Philadelphia Quakers and the American Revolution, by Jeffrey A. Denman

They were the prominent merchants of the city, the thought leaders, the fashion setters. They controlled the government of Billy Penn’s Greene Country Towne and shared his vision of a purely Utopian tract of earth upon America’s far shore. Their morals and ethics pervaded the city like a fog.

But then came the Revolution and a growing determination to take up the struggle for American independence. As others left home to fight, the famous pacifist testimony of the Quakers began to look like sympathy for the king. And things began to get ugly.

Pacifists in the Revolution

Not only would they not fight; the Quakers deliberately absented themselves from all the public drives they could associate with the war. This made them visibly impassive in the midst of a great public fervor. Even asked to supply blankets to the war effort by General Philip Schuyler, they refused.

Denunciation came from all sides.

“In the second American Crisis, Thomas Paine led an unremitting attack on the Quakers…” Denman writes. “He attacked their alleged affinity with the British government, citing [one of their tracts] as ‘a publication evidently intended to promote sedition and treason,’ which was clearly not a sound portrayal of the document.”

And not only did the patriots mistrust them: the loyalists did, too, making them the lonely conscientious objectors in a world set on fire. They refused even to pay the fines connected with this objection, frequently bringing imprisonment on themselves.

Internal strife

The Revolution, indeed, marked the end of Quaker ascendancy in the new world, the cessation of political and economic hegemony.

Displacing the Friends were the younger breed of radical Scots-Irish, the Presbyterians and Baptists, who felt no compunction about fighting, and who never tired of chiding the Friends for failing to provide for the defense of the city in earlier decades.

The Friends themselves suffered their own internal strife. Hundreds in Pennsylvania were “disowned” by the Society for failing to exhibit the proper religious discipline—in other words, for approving war with Britain.

This didn’t mean punishment, exactly. Disownment was a decision by the meeting to withdraw recognition of the individual as an exemplar of Quaker discipline.

So many Quakers were disowned that an entire subsect, the Free Quakers, formed just to accommodate them, in 1781. Known better as The Fighting Quakers, the sect included dozens of people who wished to fight—and anyone else who ran afoul of the Friends by, for example, marrying out of the Society. The last meeting of the Free Quakers was held in 1836.

“Dangerous enemies”

However, punishment was indeed meted out by Congress.

Denman relates how in 1777, some 20 men, 17 of them Quakers, were arrested and exiled to Winchester, Virginia, for refusing to swear loyalty to the American cause. They were called “dangerous enemies” by the Continental Congress, and held without trial for nearly eight months, some of them dying in exile.

Elizabeth Drinker, who was eight months pregnant at the time, and whose husband Henry was one of the exiled, gave the whole account to her diary.

Scholarship and panache

Denman’s book, a work of careful scholarship, tells the lesser-known details of this difficult chapter in American history, and does so without jargon or specialist language. Even with the occasional bumpy sentence, it would behoove every Philadelphian to read it, and discover the surprisingly rough edges of the city’s cherished Quaker legacy.

Denman proceeds with panache and care, as befits the author of numerous journal entries and magazine articles studying everything from The American Revolution to World War II. He is also the co-author of Greene and Cornwallis in the Carolinas: The Pivotal Struggle of the American Revolution, 1780-1781, and John Quincy Adams, Reluctant Abolitionist.

For source material he draws on letters, diaries, journals, guides, pamphlets, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and other works, almost all of them contemporary with the events described.

The truth behind the triumph

In the end, Denman can take credit for writing a story less of decline than of conviction under pressure. By showing how the Quakers held fast to pacifism while the world around them burned, he invites readers to see what courage looked like in 1776.

The book also reminds us of the struggle and pain behind what is so often presented as a long and glorious triumph. Like every other war, the American Revolution took place not only on the battlefield, but in the consciences of those who fought it. And there, also, it left casualties.

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