From Quaker to Upper Canadian: Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends, 1801 – 1850 (review)

Robynne Rogers Healey’s From Quaker to Upper Canadian is a concise study of the process of denominational formation on the western frontier of the nineteenth-century British Empire. Concentrating on the role of women and the family in the Quakers’ Yonge Street settlement, Healey throws new light on the religious, gender, and cultural histories of pre-Confederation English Canada. At the same time, she carefully situates the Yonge Street Quakers within their wider social and political contexts. It is an impressive performance.

From Quaker to Upper Canadian deals with two generations of Yonge Street Quakers and their efforts to maintain their position as God’s peculiar people – a group set apart from the rest of society by their beliefs and religious practices. Healy traces the rise and fall of this Quaker ideal of separateness through chapters focused on the roles of family and women in community building and the impact of religious discipline and education on the Quaker sense of self. She argues that the Yonge Street Quakers became fully integrated into Upper Canadian society during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. They participated in the political struggles against the colony’s Tory oligarchy in the 1830s, and by 1850 they had joined hands with other Upper Canadian Protestants in support of abolitionism and other causes. This transformation, Healey demonstrates, was the result of factors operating within the Quaker community and in Upper Canadian society in general. Demographic change was particularly important. The land around the formerly isolated Yonge Street settlement filled up with non-Quaker colonists during the 1810s and 1820s, forcing the Friends to deal regularly with people outside their faith group. Healy also stresses the disruptive potential of factionalism among the Quakers. Schisms in 1812 and 1828 tore apart both the church and the kin groups on which so much of Quaker life was based. Those internal conflicts also broke the hold of religious discipline over younger Quakers, who, with opposing groups competing for their allegiance, no longer saw the rules of the community as absolutes.

In many respects, From Quaker to Upper Canadian is a model study. In a little under two hundred pages, Healey manages to re-evaluate the history of an entire religious denomination in Upper Canada. She achieves this considerable feat through a close reading of the available manuscript sources. Her discussion of the meaning of silence in the minutes of the Quaker meetings is particularly noteworthy. In the period before the schism of 1828, she demonstrates, growing dissension silenced the usually loquacious Quakers, for whom consensus and community were of paramount importance. Historians of Upper Canada will also want to pay close attention to Healey’s account of the rebellion of 1837. She provides the answer to an old riddle: why Quakers made up 40% of William Lyon Mackenzie’s followers during the march down Yonge Street. The young men who became rebels were not denying their identity as Quakers, Healey argues, much less repudiating it. Mackenzie’s Quaker supporters believed that it would take drastic measures to end the tyranny of Family Compact. They were willing to shoulder arms in the interest of what they saw as the greater political good of the colony, even if that meant overlooking one of the key tenets of their faith – pacifism. Healy is also careful to note that these were young men who had grown up in the midst of the external and internal forces that shook the Yonge Street settlement to its foundations from the 1810s onward. They were not rigid in their adherence to the Quaker discipline; or, at least, they were not as rigid as their parents, who did not join the rebellion. Healey’s explanations, like her book as a whole, are never simplistic. For that reason alone, From Quaker to Upper Canadian deserves a wide audience.