The Legacy of the Quakers
By: Thomas O'Donoghue
Tags: William Penn, Religious History, Quakerism, World History, American History

A Christian denomination ahead of its time, the Religious Society of Friends or ‘Quakers’ as they are better known cast a long shadow over U.S. society and the greater world at large.

Having survived vicious religious persecution in their native England, the Quakers managed to emigrate to the newly colonized middle Atlantic colonies where they came to introduce many now popular and widely emulated social reforms.

The Quakers introduced, among other things, prison reform for the poor explicitly seeking to positively improve sanitation, shelter and the general treatment of prisoners.

The Quakers also fundamentally believed in the equality of all human beings and were a leading cause in making women equal to men in the household, schoolroom and of their place of worship, the Meeting House.

This consequent belief in equality and human rights, made the Quakers some of the earliest leading voices against slavery, an institution they abhorred.

The Quakers trace their origins to the tumultuous mid-17th century England, where they were one the few protestant sects to thrive and expand.

Believing that each and every human being was capable of having a personal experience with God, founder George Fox and his early followers held a disdain for the conventional teachings of the Church of England.

Salvation of God, was in their view, something that each and every person was capable of feeling for themselves, and not as it was taught at the time, accessible only through the ministers of the Anglican church.

The Quakers broke with tradition in more ways than one by adopting simplicity of dress, and opting for an unstructured religious services.

Their religious service was an oddity in itself, as they lacked a clergy, a pulpit or a ceremony

Their strange untraditional ways earned them the full persecution of the existing power structure of the time.

The Quakers refused to remove their hats in the presence of figures of authority and used ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ instead of the more formal ‘you’ earning them the ire of the English authorities who perceived the Friends as a threat to their authority.

George Fox, was himself jailed eight times, while some 15,000 Quakers had been imprisoned by 1689 when the Act of Toleration was passed.

The powers that be in England did their best to rid the country of this young protestant sect amidst King Charles’ efforts to reinstate Catholicism as the state religion.

Despite the best efforts of King Charles’ to root out any and all protestant sects, the Quakers managed to grow attracting people from every social and education background through their commitment to equality, honesty and a peaceful life.

The young sect began as an idea of George Fox, a humble shoemaker with a limited education, who nonetheless attracted men of much greater influence and financial resources — men of the likes of William Penn.

Ironically, King Charles’ persecution of the Quakers, the Puritans and other protestant sects had the effect of stimulating their growth and strengthening their cohesion.

Nonetheless, the uncompromising views of the Quakers brought them a great deal of persecution which followed them to the New World.

In the New World, the immigrating Quakers were met with a similarly hostile power structure in the Puritans who despised and feared them leading to further persecution, imprisonment and death for those who were unfortunate enough to arrive in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

George Fox had in mind a colony for Quakers in the New World, even traveling there to explore the wilderness of what would become Pennsylvania.

It would be William Penn, a man of greater financial means and influence who would make this dream a reality.

Pennsylvania, named in William Penn’s honor, was brought about through a charter granted in 1681 to Penn to pay off a debt that the King owed to his father.

Pennsylvania, would thus become a “holy laboratory” for Penn and his Quaker counterparts who sought a place to settle and be without persecution.

But Penn also had financial success in mind for his colony.

Creating a successful and profitable colony was of great importance to Penn and by the 18th century, Pennsylvania would become the richest of the mid-Atlantic colonies.

Quakers thus became the most important ingredient in the founding and subsequent success of Pennsylvania in its earliest two decades of settlement.

And the most important aspect of this success might lie in the tight-knit nature of Quaker communities who became supportive groups interested in the well-being of one another as well as their belief in thriftiness, frugality and hard work which elevated many Quakers into wealth.

In short, the survival of Pennsylvania’s early success can be traced to industriousness and financial tact of the early Quaker settlers.

The Quaker legacy looms large on the U.S. where these rustic pioneers brought reforms that have become synonymous with that which is refined and civilized in American culture and society.

Eschewing haggling and ‘untrue’ prices, the Quakers brought forward set prices.

Wishing to feel the pulsing of another individual’s inner light, they helped to popularize the ‘egalitarian’ handshake.

The Quakers also emphasized non-coercive child-rearing — a feature that meant, in contrast to their Puritan peers, of holding on to children past their fourteenth birthday when they might other wise be sent away for apprenticeship.

The added burden of feeding extra mouth further on into childhood meant of course, the need for extra resources and so many Quakers turned to moneymaking leading to the development of major capitalist enterprises like Barclays, Lloyd’s Band and Cadbury Chocolate all of which had Quaker origins.

Quaker industriousness also made its way to the U.S. where many Quakers subsequently became quite wealthy often settling on and developing the cheap arable land in the Delaware Valley into wheat for the wheat trade.

The Quakers were able to successfully market the Delaware valley and Pennsylvania at large as the “the best poor man’s country” successfully appealing to the dreams of the common emigre.

The Quakers, despite the longevity of their influence, have since greatly dwindled since their peak in the early 18th century.

Their lackluster desire for evangelization and their stringent desire for purified families proved less effective in spreading their interpretation of God than that of their more energetic and evangelizing cousins — the Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists — who settled the South, West and the nation as a whole.

By the mid 18th century, the number of Quakers declined significantly, but their influence has lived on.

Many Puritan women eventually adopted the female role offered in the Quaker family and a massive reform movement came about to make the woman the ethical center of American social sphere while were children were eventually raised under gentler circumstances along lines established by earlier Quaker pioneers.

Abolitionism and pacifism, popular Quaker practices also took off in the American psyche.

Lastly, Quakers had a great deal of influence on the equality of the sexes, an idea that has only seriously taken hold in the last half a century.