slave trade, Benezet wrote the first English language history of West Africa. As Americans began to complain about their enslavement by the British during the Stamp Act crisis, Benezet taught and wrote to remind them of the conditions of African American slaves. This writing was some of the first to make an appeal against slavery on humanitarian grounds, trying to establish an emotional bond between slaves and white readers that would move the readers against slavery. Benezet also argued that blacks were not naturally inferior to whites and that the differences between the races could be accounted for by the degrading experience of life in bondage. These powerful arguments slowly had an effect. He reached several readers in England and Europe and made an important contribution to the emerging abolition movement in Britain.