The Progressive Friends of Longwood

THE PROGRESSIVE FRIENDS OF LONGWOOD By Albert J. Wahl* IF THE present year holds true to a well-established pattern, thousands of people from many parts of the nation will pass through the gates of the Pierre S. DuPont estate near Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, on their way to see the flowers in the famous Longwood Gardens. Intent upon getting to the flowers, it is unlikely that many of these visitors will pay much attention to a little white-painted frame building to the left of and just beyond the entrance to the DuPont grounds. If, perchance, some do give it more than passing attention, only the initiated will know that here, almost a century ago, a newly-formed religious society tried to further a social revolution through the dedication of this building to the Religion of Humanity, to the service of God through service to man.1 The month of May, 1953 will mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of this society, a group calling itself the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends.2 Behind this anniversary lies a long and interesting story—a story carrying us back to the days well before the Civil War, when the spirit of progress was like a strong wine to the minds and bodies of many Americans, to a time when Ralph Waldo Emerson could well ask of his fellows: "What is a man born for, but to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made. . . ?"3 Emerson's heyday, it will be remembered, extended from 1830 to 1860, a period in which assorted radicals and liberals north of the Mason-Dixon line pursued what they called the * This article is a modification of a paper entitled "Longwood Meetinghouse: Its History and Attendere," presented before Friends Historical Association in May, 1952. Dr. Wahl is on the faculty of Pennsylvania State Teachers College, Indiana, Pennsylvania. 1 Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends, Proceedings (New York, 1855), pp. 55-57, 59-96. 2 Ibid. (1853), p. 5. 3 "Man the Reformer," in Mark Van Doren, ed., The Portable Emerson (New York, 1946) , p. 83. 13 14Bulletin of Friends Historical Assocution Sisterhood of Reforms; when crowds gathered in such buildings as the one at Longwood to preach, protest, and plead for woman's rights, temperance, abolition of slavery, and a multitude of other causes. These causes had a tendency to run together in their arguments and techniques, and your true reformer attended more or less to all of them.4 It was to be expected that reformers would encounter the hostility of the more conservatively-minded majority, and a student of the history of the Protestants might well have predicted trouble for these sects in this era. Indeed, the Protestant churches of America did become arenas for a most unseemly contest between those who favored progress in the spirit of Christ and those who opposed it. This contest, on questions of antislavery, woman's rights, and kindred causes, as well as on points of doctrine, brought on that phenomenon of preCivil -War days known as "Come-outerism." Come-outerism meant rebellion and a division of churches into splinter groups;3 and one of its most striking examples lay in the birth of the Congregational or Progressive Friends from the body of Hicksite Quakerism. Starting in 1848,6 and continuing for some years thereafter, Yearly Meetings in the northern and midwestern states were shaken by what the Pennsylvania Freeman called a "moral earthquake."7 Rebel meetings—variously called Congregational Friends, Progressive Friends, or Friends of Human Progress—were formed in New York, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan; they all claimed to be throwing off the authority and formalism of superior church bodies to return to the liberty and simplicity of primitive Quakerism8; and they 4 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston [c. 1898]), p. 119. 5 Ibid., pp. 114-116. 6 Waterloo (N. Y.) Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends, Proceedings (Auburn, New York, 1853), p. 21. 7 September 14, 1848. 8 Waterloo Y.M. Cong. Frds., Proceedings (1853), p. 21; ibid. (1851), p. 9; Pa. Y.M. Prog. Frds., Proceedings (1853), p. 42; ibid. (1857), p. 40; Green Plain (0.) Annual Meeting of...