Evangelical Quaker Acculturation in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1850-1875

EVANGELICAL QUAKER ACCULTURATION IN THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY, 1850-1875 Richard E. Wood* Though the most visible Quakers today are still the most distinctive ones, the majority in this denominational cluster came to stand on common ground with other evangelical Protestants in America in the period 1850 to 1875. They adopted revival methods and grew in numbers while declining in distinctiveness. Most Friends from Ohio to Kansas, numbering perhaps 30,000 in the 1850s, had followed the lead of English Quaker Joseph John Gurney in building stronger ties with other Christians who, inspired with millennial optimism and moral perfectionism, were endeavoring to re-shape American society in accordance with their ideals.1 Reassured about a strategy of religious acculturation by the spiritual vitality and social compassion of their evangelical associates, midwestern Friends gradually gave up their traditional quest of purity through isolation and came to share much more than before the economic, educational, and political attitudes of other revivalistic Protestants.2 *Richard E.Wood is an instructor in history, Seminole Junior College, Seminole, Oklahoma. 1.These statistics are based on a total of approximately 10,000 children of school age (5 to 21 years) listed in minutes of Indiana Yearly Meeting, 1855, 29, and minutes, Ohio Yearly Meeting (Gurneyite), 1855, 15; David E. Swift, Joseph John Gurney: Banker, Reformer & Quaker (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 114-144, 164-165, 175-184, 190-194; Mary C. Johnson and P.B. Coffin, comps., Charles F. Coffin, A Quaker Pioneer (Richmond, Indiana: Nicholson Printing Company, 1923), 90-102; Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), esp. 15-16, 21-37, 208; Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (third ed., Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 2.For explanation of the religious ideology and strategy of evangelical Quaker leaders of the region, see Richard E. Wood, Evangelical Quakers in the Mississippi Valley (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1985), 16-43. Contrast the direction of change depicted in the present article with that in Jack D. Marietta, "Wealth, War and Religion: The Perfecting of Quaker Asceticism 1740-1783." Church History, Vol. 43 (1974), 230-241. Those social scientists and historians who use the controversial ideal types "traditional" and "modern" as poles on a continuum would probably see significant movement by evangelical Friends in the direction of the latter in the nineteenth century . Richard D. Brown has correlated modernization in America with advances in technology, increasing econmic specialization and interdependence, greater literacy, independent thought and rationality, and the emergence of a centralized and more bureaucratic government; see his Modernization: The Transformation ofAmerican Life 1600-1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), esp. 3-22. 128 Evangelical Quakers in the Upper Mississippi Valley 129 With consciences reassured by their commitment to the improvement of society, many of these Friends believed that they could actively pursue wealth without jeopardizing their religious ideals. During the 1850s and 1860s thousands of them sold their farms in Ohio and Indiana at a substantial profit and acquired larger holdings of fertile but cheaper land in Iowa and Kansas. Others developed successful businesses in new towns or expanding cities. Even those who remained on older family homesteads shifted rapidly towards marketoriented agriculture. A revolution in the technology and costs of transportation stimulated much of this change. In the period between 1800 and 1819 the price of shipping farm products to distant markets by wagon had ranged from 30 to 70 cents per ton-mile, a situation which effectively excluded from the national market farmers who did not live near navigable rivers or lakes.3 But the extension of the national road westward to Vandalia, Illinois, the opening of numerous canals in the 1830s and 1840s, and the proliferation of railroads in the Midwest during the 185Os brought a radically different situation. Rates on the Ohio Canal dropped to as low as one cent per tonmile by 1853 as railroads began to compete with and supplant the much slower canals.4 Midwestern farmers thus gained ready access to the large markets of the east coast and of Europe. The proliferation of railroads and their extension onto the great plains...