Friends in Warm Places

In the second half of the seventeenth century, Barbados was the richest, most populous, and economically most productive colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Its planters were the first to embrace a slave plantation system, providing a model that English settlers copied elsewhere in the Caribbean and North America. Successful Barbadian planters displayed their wealth to all through their clothes, lavish entertainments, and fine mansions. The island was among the closest to England and Africa in terms of maritime distances: it was the first port of call for many western-bound English vessels, as well as for the rising tide of English slavers operating on the West African coast. Virginia and Massachusetts are the darlings of many colonial historians, but Barbados was the single most dynamic, trend-setting colony in the half-century before 1700.

Considering the vanity, rampant materialism, and brutal slave-based labor regime that characterized seventeenth-century Barbados, one would not expect George Fox's radical Quaker faith to flourish there. And yet Barbados was home to the largest Quaker population in the Americas prior to Pennsylvania's founding. Larry Gragg has followed up his recent general history of early Barbados with a slim but meticulously researched investigation of Barbadian Quakers that is both a community study of island Friends and a recovery of their transatlantic and intercolonial networks and connections. As he charts the rise and decline of Quakers in Barbados from the 1650s through the early eighteenth century, Gragg profiles who became "convinced" and how Quakers dealt with slavery, the ultimate source of the island's prosperity. He argues that Barbadian Quakers formed a counterculture that aggressively challenged the island's dominant planter class, directly and through their example of leading lives of peace, simplicity, and equality within a rigidly hierarchical society.¹

Gragg starts with an appraisal of the turbulent times in England from which George Fox and his Society of Friends emerged. Fox grew up in a comfortable "middling" Midlands household and wanted for little until, at the age of nineteen, he experienced a crisis of faith. Over the next four years, he wandered spiritually through an England wracked with religious and civil discord. Even as Calvinist, Arminian, and Episcopal clergymen debated theology, attacked one another, and sought adherents, a large segment of the English populace remained unchurched and ignorant of basic Christian doctrine. Fox floundered within "this confusing milieu of conflicting beliefs and apathy" until he experienced "a mystic union with the divine" and discovered a guiding inner light (p. 14). Further revelations led him to embrace the egalitarian worldview that shaped the central tenets of Quaker belief: rejection of vanity and hierarchy, a commitment to peace, belief in direct divine revelation, and social and gender equality. Rejecting predestination, Fox promised widespread salvation to a nation in spiritual disarray. Established clergymen condemned Fox's "blasphemy," but his message was highly appealing and spread quickly during the 1650s, especially among the families of yeomen and craftsmen in rural northern counties. Despite civil and clerical authorities' vigorous efforts to suppress Fox and his followers, the ranks of England's Quakers swelled to an estimated 50,000 by 1660—and Quaker missionaries and pamphlets were fanning out to Ireland, Continental Europe, and the colonies to spread Fox's radical message even farther afield.

The first Quaker itinerants arrived in Barbados in the mid-1650s and found a colony in the midst of dynamic change. As sugar supplanted tobacco and great planters bought out their poor and middling neighbors, settlement patterns established during the island's first decades were radically altered. English political, ecclesiastical, and legal institutions transplanted in Barbados survived the sugar revolution intact, but the island's society and landscape became markedly different from that of England. The growing number of enslaved Africans working under a coercive and oppressive labor regime stoked racism and white fears of violent revolt. As the gulf in wealth between great planters, middling landowners, and the many English and...