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2 Finding a Path of Virtue in a Revolutionary World In early September 1777, the Revolutionary War was not going well for the new United States. The British army controlled the country’s two largest ports, New York City and Philadelphia, and the Continental Army seemed unable to halt its advance. The British occupation of Philadelphia provoked widespread alarm in Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake, and the new state government of Virginia called up its militia. In Frederick County, local militia officers, following an amended state law, made no allowance for religious groups like Quakers who for reasons of conscience would not fight. On September 23, local officials drafted fourteen Friends belonging to the Hopewell Monthly Meeting into service. “With drawn swords,” the American officers “pushed the Friends into rank, threatening they would have their blood if they did not comply.” When the men refused “to handle any of the muskets,” the officers ordered the weapons “tied to their bodies” and had the group marched to George Washington’s army outside Philadelphia . The Friends refused “to partake of the provision allotted to themselves ,” forcing a number to drop out of the ranks “from indisposition of body” and return home as best they could. Only the intercession of Clement Biddle, a lapsed Philadelphia Quaker serving in the Continental Army, secured the release of those who made it to Pennsylvania. At Biddle’s urging , Washington ordered the men freed and gave them “liberty to return home.” Throughout the ordeal, Friends noted with satisfaction, the men “bore a steady testimony against all warlike measures.”1 For northern Virginia’s Quakers, such incidents became a common if sporadic feature of life during the Revolution. Many Americans viewed Friends’ neutrality in the Revolutionary War as tantamount to Toryism, and they faced harassment, incarceration, financial hardships, and deep suspicion from the new state governments. In northern Virginia, the Finding a Path of Virtue in a Revolutionary World · 39 government’s repression of Friends came in two waves: in late 1776 and 1777, when fighting in Pennsylvania threatened the Chesapeake, and after 1780 when the British invaded Virginia. Historians have often portrayed the Revolution in Virginia as a product of enlightened leaders who confidently led a united white population into revolt, but the experience of Friends highlights the anxieties of the state’s elite and the racial and class tensions that plagued Virginia. Many of these internal conflicts resurfaced and Quakers confronted another wave of repression when the British invaded the Chesapeake during the War of 1812. In the Revolutionary and early national era, Friends faced harassment when Virginia’s political leadership felt most threatened and the new nation faced its gravest military threats.2 Quakers’ wartime experience also helped transform the Society of Friends. Since the 1750s, reforming Quakers had worked to purify the sect, codify its discipline, and in the words of English traveling minister Samuel Fothergill, divide “wheat and chaff” to separate “honest-hearted” Friends from “the worldly-minded” who opposed reformation. The Revolution accelerated the reformers’ efforts. In the mid-1770s, Friends articulated more clearly and expanded the scope of their pacifist convictions, leading them to embrace a course of action that alienated them from the broader American community. Friends’ suffering during wartime, moreover, convinced them to embrace a new activism that addressed a variety of social injustices , including slavery and American Indian policy. These changes transformed the Society throughout North America, including the meetings in the slaveholding region of northern Virginia.3 The Revolution accelerated Friends’ efforts to clean their own house and generated a growing awareness that they must also work to redeem the broader society. By war’s end, northern Virginia’s Quakers had largely ended slave ownership among themselves. During the 1780s and 1790s they campaigned to aid newly freed African Americans and abolish the slave trade and the institution of slavery, an effort they renewed after the War of 1812. The Baltimore Yearly Meeting also tried to reimburse American Indians for the land on which the Hopewell Meeting House sat. The effort failed, but it sparked a new social concern for the Baltimore meeting: aid to and education among the Native Americans in the Northwest. The experience of war also encouraged the region’s Quakers to begin enforcing more strictly the Society’s rules against frivolous and immoral behavior, including the use of liquor. In response to their “sufferings,” northern Virginia’s Quakers, like their coreligionists throughout the United States, forged a [18.223.172.252] Project MUSE (2024...

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