A Quaker Tercentenary for America?

The BULLETIN of Friends Historical Association Vol. 45Spring Number, 1956No. 1 A QUAKER TERCENTENARY FOR AMERICA? By Henry J. Cadbury The recent celebration of three hundred years of Quakerism in the North of England and then in Ireland raises the question: How about America? Should a similar epoch be noted on the opposite side of the Atlantic, and if so, when and where and how? American Friends, so far as I know, are giving this question no serious thought, and with better reason than they realize. To answer the questions would be very difficult, and the answers would be even more arbitrary than in better recorded and more highly centralized areas of Quaker beginnings. When, in 1676 and later, London Yearly Meeting circulated questionnaires to the counties asking for data about the First Publishers of Truth, they did not go beyond England and Wales. George Fox himself has left us in his original Journal an annual record of Friends traveling in the ministry both in England and to "other nations," in the years 1655, 1656, etc., and in another memorandum I think he mentions a Quaker mission to Newfoundland as early as 1652. Weknow that Mary Fisher and Ann Austin were in Barbados in 1655 and the next year they began "the Quaker invasion of Massachusetts." But, as Irish Friends have reminded us, propaganda by visitors is not the only way to date our local beginnings. The presence of a resident Friend is equally worth noting, or the beginning of a set- 4 Bulletin of Friends Historical Association tied meeting. These did not always follow from the transient efforts of visitors. In fact I believe that in the history of early American Quakerism the colonists who as residents bore the brunt of persecution continuously have been unduly overshadowed by the valiant transatlantic missionaries of whom we have more record. Certainly the four martyrs on Boston Common in 1659 to 1661 have a unique place in history and if the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church they set the date of the church's planting. In any case some three years from now their memory will presumably be revived in suitable manner in America by Friends and perhaps as well by the descendants of the Puritans. Mary Dyer and her fellow sufferers are widely recognized in the story of the struggle for religious liberty. But other and earlier sufferings of Friends in various colonies are also on record. I have discussed elsewhere the discordant dating of Quaker beginnings in Great Britain.1 Many of the records lack the kind of chronological care that would make us trust them, especially those from non-Friends. There are references too early to Friends that are due to mere inattentive anachronism. The same is true on the American side, and I may recall, to begin with, the unconfirmed statement in the Clarendon Manuscripts which, apparently in 1647, three years before Fox was called a Quaker by Justice Bennett, speaks of "a set of women come from beyond seas, called Quakers." These women are usually supposed to have come from the Continent of Europe, but the term might apply as well to America. Cotton Mather, the learned Massachusetts church historian , contradicting a Quaker statement of origin in the North of England in 1652, says, fifty years later: "I can tell the world that the first Quakers that ever were in the world were certain fanatics here in our town of Salem who held almost all fancies and whimsies which a few years after were broached by them that were so called in England, with whom yet none of ours had the least communication . Our Salem Quakers indeed of themselves died childless ."2 1 Friends Quarterly, VII (1953), 112 ff. 2Magnalh Christi Americana, Book VII. But in Book III he says the first breaking out of Quakerism was at Kirby Steven in Westmorland, England. A Quaker Tercentenary for America?5 From lack of full Quaker record the most that we can report is not the actual beginnings but the first known instance of anything that can be called Quaker activity. Rufus Jones believed the first American Quaker was one Richard Smith of Southampton...