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10 Friend on the American Frontier Charles Pancoast’s A Quaker Forty-Niner and the Problem of Slavery James Emmett Ryan Now, whatever idea we may form to ourselves of the typical American , or whether we think such a being exists at all, no one would ever imagine him to be a Quaker. —Anonymous (1877) American Quaker views concerning slaveholding evolved over many decades until the nineteenth century, when opposition to slavery became firmly established among the Quaker faithful. This broad consensus, however, was fraught with disagreements over how Quakers should oppose slavery, whether politics was the appropriate avenue for Quaker resistance, and when, if ever, pacifist Quakers should themselves call for immediate emancipation when violence seemed the only possible consequence. Much of this debate was carried out in the public sphere or in meetinghouses, where leading Quakers articulated their views about race and slavery, but the opinions and attitudes of the average Friend during these public exchanges are still quite obscure to history. What can we surmise about how a moderately pious Quaker person would have understood issues such as slavery and race during a life devoted not to public activism or religious debate but instead to private activities such as business, travel, and courtship? Part of the answer to this question, I suggest, is in the private writings of Quakers who made no pretensions to civic leadership, and who made no special claims about their own piety.1 One example of private writing that sheds light on these issues is a memoir written by a young Quaker apothecary, Charles Edward Pancoast (1818–1906), who like many of his generation, journeyed west to seek adventure and fortune, leaving family and friends behind in Quaker New Jersey and in Philadelphia. As a younger son with no prospects for inheriting his father’s farm, he was sent to Philadelphia for training as a druggist and, upon attaining adulthood, decidedtoseekhisfortuneontheWesternfrontier .Decadesafterhehadreturned toPhiladelphiatoresumeabusinesscareer,hecomposedAQuakerForty-Niner: 150 james emmett ryan The Adventures of Charles Edward Pancoast on the American Frontier. This document, which had been kept in the Pancoast family as a cherished manuscript , first appeared posthumously in 1930, after the family submitted it for publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Although Pancoast’s narrative has until now been neglected by scholars, the book is an important resource for literary and religious historians interested in the rich textures of everyday life on the antebellum frontier, especially those concerned with attitudes of Quakers toward the difficult issues of race and slavery. Although he came of age at a time when Quaker activists such as Lucretia Mott and John Greenleaf Whittier were prominent abolitionists, Pancoast was neither an abolitionist nor a public figure. Nevertheless, ideas about race and slavery enter his memoir as aspects of a life devoted primarily to business and entrepreneurship, and his memoir serves as a useful index to the ways that ordinary Quakers of his generation perceived the national slave economy and the racial prejudices that formed its foundation. Most of Pancoast’s account, though, details his own adventures and fortune-seeking in the Midwest and the Pacific Coast. Failing as a drugstore entrepreneur in Missouri, Pancoast spent time owning and operating a steamship on the Missouri River, and eventually found himself at work and seeking his fortune in business among the gold rush miners of California. In all, young Pancoast spent 14 years afoot in the hinterlands and byways of Western America, before returning home to settle in Philadelphia in 1854 at the age of thirty-six. In the opening pages of his narrative, which he apparently wrote from memory or journal notes during his retirement years, Pancoast focuses first on the development of his own moral sensibilities and how they were shaped by his Quaker upbringing, with its peculiar speech, plain attire, twice-weekly meetings, and pious structures of daily life. Although he admits to some boyhood misdeeds, he also describes himself as being somewhat more upright in behavior than his peers. “When I come to review my conduct of those days,” he writes, “I discover that there was some of the innate wickedness of the ordinary Boy in my character; but notwithstanding I was guilty of many boyish misdemeanors, I had an indwelling consciousness of right that made it impossible for me to do wrong without being strongly rebuked by a Spirit that confounded me in the act.”2 We also learn from his narrative that, as a boy, Pancoast had become aware of slavery’s insidious presence...

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