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1 “Liberation Is Coming Soon” The Radical Reformation of Joshua Evans (1731–1798) Ellen M. Ross Eighteenth-century Quaker reformer Joshua Evans, although little known today, was an important voice in Quaker antislavery, Indian rights advocacy, and American peace history. Recent transcriptions by Jon Peters and Aaron Brecher of all known extant manuscripts of Evans’s journals provides an opportunity to reexamine this figure, a friend and sometime neighbor of John Woolman, and a “beloved friend” of Elias Hicks. Evans was a critic of the developing capitalist economy. He perceived that people were increasingly implicated in the exploitation and oppression of enslaved people, the poor, Indians, even animals, and the land itself. For Evans, war was the fundamental symptom of humans’ alienation from God and the most potent catalyst for the ills afflicting eighteenth-century society. He objected to an interconnected market system that perpetuated war: an economy increasingly dependent upon slavery and overreliant on tariffs and foreign trade, the oppression of Indians, the export of grain to import rum, the cultivation of tobacco, and the production and consumption of luxury goods. Evans labored to bring to reality an alternative vision of America, one that would hold all people in equal regard. The divine injunction to “do unto others as one would have others do unto one” was for him the fundamental principle guiding the formation of the new society. The means to the transformation was a “regeneration,” a “reformation,” inspired by the “ancient testimonies” of Friends. The vision Evans articulated included a critique of particular Quaker practices that he thought manifested degeneration within the Society of Friends, and it moved beyond that to a critique of American society, and, at times, to a critique of the universal state of humankind. Evans’s life and work provides a rendering of the American ethical lineage in which the cultivation of personal transformation is prescribed as the most critical strategy for promoting social transformation. He sought to make the new America a reality in his own life. His hope was that as others were persuaded of the need for personal reformation, the pernicious and misguided war-based economy would give way to a harmonious world in 16 ellen m. ross which “the hungry would be fed & the Naked Cloathed, no hard thinking against another, nothing would hurt or destroy.”1 For reformers like Evans antislavery advocacy was a part of a larger and overarching concern about the disposition of the Quaker community and society in general. The location of the concern about slavery within a wider theological perspective helps explain the tenacity and influence of people such as Evans. Obedience to God yielded freedom in the world. The power of visionaries like Evans was in their willingness to stand over and against the customs of their day in order to bring to reality another way of being. At times, this reformation of the mid– and late eighteenth century is depicted as signaling Quaker withdrawal from society. The story of Evans offers an alternative narrative. Rather than separating himself from society, he made a claim about what the center of society could be and sought to bring that to reality in his own life and, through his public ministry, to call others to walk with him. Scholars often underestimate the power of religious faith to sustain movements for reform. Consideration of Evans’s life sheds light on the critical connection, common to many Quaker antislavery advocates, between personal religious convictions and methods of social transformation. In 1756, during the French and Indian War, Evans refused to join the militia or to participate in the common practice of paying another person to go in his place. In his journal he wrote, “I cannot reconcile War with Christianity nor the devouring spirit with the Lamb’s nature, No More than Murther [murder] and theft with the Royal Law of doing to others as [we] would they should do unto us.”2 Eventually he also refused to pay property taxes that would have been used to finance war. He observed in his journal that he was “much reproached,” but, he concluded, “I could not pay my money to defray the expense of sheding blood.”3 Evans’s journal is a window onto the world of eighteenth-century Quaker activism. Although at times he described himself as a lone voice crying out in the wilderness, he emerged among other Quakers who were similarly awakened to the unified agenda that drove his ministry. Jack Marietta’s The Reformation of...

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