A Crisis of Allegiance: Berks County, Pennsylvania Quakers and the War for Independence

A Crisis ofAllegiance: Berks County, Pennsylvania Quakers and the War for Independence Karen Guenther* Members of the Society of Friends first settled in the Pennsylvania backcountry during the 1710s, when members of the Boone, Lee, and Hughes families established homesteads inthe Oley Valley ofnorthwestern Philadelphia (now Berks) County. Enough Quakers had moved to this region that by 1725 Gwynedd Monthly Meeting in Chester County had authorized the formation of a preparative meeting for these Friends. A decade later, Gwynedd Monthly Meeting approved the establishment of Maiden Creek Preparative Meeting to meet the needs ofIrish Quakers who had settled in the central part ofthe area that became Berks County. In 1737, these Friends had strengthened their numbers sufficiently to warrant the creation of Oley (later called Exeter) Monthly Meeting.1 By 1775, the geographic boundaries of Exeter Monthly Meeting had become quite extensive. The monthly meeting still met alternately at the meeting houses at Exeter and Maiden Creek, located less than fifteen miles east andnorth, respectively, ofthe county seat atReading. Anotherpreparative meeting gathered at Robeson, approximately ten miles south ofReading . Particular meetings also assembled on first days at Reading and at Pottstown in northwestern Philadelphia County. In addition, by the end of this year a sufficient number ofQuakers had moved into the interior that the monthly meeting acknowledged the formation of an additional particular meeting at Catawissa in Northumberland County. Consequently, members ofExeter Monthly Meeting resided between forty and two hundred miles away from Philadelphia by the time ofthe Revolution. This geographical dispersion would provide a different revolutionary experience for these frontier Quakers than that oftheir metropolitan counterparts, because they also had to cope with the remnants ofa civil war in northern Pennsylvania while facing the prospects of war with the British. The War for Independence caused county residents to interpret the Friends' failure to fight as disloyalty toward the patriot cause, rather than a matter of religious conviction.2 NotuntilthepassageoftheBostonPortBill, one ofthe "IntolerableActs" approvedbyParliament, didtheprotestbegininBerks County. InJuIy 1774, community leaders consideredthe act"unjust andtyrannical inthe extreme" andpledged support for the formation ofwhatbecame the First Continental * Karen Guenther is Assistant Professor ofHistory at Mansfield University. She is grateful to Kenneth Cook, Recording Clerk of Exeter Monthly Meeting, and Dr. James Kirby Martin ofthe University ofHouston for their help with this article. 16Quaker History Congress. Seven men, including nominal Quaker Dr. Jonathan Potts, formed a Committee of Correspondence that would discuss plans and procedures with similar groups from other counties in the province. Potts was an especially active participant on the pre-Revolutionary committees, as he also served on the county Committee ofObservation and as a delegate to the Provincial Convention. Another Friend, innkeeper James Lewis, also represented the pacifist viewpoint on the local Committee of Observation. The vast majority ofthe members ofthese committees, however, belonged to the mainstream churches ofthe county—Lutheran, Reformed, or Anglican —and only Christopher Schultz, a Schwenkfelder, came from one ofthe numerous German sects in the county.3 For residents ofBerks County, the coming ofthe War for Independence was quite momentous. Within a week of the Battle of Lexington in April 1 775, two companies ofsoldiers, commandedbytwo members ofReading's German Reformed congregation, had been formed to aid the patriot cause. By July, Berks Countians had organized at least forty companies to resist British authority. Over the course ofthe war, local militia and Continental regulars from the county participated in campaigns at Cambridge and in Canada, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and along the frontier.4 Not all residents of the county, however, supported the rebellion. After the commencement ofhostilities in 1775, a group of"divers Inhabitants of the County of Berks, being conscientiously scrupulous ofbearing Arms," met in Reading. William Reeser, the chairman of the gathering and a member ofthe German Reformed congregation and ofthe County Committee of Observation, wrote to the Committee of Safety on September 1 1 , 1775, and stated that although this group opposed taking up arms, they realized the "justice ofthe cause" and promised to contribute to its support. In the county, Mennonites, Moravians, Schwenkfelders, and Amish, in addition to the Quakers, held theological reservations concerning the war; the German sects implied that they would neither fight norpay militia fines, but they...