Cobbett on Quakers: William Cobbett's Dedication of O'Callaghan's Usury to the Society of Friends

COBBEn ON QUAKERS William Cobbett's Dedication of O'Callaghan's Usury to the Society of Friends By Thomas Bassett* A vituperative satirist in Philadelphia (1792-1800) and a pungent author on a Long Island farm (1817-19), William Cobbett observed the Quaker merchants of New York and Philadelphia with as much acid disapproval of their business as he did those of London in the other periods of his Anglican, Tory, radical life ( 1763-1835) . He was against Quakers, he said, because they were monopolists and profiteers. He contrasted some honest farmers he observed in Warminster, Wiltshire, in 1826, with "Quakers, none of whom ever work, and all of whom prey upon the rest of the community."1 As an anticlerical against the Established Church, Cobbett liked Friends' voluntarism, without paid ministers, and he had several friends in the Society. He wrote in his weekly Political Register for April 10, 1830, of James Paul, a Quaker farmer of Dublin, Pennsylvania , "under whose hospitable roof I and my wife . . . spent many and many a happy day," although Cobbett said he never helped him to so much as a pin. He named his third son after Paul. "From talk with another Quaker friend, Dickins, . . . there sprang," writes his biographer, "the idea of the series of articles making up the Paper against Gold" polemic.2 Jeremiah O'Callaghan (1780-1861), the author of Usury: or Lending at Interest (1824; 3rd ed., London: WiUiam Cobbett, 1828), was an unemployed priest in 1828. No Irish, English, Canadian or other American bishop would settle him in a parish because of his adamant opposition to taking interest. Shortly after a fruitless appeal to the Vatican, O'Callaghan became tutor to Cobbett's sons in London. In 1830 he finally landed a job as •Thomas Bassett is Editor for the Committee for a New England Bibliography in Boston and is currently working on New Hampshire. 1.Rural Rides (ed. by G. D. H. and Margaret Cole; London: 1930; 3v.), 2:397. 2.Fifteen numbers, 1810-17; many editions. G. D. H. Cole, The Life of William Cobbett (New York: 1924), 168-169, 294. 44 COBBETT ON QUAKERS45 missionary priest for the Diocese of Boston, covering all of Vermont. There he served the Irish and Québécois immigrants until the Diocese of Burlington was established for the State in 1853. The 1828 edition of his Usury is the only one of at least five, 1824-56, to carry this bit of Anti-Quakeriana. I have found no record that shows he had any dealings with Vermont Quakers. He lashed out in print at the Episcopal Bishop, John Henry Hopkins, and the Burlington Congregational minister, John K. Converse, who published arguments against the Roman Catholic Church. Vermont Quakers were quiet on that subject and O'Callaghan had no occasion to notice them. TO THE "SOCIETY OF FRIENDS." Quakers, I have, in the above address, given you the appellation which you have chosen to give yourselves, and under the cover of which, you have so long carried on a most profitable duping of the world. I dare say that you must have wondered, when you read my letter to Tuffnell,3 how I should have become so intimately acquainted with the writings of the Fathers of the Church. The truth is, that I committed upon Father O'Callaghan an act somewhat resembling those which you, from your infancy, are taught to commit, are absolutely drilled to committing , on all the rest of mankind, whom you, being one degree more reprobate than the Jews, look upon as fair game for the hooks and the traps, of an infinite variety of sorts, which you are constantly committing , and for the studying of die art of committing which, with safety, I am convinced that your silent meetings are intended. There you sit; there you consider and re-consider how you shall go to work to monopolize, to forestall, to rake wealth together by all manner of cunning and sharping tricks; and how you can contrive to live snugly, and be as sleek as moles, without ever performing one single thing that ought to be called work. But, if I robbed Father O'Callaghan...