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This chapter explains why Pennsylvania Friends' settled in northern Virginia after 1730: to obtain cheap land that they believed necessary to maintain their religious households and ensure the spiritual safety of their children. Friends in Virginia established their hierarchical system of religious meetings and began enforcing the behavioral rules (the “discipline”) and cultural practices that grew out of their spiritual beliefs. Virginia authorities welcomed these frontier settlers as a defense against Native Americans; but as dissenters from the established Anglican Church and the honor-based culture of Virginia, Friends remained a suspect group. These suspicions grew during the French and Indian War when Quakers refused to serve in the militia and Virginia authorities arrested and fined individual Friends for non-service. Quakers' war experience sparked their efforts to reform the Society and tighten its discipline-including injunctions against slavery-leading to the disownment (or removal) of many members.

Chapter One, “Zion in Crisis,” traces the imbricated relationship between the Quakers' evolving theological identity and the political movements of the late eighteenth century. The universalist propensity of religion coexisted uneasily with the particularizing tendency of nationalism and the state-strengthening expressions of patriotism, and the Society seized on the Jewish faith tradition in order to resist these twin pressures. In particular, ministers on both sides of the Atlantic drew on four key concepts from the Jewish faith tradition and relied on these tenets when confronting the pressures wrought by warfare and nationalism: (1) A communal belief in their identity as a “chosen people” subject first and foremost to divine law. (2) A shared history of persecution that defined their relationship with the governments under which they lived. (3) A reciprocal experience of diaspora that bound together their scattered community. (4) A collective responsibility to prophesy in order to stir others to repentance and reform. Taken together, these four tenets represent the Quakers' interpretation of the Zion tradition during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Quaker movement began in mid-seventeenth-century Britain and its followers coalesced around the common sentiment that they had experienced a spiritual Second Coming of Christ. The leaders of this new movement believed they were in the vanguard of God’s people, establishing God’s will in the world. The founding of the colony of Pennsylvania, by William Penn, was an attempt to establish Quaker principles in the colonies. In the early and mid-eighteenth century, many Quakers became unsettled about how short Pennsylvania had fallen from their vision. These reform-minded Quakers reinvigorated corporate discipline and protested war, slavery, and political compromise. John Woolman was only one of these reformers, but he developed an incisive critique of the British imperial economy. While scholars have viewed him as primarily a Quietist figure, his awareness of broader economic developments and his apocalyptic outlook show that he constructed a theology that defies such categorization.