Quakers Living in the Lion's Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730–1865 by A. Glenn Crothers (review)

While Quaker devotion to antislavery in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is well known, southern Quaker communities struggled to navigate between this religious tenet of the sect and their developing southern identity. In his highly readable and engaging book, A. Glenn Crothers examines the lives of Quakers in Northern Virginia between 1730 and 1865 and the precarious position they held as "Quakers living in the lion's mouth."

This book is organized chronologically with attention given to local social realities such as intermarriage with slaveholders as well as the theological developments of the international denomination such as the effects of the Hicksite schism. Underlying this approach is the belief that antislavery sentiment was a product of both political and religious developments of the late eighteenth century and not a belief of early Quaker meetings. Crothers argues that Quakers "could alienate their white neighbors, snuff out their "light," and lose the opportunity "to do good" among black and white Virginians" (7).

Crothers opens the book by presenting the quandary Virginia Quakers found themselves in throughout the antebellum period; how could they remain a distinct people separate from the world when slave labor dominated the market and drove cultural institutions? Before the American Revolution, Quakers held slaves with few moral scruples about the practice. The language of the revolution and the ideas it presented along with the growing evangelicalism of the Quaker denomination, however, pushed Quakers throughout the Atlantic world to reconsider their position on slavery. By 1776 the Philadelphia Association of Quakers held slavery incompatible with Quakerism.

For Quakers in Virginia this meant freeing slaves they owned and ceasing their association with slaveholders. This proved difficult to put into practice because of Virginia's laws against emancipation. Cultural practices such as passing on slaves to daughters and sons meant that when a Quaker married outside of the sect they could also become inadvertent slave owners. Rather than integrating into Virginia's society then, as Quakers had done until this time, Quakers in Virginia suddenly found it more prudent to either move west where slavery was already outlawed or to intermarry among fellow Quakers. As Quakers flooded west, however, endogamous marriage also became a trickier prospect and often was not economically advantageous. Those who flouted one Quaker principle were also most likely to break other principles. And, those Quakers who remained in Virginia found themselves increasingly incapable of prospering economically while maintaining their standing within the church.

Women became more influential in Northern Virginia meetings during the nineteenth century because of both the economic shift away from slavery and the Hicksite schism within trans-Atlantic Quakerism. As Crothers observes, "female networks of support became essential for preserving Friends' sense of separateness. Women's socializing, nurturing, and association building, in short, superseded men's economic networks as a source of group cohesion" (171). The Hicksite split, accompanied by westward migration, and Quaker men who had been removed from monthly meetings for economic transgressions meant that some Northern Virginia meetings folded and that those that survived were less engaged in the economy of the South. It also meant that these meetings could increasingly speak out against slavery in some fashion.

The Civil War fractured even further the already disintegrating religious group. Before the war, Quakers in Northern Virginia had worked to undermine slavery through a variety of projects: free labor plantations, educational outreach, agricultural improvements and industrialization. Once the war was inevitable, however, Quakers had to make political decisions. While some Quakers supported the union by acting as nurses and providing supplies, others offered the same support to their neighbors who fought for the Confederacy. And, regardless of the side they supported, all Northern Virginia's Quakers faced the threats of war; ravaged land, arrest, fines, and other hardships. For Crothers, the Civil War produced changes within the denomination as much as it...