THE QUAKER CONTEXT
The Quaker Context in American Literature, by the turbulent
1680s, in the aftermath of the republican experiment and before the Glorious
Revolution, England and its empire were in the throes of numerous controversies
over constitutional liberties and autocratic power. Against this backdrop arose
a sect of Christians, inspired by a man named George Fox, who had turned away
from every established church, Catholic, Anglican and Puritan in search of the
true road to God.
These were the Quakers. The Quakers believed that divine
guidance was not to be found in any outward church, or even in the Bible
(though the latter was of couke central to all faith). It was to be found in
the voice of conscience, which is God's voice. Neither rituals nor clergy were
needed. Even taking the sacraments in church was unnecessary. One's whole life
was instead to be a continuing baptism, in the sense of resisting sensual
evils, and a continuing communion, in the sense of a union with Christ. The
purpose of a religious gathering, what the Quakers called a meeting, was to
commune jointly, in silence, with the indwelling spirit. If a member felt
called upon to rise and speak, he was to do so freely and without concern for
his lack of clerical training. The Quakers were distrustful of learning, for
they felt it led to the sin of pride in self. True preaching came not from a
learned and arrogant ministry, they believed, but from within the body of the
meeting in the persons of "god-called" ministers.
American Enlightenment
The Quakers insisted upon living inviolate and orderly lives
of thrift and frugality. Every person should have a "calling," a
committed engagement to work in this world. Even in jail, the Quakers busily
set about working at crafts and skills. These habits helped to make them
well-to-do merchants, leading to the very best that they were people with one
foot in the meeting house and the other in the counting house.
But though the Quakers had a lot in common with the
Puritans, the two sects held theological opinions opposed to one another. The
Puritans were horrified by the Quakers belief in the perfectibility of all
human beings. If there is evil in the world, declared the Quakers, it lies in
external institutions of hierarchy, power and violence, not inside the human
heart. Where Puritans thought of God as supreme authority, and in his image
built strong institutions of government, in which the magistrate was ' central,
the Quakers regarded God as absolute love, and in his image built a civil
society without supervisory or superintending structures. Thus, the Quakers
sought to apply the Sermon on the Mount in the most literal sense, creating a
world of equality and fraternity here and now. They aided the poor and the
destitute, and were the first to condemn slavery. They believed in complete
equality between men and women--women had leading roles as charismatic leaders
in the Quaker movement--as well as between everyone in society. They would not
refer to anyone as "Mister" (which originally meant
"master"), called the King "Charles" instead of "King
Charles," and always used the familiar forms "thee" and
"thou" instead of the more formal "you" in interpersonal
conversation. Since "hat honor" was insisted upon in seventeenth century
European life (inferiors always took off their head covering in the presence of
superiors), Quakers wore theirs even in the king's presence.
The Quakers grew in numbers, reaching perhaps 60,000 by the
1680s, but this was in the face of sheer repression. It was common for a Quaker
congregation to be fined thousands of pounds for not attending Anglican
services, for Quakers by the thousands to be imprisoned or to have their
livelihood denied them for not taking oaths. What they wanted, therefore, was
to find a place of refuge abroad, some place in the king's empire where they
might live in peace--and, they hoped, attract converts by the virtue and purity
of their lives and religion. For years this searching went on, into the islands
of the Caribbean and on the North American mainland.
Literary Theory
In 1674 a group of Quakers, including the gifted William
Penn, joined to buy the western half of New Jersey as their place of
settlement. As an oppressed minority they were acutely conscious of the need
for guaranteed fundamental rights, and the constitution that William Penn wrote
for West New Jersey--the Concessions and - agreement--was strikingly liberal.
It established an annually elected assembly that was fully independent of the
executive.
Settlers were guaranteed full due process in confrontation of
accusers, the right to cross-examination, and the admission of evidence), and
trial by jury. There was to be neither life imprisonment nor capital
punishment, both novel provisions centuries ahead of their age. Everyone in
West Jersey was also guaranteed complete religious freedom, for there would be
no established state church. Liberal land provisions were offered to attract
settlers, and within a few years hundreds of settlers, mainly Quakers had
arrived. (All of New Jersey became a royal colony in 1702, the two halves being
merged under a unified government that was provided by New York Colony until
1738.)
A far grander "Holy Experiment" was set in motion
in 1681. King Charles II had owed a large debt to William Penn's dead father,
and to repay it he granted to William Penn--a close friend of the Duke of
York--a huge proprietary colony (that is, Penn personally owned the land, and
had absolute powers of government), Pennsylvania, including what is now
Delaware, which had already been settled by Swedes and Dutch. Now, half a century
after John Winthrop had taken his company of Puritan settlers to New England to
begin their attempt at building a Utopian Christian society, Penn and the
Quakers set out on a similar adventure. Pennsylvania was outstandingly
prosperous from the beginning. Its rich farmlands attracted a constant stream
of settlers, who produced a bountiful supply of food to be sold abroad.
Philadelphia was quickly settled by experienced merchants from London and from
towns elsewhere in the colonies. By the mid-eighteenth century they had made
Philadelphia the third commercial city in the British Empire, after London and
Bristol. Through personal religious ties, Quaker merchants had contacts all
over the North Atlantic commercial world, from Germany to the Caribbean. It was
not uncommon for an intermarried network of merchants to connect Madeira,
London, Barabados, Newport, and New York, and then work together in assisting
one another.
In London it there was a vigorous community of Quaker
merchants who aided their counterparts in Philadelphia. In the same letters
they sent, along with denominational news, reports on crops, prices and
finances also. Pennsylvania's wealthy men soon invested in western lands,
reselling at higher prices to incoming farmers. Many of them sought land for
the same reason that the aristocracy did in England did--to provide social
eminence as well as income. Quaker merchants also were not long in starting to
build iron foundries. Because of this, Pennsylvania has been uniquely
identified with the metals trade since the colonial days. Based upon this and
other enterprises, an aristocracy grew up in Pennsylvania comparable to that of
the planters in the Chesapeake and Carolina colonies, the patroons in the
Hudson valley and the merchant princes of Boston.
However, though they were so like the Puritans in their ways
of living (if not in their religious beliefs), in one great particular they
differed--they could abide dissent. Indeed, allowing people to dissent, and to
believe in and practice their own different faiths in their own diverse ways,
was the bedrock of the Quakers' social policy. In turn, this principle would
create so great a babble of creeds and sects in their colony of Pennsylvania
that their own distinctive identity would be lost.
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