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C h a p t e r 6 Men in Military Posture: The Seven Years’ War There then appeared on a green plain a great multitude of men in military posture, some of whom I knew. —John Woolman, Journal, chapter 3 On a night in February 1754 Woolman dreamed that while walking through an orchard he saw two lights in the sky resembling dull suns. Suddenly a storm of fire swept over the orchard from the east. Woolman was surprised, but not afraid. He noticed a friend standing nearby who was “greatly distressed in mind at this unusual appearance,” and Woolman tried to be reassuring. He said, “We must all once die, and if it please the Lord that our death be in this way, it is good for us to be resigned.” Woolman left the orchard and entered a house. He went upstairs and walked past a group of “sad and troubled” people. Crossing an attic room, he found a place to sit alone by a window where he could watch the firestorms pass outside. Then he saw “a great multitude of men in military posture” approaching from the east. He recognized some of them. As the men passed the house a few of them glanced up at Woolman and taunted him, but he held his silence. Finally a captain of the militia walked over to the ground beneath the window and explained to Woolman that “these men were assembled to improve in the discipline of war.”1 In February 1754, nearly everyone in eastern North America was anticipating a war. In 1748, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chappelle had formally ended the last imperial conflict without satisfying the territorial ambitions of the expansionists in either the British or the French Empires. Ambitious imperialists 122 Chapter 6 on both sides had grown bold over the interim. French and British efforts to occupy disputed land had raised tensions on the border of Nova Scotia as well as in the Ohio Valley. Woolman’s account of his dream indicates that he saw the Seven Years’ War coming before it began, but that was hardly unusual for a well-read and politically engaged colonist. The dream was distinctive because it suggested that Woolman received his premonition in a vision and that he responded to the warning calmly, accepting the coming crisis as a test of his faith. When they met decades later to consider the publication of Woolman’s journal, the Overseers of the Press may have detected a note of arrogance in the dream, and they removed it from the text. In the 1740s during the most recent imperial war, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had revised its discipline to emphasize that the Friends had been opposed to “bearing of arms and fighting” consistently “ever since we were a people.” The meeting had cited the Sermon on the Mount, reminding the Quakers that “the Prince of Peace . . . hath commanded us to love our enemies , and to do good even to them that hate us.”2 In addition to making such moral arguments, Quaker ministers during that war had also advanced pragmatic, historical and legal arguments in favor of pacifism. They had cited William Penn and suggested that Penn’s refusal to rely on military force had served the colonists in the region well. “How remarkably we have been preserved in peace and tranquility for more than fifty years,” one Pennsylvania Quaker observed, “no invasion by foreign enemies, and the treaties of peace with the natives, wisely began by our proprietor William Penn, preserved inviolable to this day.” Despite the ambivalent stance of the colonial government during various conflicts over the intervening years, some Friends asserted that Penn’s policies had become an integral component of “the peaceable constitution ” of Pennsylvania.3 For his part, Woolman favored arguments founded on apparent logical and moral consistency. The Quakers’ peace testimony seemed to accord with a simple principle that he would later pronounce to his students : “Take good measures to obtain good ends. Go not from goodness in pursuit of good.”4 Nonetheless, adhering to the peace testimony had seldom been as simple in practice as the Quakers suggested. In the early years of their religious society , they did not articulate or pursue a consistently pacifist stance, and even after they made peace one of their defining, communal ideals, they continued to differ among themselves over its scope and meaning.5 As a group they believed that government officials could legitimately use force to maintain order...

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