Tag Archives ⇒ underground railroad

Ask Me Anything: How easy is it to become a Quaker?

April 25, 2018
· Martin Kelley

I have an Ask Me Any­thing request from read­er Ruby M:

Hel­lo! I’m study­ing The Friends Church for aca­d­e­m­ic pur­pos­es and I’d love to hear from some­one with first­hand expe­ri­ence. How easy is it to become a quak­er? Do you ever feel peo­ple treat you dif­fer­ent­ly because you’re a quak­er? Do you think there should be more rep­re­sen­ta­tion of quak­ers in the media? Thank you so much for your time. I’m very eager to hear back from you!

Since my expe­ri­ence is just one data point, I hope oth­ers will use the com­ment sec­tion below to add their stories.

I found becom­ing a Quak­er to be some­thing of a spi­ral process. I first walked into a Friends meet­ing­house at the age of 20 and only slow­ly took on an iden­ti­ty as a Friend. At each step of the process, I learned more clear­ly what that might mean and have strived to grow into deep­er faith­ful­ness. I didn’t for­mal­ly apply for mem­ber­ship until a decade or so after I became a reg­u­lar atten­der. This time lag is not unheard of but I don’t think it’s usu­al. It’s more of an insight into my own care­ful­ness and ret­i­cence about join­ing things than it is an indi­ca­tion of any­thing the meet­ings I attend­ed required. When I did final­ly apply for mem­ber­ship I was quite qual­i­fied and want­ed the clear­ness process to be exact­ing: again, this is an insight into my psyche!

Most peo­ple on the street don’t quite know what Quak­ers are so I can’t say I’m always treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly. I guess see­ing more Quak­ers in the media would be help­ful, though giv­en our over­all small num­bers I sus­pect even our fleet­ing appear­ances in TV shows and movies are more than we might pro­por­tion­al­ly expect.

I’m inter­est­ed to hear how oth­er Friends would answer Ruby’s question.

 

Update: reader answers by email and commentary

Jes­si­ca F: I’ve want­ed to be a Quak­er since I learned about the Abo­li­tion­ists who helped with the Under­ground Rail­road and prison reform. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the movie Gen­tle Per­sua­sion pre­sent­ed Quak­ers as being against music so I became a Uni­tar­i­an instead. Even­tu­al­ly I learned that wasn’t true for many Quak­ers and I found that all of the val­ues I had devel­oped through the years were also Quak­er val­ues and so becom­ing a Quak­er gave me a sup­port sys­tem and a com­mu­ni­ty of like minds.

Nineteenth-century Quaker sex cults

March 6, 2018
· Martin Kelley

An arti­cle in Port­land Month­ly is get­ting a lot of shares today, large­ly giv­en its breath­less head­line: How the Father of Ore­gon Agri­cul­ture Launched a Doomed Quak­er Sex Cult.

It pro­files Hen­der­son Luelling (1809 – 1878) and it’s not exact­ly an aca­d­e­m­ic source. Here’s a snippet:

Luelling had tak­en up with these groovy Free Lovers, whom he met in San Fran­cis­co. From the out­set, the jour­ney had com­pli­ca­tions. “Dr.” Tyler, it turned out, was actu­al­ly an ex-blacksmith who now pro­fessed exper­tise in water-cures and clair­voy­ance. One of the men was flee­ing finan­cial trou­bles, and when the ship was searched by police he hid under the hoop­skirt of a female passenger.

Luelling’s life fol­lows many com­mon themes of mid-nineteenth cen­tu­ry Quak­er life:

  • He was a hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ist, first mov­ing to the Port­land, Ore­gon, area and then to a small town near Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia. Friends had long been inter­est­ed in botan­i­cal affairs. Rough­ly a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er John Bar­tram was con­sid­ered one of the great­est botanists of his generation.
  • Luelling moved from Indi­ana to Salem, Iowa in the 1830s and became a staunch abo­li­tion­ist, even build­ing hide­outs for the Under­ground Rail­road in his house. Wikipedia reports he was expelled from his meet­ing for this.
  • He got Ore­gon fever and moved his oper­a­tion out there.
  • At some point in this he became inter­est­ed in Spir­i­tu­al­ism and its off­shoots like the Free Love move­ment. This was not a Quak­er move­ment but the mod­ern Amer­i­can move­ment start­ed with the Fox Sis­ters in Upstate New York and was heav­i­ly pro­mot­ed by Quak­er Hick­sites Amy and Isaac Post.

If you want to know more about Luelling’s “sex cults,” this arti­cle in Off­beat Ore­gon feels much bet­ter sourced: The father of Ore­gon’s nurs­ery indus­try and his “Free Love” cult:

The “free love” thing is far from new. Over the years, espe­cial­ly in the Amer­i­can West, at least half a dozen gen­er­a­tions have pro­duced at least one “dar­ing” philoso­pher who calls for a throwing-off of the age-old yoke of mar­riage and fam­i­ly and urges his or her fol­low­ers to revert to the myth­ic “noble sav­age” life of naked and unashamed peo­ple gath­er­ing freely and open­ly, men and women, liv­ing and eat­ing and sleep­ing togeth­er with no rules, no judg­ment and no squab­bles over paternity.

He’d also start­ed his very own free-love cult — “The Har­mo­ni­al Broth­er­hood.” Luelling’s group made free love the cen­ter­piece of a strict reg­i­men of self-denial that includ­ed an all-vegetarian, stimulant-free diet, cold-water “hydropa­thy” for any med­ical need, and a Utopi­an all-property-in-common social structure.

Port­land Friend Mitchel San­tine Gould has writ­ten about some of these cur­rents as well. His Leavesof​Grass​.org site used to have a ton of source mate­r­i­al. Dig­ging into one day it seemed pret­ty clear that the Free Love move­ment was also a refuge of sorts for those who did­n’t fit strict nineteenth-century het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty or gen­der norms. Gould’s piece, Walt Whit­man’s Quak­er Para­dox has a bit of this, with talk of “life­long bachelors.”

Many of the Spir­i­tu­al­ist lead­ers were young women and their pub­lic lec­ture series were pret­ty much the only pub­lic lec­tures by young women any­where in Amer­i­ca. If you want to learn more about these devel­op­ments I rec­om­mend Ann Braud’s Rad­i­cal Spir­its: Spir­i­tu­al­ism and Wom­en’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century Amer­i­ca. These com­mu­ni­ties were very involved in abo­li­tion­ist and wom­en’s rights issues and often start­ed their own year­ly meet­ings after becom­ing too rad­i­cal for the Hicksites.

And lest we think all this was a West Coast phe­nom­e­non, my lit­tle unpre­pos­sess­ing South Jer­sey town of Ham­mon­ton was briefly a cen­ter of Free Love Spir­i­tu­al­ism (almost com­plete­ly scrubbed from our his­to­ry books) and the near­by town of Egg Har­bor City had exten­sive water san­i­tar­i­ums of the kind described in these articles.

Looking locally at the Underground Railroad

February 28, 2015
· Martin Kelley

It seems like we’re under­go­ing some reassess­ment in terms of the Under­ground Rail­road. A piece appear­ing in yesterday’s New York Times, “Myth, Real­i­ty and the Under­ground Rail­road” by Ethan J Kytle and Carl Geis­sert, tell one nar­ra­tive tells the sto­ry of one of the pri­ma­ry myth-makers of the 1890s:

Although Siebert tem­pered some of his con­tem­po­raries’ hyper­bole, he nonethe­less took many Under­ground Rail­road sto­ries at face val­ue. Undaunt­ed by a dearth of ante­bel­lum doc­u­men­ta­tion — most rail­road activists had not kept records in order to pro­tect run­aways and them­selves — Siebert relied on the rem­i­nis­cences of “‘old time’ abo­li­tion­ists” to fill “the gaps in the real his­to­ry of the Under­ground Railroad.”

An arti­cle in last month’s Times explains that this sto­ry got the revi­sion­ist treat­ment in the 1960s:

That view large­ly held among schol­ars until 1961, when the his­to­ri­an Lar­ry Gara pub­lished “The Lib­er­ty Line,” a slash­ing revi­sion­ist study that dis­missed the Under­ground Rail­road as a myth and argued that most fugi­tive slaves escaped at their own ini­tia­tive, with lit­tle help from orga­nized abo­li­tion­ists. Schol­ar­ship on the top­ic all but dried up, as his­to­ri­ans more gen­er­al­ly empha­sized the agency of African-Americans in claim­ing their own freedom.

That arti­cle focus­es on Eric Fon­er, who’s just come out with a book that you might call a post-revisionist his­to­ry, based on some recently-uncovered doc­u­ments by little-known 19th-century abo­li­tion­ist edi­tor named Syd­ney Howard Gay. It’s on my to-read list. It’s nice to have some new doc­u­men­tary evi­dence, as it some­times seems the Under­ground Rail­road is the prover­bial blank slate upon which we project our con­tem­po­rary politics.

I’m cur­rent­ly read­ing “Philadel­phia Quak­ers and the Anti­slav­ery Move­ment” by Bri­an Tem­ple, an ama­teur South Jer­sey his­to­ri­an. It’s a use­ful lens. There are a hand­ful of crazy cool sto­ries of white Quak­ers, but it’s clear that much of the Quak­er involve­ment is point­ing run­aways to the near­est African Amer­i­can town. But that’s where it gets inter­est­ing for me. So many of these towns seem to be on land sold them by a white Quak­er farmer; they’re just a mile or two from a Quak­er town, down a qui­et sec­ondary road where you can see any­one com­ing, along­side deep woods or marsh­es into which run­aways can eas­i­ly disappear.

It seems like one of the most impor­tant Quak­er con­tri­bu­tion to the Under­ground Rail­road in South Jer­sey was par­tic­i­pat­ing in the found­ing of these towns: places where man­u­mit­ted and self-freed African Amer­i­cans could live in a self-governing and self-defensible community.

This rais­es lots of ques­tions. There was one promi­nent South Jer­sey African Amer­i­can Quak­er but he was the excep­tion. And it’s often for­got­ten, but much of the source of Quak­ers’ wealth (the land they had to sell) was war and pre­vi­ous enslave­ment. But still, it seems like there might have been some­thing resem­bling repa­ra­tions going on here: forty acres and a mule and giv­ing the freed Africans the space to min­is­ter their own church­es and gov­ern their own town. The his­toric black towns of South Jer­sey would make a great the­sis for some hard­work­ing grad student.

The racial pol­i­tics of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry have not been kind to these towns (Ta-Nehisi Coates could write a new chap­ter of Case for Repa­ra­tions based on them). High­ways plan­ners look­ing for routes close to the now-historic Quak­er towns drew their lines right through the towns. Since most were nev­er for­mal­ly incor­po­rat­ed, zon­ing and school board bat­tles with their sur­round­ing town­ship have tak­en away much of their auton­o­my. Many have been swal­lowed whole by mid-century sprawl and towns in more rur­al areas have depop­u­lat­ed. An old church is often the only vis­i­ble rem­nant and some­times there’s not even that.

My read­ing has stalled three-quarters of the way through Temple’s book and I’ve missed a few oppor­tu­ni­ties to see him present it local­ly. But I’ll try to fin­ish and give a more com­pre­hen­sive review in the near future.