Children of Dissent and Revolution: Joseph Maddock and the Wrightsborough, Georgia, Quaker Community

On January 24, 1779, Joseph Maddock, leader of the Quaker community of Wrightsborough, Georgia, must have anguished over how close he came to violating his commitment to the pacifist, non-partisan, anti-military principles of the Society of Friends. On that day, he visited the home of John Moore where he met with Moore and other neighbors William Millen and James Bryan. They had gathered to meet with a man whom Millen later identified as a James Boyd, a man who had arrived from Savannah, the capitol of the province that had fallen to a British army on the previous December 29. This covert agent produced a proclamation of January 10 that called for all Americans to return to the king's standard and also instructions from a Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell for Boyd to reach the South Carolina frontier on a secret mission to assemble the Americans who had remained loyal to the king and to bring them on February 9 to Augusta, Georgia, only hours from Wrightsborough. Maddock had been called to the meeting for, in Millen's words, "[Boyd] knowed the King's Heart was in his [Maddock's] Bosome."¹ Other local residents James Coates, Joshua Ryal, Thomas Ansley, and David Baldwin who, like the others mentioned above, were not Quakers, also came to Moore's house to hear Boyd's message. Of this assemblage, Millen only mentioned Ansley as having any problem, and that not stated, with the terms presented by the king's agent.²

Modern studies of the American Revolution by American and British scholars have broadened our understandings of that struggle by revealing its many complicated sides. The politics and violence of the era, but especially in the South in the years of true civil war between 1779 and 1782, left no community of any kind untouched. Joseph Maddock and his Meeting at Wrightsborough, Georgia, illustrate how even the traditionally pacifist and non-political Society of Friends in America came to suffer from issues of conscience that defy simple explanations and traditional stereotypes.³

That James Boyd ultimately failed in his effort, for example, had disastrous consequences for Maddock and the men who met with him at John Moore's house.⁴ British troops reached Augusta, as Boyd had foretold, on January 31. The Wrightsborough Monthly Meeting sent a delegation of Maddock, John Jones, Francis Jones, and Joseph Williams there to assure Lieutenant Colonel Campbell of their pacifism.⁵ In the meantime, Maddock and his neighbors had likely supplied the guides for the mission to South Carolina, for on the morning of February 14, 1779, Boyd and his hastily assembled ad hoc regiment of some 600 of the North and South Carolina Loyalists (or Tories) camped at Kettle Creek, on a path that, after another day's march, would have brought them to Wrightsborough. A week late and thousands of men below expectations, his party consisted more of refugees, some of them with Quaker backgrounds, seeking British protection from their pro-Revolution mainstream neighbors than warriors willing to fight and die for any cause. That same morning, as the king's troops under Campbell, having heard nothing from Boyd, evacuated Augusta, a force of 340 Patriot militiamen under Colonels Andrew Pickens and John Dooly attacked the Loyalist camp at Kettle Creek and achieved an overwhelming victory. Boyd fell mortally wounded in the fighting, unrepentant to the end. Only 270 of his men succeeded in finding their way to Wrightsborough from where horsemen sent by Campbell's retreating army rescued them.⁶

In the days that followed, Patriot parties would arrest and imprison persons accused of having aided the king's cause, including Maddock, Ansley, and Ryal. They all eventually obtained release, but Maddock went home only after spending months in a Charleston, South Carolina prison. The members of the Wrightsborough Quaker Monthly Meeting ignored Maddock's military-like activities. He had, for the time being, successfully avoided questions about his adherence to their principles in those difficult times of war.⁷

Members of the Society of Friends had a long history with...