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Posted on 09/05/2011 3:32:48 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
In a fledgling nation hungry for men to fight in the American Revolution, conscientious objectors were frequently greeted with scorn and their loyalty was questioned.
(According to FR rules, please go to the link to read this most interesting story.)
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
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The Quaker dominated government of PA was not conducive to long life for western settlers. OTOH, in less than 100 years, Philly became the richest city in British North America.
Still, your point is made. Pacifism kills.
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***The Quaker dominated government of PA was not conducive to long life for western settlers.***
How true! One of the earliest school massacres happened in PA during the French and Indian war.
The legislature was so pacifistic that the settlers had to pile their murdered dead in the dorway and force the Quaker legislators to walk over them to get them to call out the militia for service.
Can you suggest a reference where I can get more information about the settlers taking their dead to the PA state house to protest the lack of support for defense of the frontier? I remember reading that somewhere. I’d like more info because I’m teaching a Sunday school class on Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and their clashes with the pacifist Quakers who pushed them to the frontier as buffers against Indian attacks and then refused to help them defend their settlements.
The only reference I have is in an old book THE ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY OF PIONEER LIFE by Augustus L Mason, published in 1883.
Page 161..
A letter written by Benjamin Franklin, from Easton, Pennsylvania, which must have been a hundred or more miles from the border settlements says: “The settlers on this side of the mountains are actually removing and we are now the frontier. Our poor people of this town have quite expended their little substance and are wearied out with watching. Seeing themselves neglected they are moving away as fast as they can. Pray do somthing for our speedy relief or the whole country will be entirely ruined. All this part of the country is now entirely lost, and the enemy are penetrating further and further, and if immediate measures are not taken, they will soon be in sight of Philadelphia. the whole country is flying before them.”
The slaughter was by no means confined to this section of the state. The same affairs existed everywhere, even to Greene county in the extreme south-west. Still the Quaker Legislature refused to help. Popular indignation knew no bounds. the bodies of the dead and mangled were sent to Philadelphia, hauled around the streets in public view, and placarded “THESE ARE THE VICTIMS OF THE QUAKER POLICY OF NON-RESISTANCE!” A vast mob assembled around the House of Assembly, piled the corpses in the doorway, and demanded that instant action be taken.
At last, with great reluctance, the Assembly ordered the erection of a chain of stockade forts at the mountain passes from Easton to Bedford.
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I’ve always wanted my husband to add a Pennsylvania (or Kentucky) long rifle to his gun collection. They are priced out of sight, unfortunately.
Wow! And we think we have complaints today!
“Quakers” are romanticized in our history books and our literature today; but I can see that they were controversial in the past, despite the fact that one Quaker Lady became part of George Washington’s corps of spies.
I have ancestors who left the church of their childhood in the late 1600s/early 1700s and who married into the Quaker sect. They relocated over time from Philadelphia to Virginia to Missouri. I see why they became cut off from their relatives. It wasn’t just distance.
Two of my Quaker ancestors fought for the Union in the Civil War, presumably because they thought fighting slavery was more important than whatever pacifist beliefs they held.
I had two Quaker uncles who were in the Army during WWII.
I also had an ornery non-Quaker ancestor who was a Greene County frontiersman who volunteered for a patriot militia during the Revolutionary War. By the time of the War of 1812, he had a big family and had pushed west to Ohio, but he volunteered again anyway.
Yes, the original article about the “broadsheet” mentioned that. The part of my family that left Philadelphia to marry into a Quaker line went on to join Quantrille’s Raiders by the time (several generations later) they got to Missouri and the Border Wars (which preceded the Civil War).
Lydia Darragh was the Quaker Lady I was referring to in #11. I couldn’t remember her name. Thanks for the link.
I heard the story a little differently, as recounted by Smithsonian Magazine. There, they said that one of her sons had joined Washington’s troops against the family’s wishes. She overheard the British plans for attack and she wrote a note which she folded into a covered button which she sewed onto her younger son’s shirt. (They called them blouses in those days.) He made it through the lines to buy flour and went tooo Washington’s HQ where he delivered the message after he cut the button off his shirt.
Washington wrote about his corps of spies in his later years and thanked some of them openly. Others he kept secret until he died and never referred to them by name.
General Nathaniel Greene was a lapsed Quaker.
I learn so much on Free Republic!
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