Quaker History

In the religious upheaval of 17th-century England, a young man named George Fox had a vision. Tired of priests, tired of outward forms, he heard a voice: "There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition."

The message spread. These seekers refused to take oaths, refused to pay tithes to the Established Church, refused to remove their hats before "superiors." They insisted that God could speak directly to every person—the wealthy judge and the common laborer alike—through an "inner light."

For this they were mocked. A judge in Derby tauntingly called them "Quakers" after Fox told him to "tremble at the word of the Lord." The name stuck, a badge of honor and sometimes of scorn.

But what distinguished Quakers was not merely their refusal of outward ceremony. It was their certainty that they had discovered something real—an immediate experience of the divine that required no priest, no sacrament, no special building.

"You will say, What began the first Quaking? I answer, the power of God, and witness of God's spirit; this was and is the beginning of the Quakers..."

— George Fox

When Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, persecution intensified. The "Quaker Act" made meetings illegal. The "Conventicle Act" banned assemblies. The "Bloody Assizes" of 1685 sent hundreds to prison.

Some died in Newgate. George Fox spent over six years in various prisons. Edward Burrough perished in Newgate before reaching age 30.

Yet in prison, something unexpected happened. The Friends wrote. They produced epistles, defenses, letters of comfort to the persecuted. Isaac Penington, eventually imprisoned himself, wrote letters that are still treasured for their spiritual wisdom.

"My prison shall be a pulpit; and my sufferings shall preach more than ever my tongue hath done."

— Thomas Ellwood (attributed)

In 1681 Charles II granted William Penn a charter for an American province. In 1682 Penn arrived. English Friends were still living under the Clarendon Code. Pennsylvania was the first large civil order they themselves framed — liberty of conscience as the point of the experiment, not a concession wrung from a hostile church.

Meeting-houses there did not have to wait on the Act of Toleration of 1689. What English opponents had treated as an absurdity — that a people who would not swear and would not fight could nevertheless govern — became a fact on the map.

"Turn in, turn in, I beseech you: where is the poison, there is the antidote."

— William Penn, Rise and Progress (1694)

Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Grimké wrote as Friends — dating their letters in the Friends' manner, addressing the reader as thee — from New Jersey and Massachusetts, back toward the South they had left.

Angelina's Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) asked the women who already knew her to read, pray, speak, and act. Sarah's Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States the same year turned to the ministers. Angelina's Letters to Catharine Beecher (1837) then stated the hinge: the investigation of the slave's rights had led her to a better understanding of her own.

"The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own."

— Angelina E. Grimké, Letters to Catharine Beecher, Letter XII