Penn was a man of paradoxical qualities. He espoused a radically egalitarian Quaker theology, insisting that something divine resided within each individual, yet he owned slaves on his American estate. He praised representative institutions such as parliament and the jury system, but spent years in hiding for his loyalty to an absolutist king. ‘I am like to be an adopted American,’ he wrote shortly after arriving in Pennsylvania in 1682, but spent only four of his remaining 36 years there. And he was chronically incapable of managing money, spending eight months in an English debtors’ prison in his 60s, even while his colony quickly became a commercial success.
More fascinating discoveries from the walls of the #russellhousekitchen – new artifacts were extracted from cavities above the kitchen firebox on the first floor! This latest batch of artifacts dates to the 1850’s and 1860’s, which I think we can agree is an interesting and… fractious time in Charleston’s history. The most intriguing scrap of paper recovered from the walls is pictured here: a page ripped from a Quaker periodical entitled “Friends’ Intelligencer,” published in Philadelphia in 1868.
Who were the Friends in Charleston in the years right after the Civil War? Was the Intelligencer hidden or just recycled to plug up a draft? I wonder if this could be related to Quaker relief work in South Carolina. The most well-known example was the Penn School on St Helena Island, founded by northern Unitarians and Quakers in 1862 to educate freed Gullah after the slaveowners fled Union troops.
Curious about the fragment, I typed a few of its legible words into Google and sure enough, they’ve scanned that volume of the Intelligencer (hattip to my FJ colleague Gail, who found this link). It shows a date of Fourth Month 20, 1868, though curiously FI also republished it in 1874, which I first found. The poem is credited to Bessie Charles, the English poet also credited as Elizabeth Bundle Charles; it seems to have been published in various collections around that time. The Intelligencer continues today of course.
This question is neither sarcastic nor rhetoric. As many people insist that violence and atrocities are an inherent part of religions, that religions would cause wars, I really want to know if that is the truth. Personally I believe religions can be peaceful, such as in the cases of the Quakers and the Baha’i, but I might be wrong.
The obvious answer should be “none.” Quakers are well-known as pacifists (fun fact: fake cannon used to deceive the enemy into thinking an army is more fortified than it actually is are called “Quaker guns.”) Individual Quakers have rarely been quite as united around the peace testimony as our reputation would suggest, but as a group it’s true we’ve never called for a war. I can’t think of any military skirmish or battle waged to rallying cries of “Remember the Quakers!”
Quaker guns at Manassas Junction, 1862. Via Wikimedia.
And yet: all of modern civilization has been shaped by war. Our political boundaries, our religions, our demographic make-up – even the languages we speak are all remnants of long-ago battles. One of the most influential Quaker thinkers, the eighteenth century minister John Woolman, constantly reminded his brethren to consider those luxuries that are the fruit of war and slavery. When we broaden the scope like this, we’ve been involved in quite a few wars.
We like to remember how William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania as a religious refuge. But the king of England held European title to the mid-Atlantic seaboard because of regional wars with the Dutch and Swedes (and later held onto it only after a much larger war with the Canadian French settlements).
The king’s grant of “Penn’s Woods” was the settlement of a very large war debt owed to Penn’s father, a wealthy admiral. The senior William Penn was something of a scoundrel, playing off both sides in ever-shifting royalist/Roundhead seesaw of power. When the musical chairs were over he was on the side of the winner, who owed him and later his son. The admiral’s longest-lasting accomplishment was disobeying orders and capturing Jamaica for the British (Bob Marley sang his songs of oppression and injustice in English because of Sir William).
By most accounts, William Penn the younger was fair and also bought the land from local Lenape nations. Mostly forgotten is that the Lenape and Susquehannock population had been devastated in a recent regional war against the Iroquois over access to beaver-trapping territories. They were now subject nations to the Iroquois Confederacy, which skillfully played global politics by keeping the English and French colonial empires in enough strategic tension that both left the Iroquois homeland alone. It was in the Iroquois’s best interest to have another British colony on their southern flank and who would make a better buffer than these idealistic pacifists? The Lenape land reimbursement was secondary consideration to continental politics from their perspective. (One could easily make a case that the biological genocide of indigenous America by diseases brought over by uncaring colonists was also a form of war.)
The thousands of acres Penn deeded to his fellow Quakers were thus the fruits of at least four sets of wars: colonial wars over European claims to the Delaware Valley; debt-fueled English civil wars; English wars against Spanish Caribbean colonies, and Native American wars fought over access to commercial resources. Much of original Quaker wealth in succeeding generations is indebted to the huge land transfer in the 1680s, either directly (we still hold some valuable real estate) or indirectly (the real estate’s sale could be funneled into promising businesses).
Not all of the fruits of war were secondhand and coincidental to Friends themselves. Many wealthy Friends in the mid-Atlantic colonies had slaves who did much of the backbreaking work of clearing fields and building houses. Many of those oppressed souls were put into bondage in Africa as prisoners of war (John Woolman would probably point out that slavery itself is a form of war). That quaint old brick meetinghouse set back on a flower-covered field? It was probably built at least in part by enslaved hands.
Today, it’s impossible to step free of war. Most of our houses are set on land once owned by others. Our computers and cell phones have components mined in war zones. Our lights and cars are powered by fossil fuels. And even with solar panels and electric cars, the infrastructure of the daily living of most Americans is still based on extraction and control of resources.
This is not to say we can’t continue to work for a world free of war. But it seems important to be clear-eyed and acknowledge the debts we have.
This week the New York Times Opinionator blog argues a Quaker connection in the geography of “Red” and “Blue” states – those leaning Republican and Democratic in general elections. The second half of Steven Pinker’s “Why Are States So Red and Blue?” leans on David Hackett Fischer’s awesome 1989 book Albion’s Seed. Subtitled “Four British Folkways in America” it’s a kind of secret decoder ring for American culture and politics.
Fischer argued that there were four very different settlements in the English colonies in the Americas and that each put a definitive and lasting stamp on the populations that followed. I think he’s a bit over-deterministic but it’s still great fun and the thesis does explain a lot. For example, the Scot-Irish lived in lawless region along the English-Scottish border, where people had to defend themselves; when they crossed the ocean they quickly went inland and their cultural descendants like law and order, guns and a judgmental God. Quakers from the British midlands were another one of the four groups, cooperative and peace-loving, the natural precursors to Blue states.
Now step back a bit and you realize this is incredibly over-simplistic. Many Friends in the Delaware Valley and beyond have historically been Republican, and many continue as such (though they keep quiet among politically-liberal East Coast Friends). And the current Democratic president personally approves U.S. assassination lists.
You will be forgiven if you’ve clicked to Pinker’s blog post and can’t find Quakers. For some bizarre reason, he’s stripped religion from Fischer’s argument. Why? Political correctness? Simplicity of argument. Friends are summed up with the phrase “the North was largely settled by English farmers.” Strange.
But despite these caveats, Fischer is fascinating and Pinker’s extrapolation to today’s political map is well worth a read, even if our contribution to the distribution of the American map goes un-cited.
Another slice of lost Philadelphia profiled on HiddenCity, this time my grandmother’s childhood neighborhood.
Embedded Link
Flash of Discovery | Hidden City Philadelphia
The first English speaking Lutheran church in the world, located on Philadelphia’s Franklin Square, was part of an entire neighborhood demolished to make way for the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
This week the New York Times Opinionator blog argues a Quaker connection in the geography of “Red” and “Blue” states – those leaning Republican and Democratic in general elections. The second half of Steven Pinker’s “
