The Rise and Fall of Quaker Regions
Colonial geography was a mixed blessing for the Society of Friends, or Quakers. Distance from England allowed them to establish not only institutional forms but, in some places, regional prominence and even political dominance.
But the local geography also offered commercial opportunities that challenged their ideals.Formed by George Fox (1624–91) in England in the 1650s, the Quakers spread their radical message of intense personal communion with a divine “inner light” from their early base in northern England first to London and southern England and then, by the late 1650s, to the West Indies and North American colonies. They organized into geographically defined and increasingly encompassing monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings which sought through participants’ “inner light” to forge consensus. But established authorities perceived their questioning of outward institutions, worldly power structures, and social distinctions (including those based on race and gender) as threatening.
Engraving of a Quaker meeting. Quakers were persecuted in England and New England but enjoyed political dominance in colonial Pennsylvania.
Seeking haven and converts, Quakers arrived in New England beginning in 1656 and met with a hostile response. Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven outlawed Quakerism almost immediately, and severe enforcement—in some instances through execution—forced Quakers to settle at first in such remote areas as Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Maine. In tolerant Rhode Island, they attained majority status and control of the General Assembly. Yet they established their presence throughout the region during the 1660s and convened their first New England Yearly Meeting in 1661. The weakness of the Anglican establishment in Virginia and Maryland allowed Quakers to develop numerous local meetings during the 1660s and yearly meetings by 1673.
In North Carolina, where Anglicanism was particularly slow to develop, Quakers organized effectively—a North Carolina meeting was formed in 1681—and remained the colony’s only organized denomination until 1701. Yet their prominence there waned after Anglicans assumed control in the early 18th century and antislavery principles led them to migrate from the Southern states to the Midwest in the early 19th.
The most significant Quaker presence was in the Delaware Valley. Quaker merchants purchased East and West Jersey in the 1670s, controlling both until New Jersey became a royal colony in 1702. On the west bank of the river, William Penn (1644—1718) founded Pennsylvania in 1681 as an experiment in applied Quakerism. Its assembly, controlled by Quakers until 1756, reached consensual decisions, enacted religious freedom, eliminated oaths, refused to establish a militia, outlawed slavery in 1711, and extended special protection to Indians and the poor. Friends in the region formed the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1685, and numbered about 50,000 by 1750. Meanwhile, Philadelphia, near the mouth of the Delaware, became a bustling seaport.
The Quakers were, however, too close to both London and Philadelphia. Their power was shaken after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 ended Penn’s royal favor, Anglicans began to challenge their dominance, and they became divided among themselves into rival urban-cosmopolitan and rural-conservative factions. Over the first half of the 18th century, waning numerical dominance and the ever-growing strains of political supremacy and commercial prosperity gradually undermined their ability to keep their government grounded in Quaker principles. They finally renounced political power in 1756 amid the intense geopolitical rivalries of the French and Indian War.
Discernible Quaker regions ceased to exist by the early 19th century, but their contributions to the later antislavery and women’s rights movements testified to their continuing impact on American life.