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Foreword
- University Press of Florida
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Foreword Dissent in America is an old and perpetually relevant topic. Dissenters simultaneously reflect and refute the nation’s values. And since the beginning of America they have often acted on religious conviction. Based on their interpretation of the Bible, Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, during the 1630s, challenged authority in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay colony. A century later, Mormons faced persecution for practicing a revised version of Christianity. At the same time, Roman Catholics provoked a Protestant and nativist reaction through their loyalty to the Pope and insistence on their right to educate their children in their faith. During the twentieth century, Jehovah’s Witnesses affected American perceptions of civil liberties through their refusal to allow government to stand between them and their religious commitment. Other examples of religious dissent abound. Probably no American religious group, however, is better known for dissent from prevailing social and cultural practices than the Society of Friends, or Quakers. The Society organized in England during the seventeenth century. It stressed the existence of a divine spark in all human souls and a determination not to engage in or resist violence. Starting during the 1670s, large numbers of Quakers moved to England’s North American colonies to practice their faith more openly. By 1750 Quaker meeting houses were the third most common places of worship in the thirteen colonies. Their numbers trailed only those of Congregationalists and Anglicans. Yet by 1775 Quakers had declined to the fifth largest American denomination. They were ninth by 1820 and sixty-sixth by 1981. In 2009 there were only 107,000 Quakers in North America. Many factors produced this decline over two and one half centuries. But, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Quakers’ diminishing numbers owed a great deal to their engagement with the world around them and the demands in self-discipline that standing against that world made on them. Unlike such pietist groups as the Amish and Mennonites that shunned aspects of materialism, Quakers became merchants, manufacturers , commercial farmers, and politicians. Even as Quakers adopted forms of worship, dress, and speech that set them apart, they sought to prosper materially and to spread their social views in ways that forced them xii · Foreword to interact with larger regional societies. By the late eighteenth century, in such states as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia, they organized antislavery societies and lobbied governments in efforts to express their opposition to violence and their commitment to the spiritual equality of all human beings. These economic, social, and moral initiatives led Quakers simultaneously to challenge the dominant society and to compromise with it. The stress, anguish, and contradiction that accompanied this awkward engagement with the world form the central theme of A. Glenn Crothers ’s thoughtful study of the Quaker community in northern Virginia between 1730 and 1865. Crothers’s approach is multifaceted as he analyzes the development of a dissenting religious community located on the Old South’s northern periphery. In his detailed narrative, Crothers explores several interrelated themes. One of them is Quaker pacifism versus the larger society’s demands for military service during the War for Independence, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. Another is the Quakers’ intensifying opposition to slavery in a slaveholding society, where pressure to conform to a pervasive, oppressive, race-based system affected them much more directly than it did their antislavery coreligionists in the North. Throughout his book, Crothers also portrays the evolving role of Quaker women in a community that (sometimes grudgingly) accorded them wider prerogatives than existed in the larger American culture. Most important, Crothers shows how Quakers helped shape life in northern Virginia from the early eighteenth century through the Civil War period. While attempting to uphold their beliefs, Quakers changed over time in regard to religious obligations, community, and civic duty. In some cases, individual Quakers compromised the denomination’s most central principles; some left the Society altogether. And often Quaker dissent encouraged other Virginians to strengthen their contrary views. In short, throughout his book, Crothers addresses the issue of means-and-ends in dissent by relocating the question to a place and a people too little studied. He does so in ways that suggest dissent was, and is, not easy. Although dissent is essential to democracy, it is often costly for individuals and groups that engage in it. That was all the more true in the Old South. Crothers’s book is a welcome addition to the Southern Dissent series. Stanley Harrold and Randall...