The Twilight of the Holy Experiment: A Contemporary View

Notes and Documents THE TWILIGHT OF THE HOLY EXPERIMENT A CONTEMPORARY VIEW Edited by Frederick B. Tolles Two hundred years ago, in June 1756, six Quakers resigned their seats in the Pennsylvania Assembly. Their action signaled the end of the most prolonged and remarkable effort ever made to translate Quaker principles into political action. How the "Holy Experiment" came to an end is a story that has often been told.1 The two-hundredth anniversary is a good time to remind ourselves of the circumstances, and an account published in a Philadelphia newspaper gives us an opportunity to see them through contemporary eyes. Friends had controlled the Assembly of Pennsylvania for seventy-four years. During all this time Pennsylvania had been at peace. The British government in London had made frequent attempts to involve the Quaker commonwealth in the wars waged outside its borders by requesting or demanding financial support. By one means or another—by outright refusal to participate or by ingenious but somewhat questionable subterfuges—the Quaker Assembly had avoided voting directly for any military measures. But the long peace was broken in 1755. In the wake of General Braddock's disastrous defeat at Fort Duquesne, warfare flared out all along the Pennsylvania frontier. Supported and incited by the French, Delaware and Shawnee Indians terrorized the back settlements during the fall and winter of 1755 with fire and scalping knife. Recent scholarship suggests that responsibility for the alienation of the Indians did not rest primarily on the policy of William Penn's sons, as contemporary Friends insisted and Quaker historians have generally agreed; the roots of the conflict lay 1 The fullest account, based on Quaker documents, is still Isaac Sharpless's in A Quaker Experiment in Government (Philadelphia, 1898), chap. VIII. But see also Theodore Thayer, Israel Pemberton: King of the Quakers (Philadelphia, 1943), chaps. VI-VIII. 30 Notes and Documents31 rather in the harsh facts of imperial power politics, French expansionism , and the land-hunger of Virginia planters and London merchants.2 In any case, the non-Quaker inhabitants of the Pennsylvania back country, who bore the brunt of the Indian fury, were not interested in the exact apportionment of blame. They demanded decisive measures of defense and retaliation, and threatened to converge on Philadelphia to enforce their demands by direct action. On April 14, 1756, the Governor and his Council, bowing to insistent pressure, by-passed the Assembly and declared war on the Indians. William Logan, the only "consistent" Friend on the Council, cast the lone dissenting vote. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia and London, a good deal of political maneuvering had been going on. In November 1755 the Quaker Assemblymen actually voted defense measures. They appropriated £55,000 for the relief of friendly Indians and distressed frontiersmen "and other purposes." The phrase "other purposes," like the well-worn formula "for the Queen's use" in earlier appropriation bills, could obviously cover military expenditures and was presumably intended to be so construed. At the same time, they passed a militia bill, drawn by Benjamin Franklin to Quaker specifications . It called for the voluntary enlistment of all men whose conscience allowed them to fight. By these equivocal devices the hard-pressed legislators hoped to satisfy their critics on both sides— concerned Quakers and non-resistant Germans, who wanted no warlike measures at all, and the militant anti-Quaker forces, who demanded a vigorous defense policy. Their compromises satisfied no one. A group of twenty Friends, speaking for themselves but representing the "weight" of the Yearly Meeting, promptly sent an address to the Assembly, protesting its action in appropriating funds and "putting them into the Hands of Committees who may 2 Julian Boyd, "Indian Affairs in Pennsylvania, 1736-1762," in Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 1938). It is worth noting that John Hanbury, a wealthy London Quaker, was one of the moving spirits in the Ohio Company, the group of land speculators whose activity in the Ohio valley was one of the factors which precipitated the Anglo-French conflict there. See Lois Mulkearn, ed., George Mercer Papers Relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia (Pittsburgh, 1954), passim. 32Bulletin of Friends Historical Association Apply them to Purposes inconsistent...