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This chapter examines the causes and ramifications of the 1827–1828 Hicksite-Orthodox split among Friends, arguing that theological and personality differences sparked the divide. In the 1820s, Orthodox Friends, influenced by evangelical Protestantism, found the theological liberalism of many Quakers increasingly unacceptable. When they tried to impose theological orthodoxy on the Society, they triggered a separation within most of the American yearly meetings. In the Baltimore Yearly Meeting, to which northern Virginia Friends belonged, Hicksites predominated, lessening conflict. But the split undermined local Friends' morale and diverted the energies of Quaker leaders away from the Society's social concerns (including antislavery) as they tried to avoid further internal conflict and seek reconciliation with moderate Orthodox Friends. At the same time, the split enabled the region's women Friends to take on new leadership roles and responsibilities.

This chapter examines how Friends' pacifism during the American Revolution, coupled with their decision to end slaveholding, led white Virginians to suspect Friends' patriotism. Following the example of Philadelphia Friends, Quakers in Virginia adhered closely to their pacifist beliefs, facing arrest and the distraint of property for refusing to serve in the Virginia militia. White Virginians' suspicions of Quaker disloyalty grew when local Friends offered support to the “Quaker exiles” (the Philadelphia Friends sent to Winchester for treason) and when Friends began emancipating their slaves contrary to state law in the midst of a war that imperilled slave property. Virginia Friends faced similar difficulties during the War of 1812, particularly when large numbers of African Americans ran to British lines during the invasion of Washington. Throughout both conflicts, the Society disowned those who failed to adhere to Quaker injunctions, believing that only by strict regulation of their own behavior could Friends act as the moral compass of the community.

This chapter examines Quaker antislavery after 1830, arguing that Friends' activism was constrained by the white community's growing intolerance of dissent and by Friends' economic and cultural attachment to the region. Many Friends also became convinced that the tactics of northern abolitionists would incite violence, threatening Quakers' commitment to pacifism and antislavery. Consequently, northern Virginia Friends promoted educational reform, economic development, and agricultural improvement, believing such reforms would appeal to the self-interest of white Virginians while promoting a free labor economy. At some personal risk, Friends also aided the free black and enslaved community of the region. Quakers' efforts helped to destabilize the institution and unnerve local slaveholders, who, in response, threatened local Friends with arrest and violence.

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 4 explores northern Virginia Friends' antislavery efforts before 1830 and the reasons they adopted deferential and gradualist tactics, including colonization. Friends condemned slavery because they believed all people possessed an “inward light,” but this same belief led them to embrace moral suasion to appeal to slaveholders' conscience. Friends' growing attachment to the region also encouraged them to embrace a deferential approach and avoid alienating their white neighbors. Influenced by Revolutionary ideology and worried about Virginia's declining economy after 1815, some slaveholders supported Friends' antislavery efforts. However, Gabriel's Rebellion in 1801 and Nat Turner's revolt in 1831 revealed the limits of white Virginians' commitment to ending slavery and their willingness to impose legal and political constraints on Quaker activism.

Chapter 6 considers the impact of western movement on northern Virginia's Quaker women. Migration disrupted economic bonds forged by Quaker merchants and farmers and produced a growing gender imbalance as single male Friends moved west. In response, more women-buoyed by Friends' belief in gender spiritual equality-took on positions of responsibility within the local, quarterly, and yearly meetings, and more women attended and became teachers of Quaker schools. By the 1860s Quaker women demanded full gender equality within the meetings. At the same time, women's social networks and association building helped sustain the bonds of northern Virginia's Quaker community. Still, Quaker women could not escape entirely the pervasive gender and racial values of the region, which limited their social activism and shaped relations with their black domestic servants.

Chapter 8 examines the experience of northern Virginia's Friends during the Civil War. Friends faced arrest, conscription, and imprisonment from hostile Confederate forces and confiscation of their property by both Union and Confederate armies, particularly after the region descended into guerrilla war. However, the biggest casualty of the war was Friends' peace testimony, which called on Quakers to be neutral in thought and deed. Only a small number of the region's Friends entered the military, but few Friends remained neutral. Seeing the Union as the source of their religious liberty and committed to ending slavery, nearly all the region's Friends embraced the northern cause, with Quaker women taking a leading role. The war transformed Friends' adherence to and interpretation of the peace testimony and their disciplinary standards, giving rise to a more permissive and individualist Quakerism.

Chapter 3 explores the way in which Quaker business ethics and success, and Friends' economic contributions to the regional economy, their civic concerns, and social respectability enabled them during years of peace to escape the pariah status they had held during the American Revolution and become respected members of the mercantile and agricultural communities of northern Virginia. As they prospered and created economic networks that helped sustain the community, however, many Friends became embedded in the economic and social life of the region, in the process becoming dangerously entangled in speculative ventures and slave-based industries that diverged from their religious and ethical convictions. In short, economic success and growing public acceptance intensified rather than resolved the tensions that arose from living in a society that violated their testimonies on a daily basis.

Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson stepped into the prevailing winds of holiness when he joined the Chester Preparative of the Westfield Monthly Meeting in 1889. By this time, holiness had flourished in the soil of Indiana Quakerism for over 20 years. The emergence of the holiness movement within the Society of Friends was dubbed as the “transformation of American Quakerism”. Many Friends had begun following the lead of Joseph John Gurney in dismantling the walls separating them from the wider world of evangelicalism. They embraced Victorian middle class culture, and believed in the efficacy of rational means to advance moral and religious cases such as abolition.

A Quaker minister, Elizabeth Fry is famous for her work as a prison reformer. Central to this work, however, was scriptural reading as a key component in the rehabilitation of prisoners. For Fry, the Bible was such a foundational document that it was for her simply ‘reading’. She was a promoter of the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society and responded to a wide variety of social needs by commending scriptural reading. While the Society of Friends has often been viewed as less committed to the authority of Scripture than many other Protestant denominations, this case study does not bear out such an assumption.

Peace activism underwent a disappointing relapse during the intervention of Britain in Egypt and Sudan. The established primary movement faltered through difficulties in both financial and ideological aspects as one of the most conspicuous independent publicist W. T. Stead became one of the peace movement's biggest burdens as he did not take the peace cause until 1894. In order to mobilize support on particular issues, primary associations created ad hoc bodies one clear example of which is the Arbitration Alliance created in 1894 to win support from the churches on specific issues. This period is disappointing in the history of peace movement as primary associations left the goal of promoting ideas to rather focus on their own internal problems.

George Walton, captain of a merchant ship from Perquimans County, North Carolina, who had only recently joined the Quakers, had a long, complex, and vivid dream during the night of 17 December 1772. This dream serves as a fitting introduction to the Quaker manumission movement in Revolutionary War-era North Carolina. The dream underscores the emotional aspects of the movement and touches on the themes of what motivated antislavery activists, the role of blacks as actors in their own history, the functions of leaders and followers in the antislavery movement, and the significance of the Society of Friends in that movement. The chapter shows how the consequences of this group's antislavery activism radiated out from a few individuals to the region, the state, and, eventually, the nation.

Elizabeth Heyrick's 1824 pamphlet Immediate, not Gradual Abolition challenged the policy of amelioration and gradual emancipation adopted by the Anti-Slavery Society in Britain at its foundation in 1823, setting in motion debates that led to a fundamental shift in abolitionist policy in both Britain and the US. This chapter traces the religious wellsprings of Heyrick's outspoken radical abolitionism. It explores the roots in the milieu of late eighteenth-century provincial rational dissent, where religious and political radicalism were interlinked. It then examines the ways in which her radicalism was strengthened and sustained through her subsequent involvement in the Society of Friends at a time when Quaker women were asserting spiritual leadership through searing critiques of the increasing ‘worldliness’ of the male leaders of the Society.

Between 1895 and 1898, financial tribulation and spiritual discontent motivated Tomlinson to break away from the Society of Friends and embark on a lifetime of radical holiness ministry. Tomlinson decided to set out for Appalachia, which he had visited in the past with mentor J.B. Mitchell. This decision was attributed to his inclination to avoid the crowd, at a time when foreign missions dominated headlines while home missions were relegated to the background.

This chapter focuses on the seventeenth-century Quaker presence in transatlantic English colonies in the Caribbean and North America. Its starting point is a puzzling discrepancy between Quaker accounts of visits to Barbados and those to the American mainland: while the latter are detailed, complex and recognisably constructed around the same kinds of oppositions and alliances as are to be found in the accounts of English journeys, the former are short, general and often bland. Why, when the terrain, the social structures and the cultures must have been equally strange to visiting Friends, was there such a disparity of textual engagement? An answer is found in the ambivalent Quaker response to the Barbadian slave-owning economy, in which Friends themselves actively participated. While the commitment to spiritual equality was advocated as strongly as ever, there was, equally, a commitment to the status quo of the social order. Rather than the inward light dissolving the boundary between the social and the spiritual – such that the one is read as a dimension of the other, linked through the frequently reiterated assertion that God is no ‘respecter of persons’ (see Acts 10.34; Romans 2.11; Ephesians 6.9), as was more typically the case – here instead the assertion of spiritual equality is maintained separately from the upholding of a system manifestly dependent on an absolute ‘respect of’ or distinction between, persons. It is argued, therefore, that the capacity of the early Quaker conception of the inward light to dissolve boundaries and fuse categories here met an unusual and unwonted limit, with the result that the seamlessly continuous culture of the early Friends faltered in its unerringly inclusive remit.

The prologue introduces Samuel M. Janney, Quaker minister, educator, historian, and antislavery activist. His 1849 arrest by a Loudoun County, Virginia, grand jury for inciting slave revolt introduces and illustrates Friends' awkward position within antebellum Virginia society as, at once, southerners and outsiders. It outlines Quaker spiritual beliefs, particularly their belief in the “inward light” within all people, and how this notion led to Friends' embrace of pacifism and antislavery. Finally, it identifies the book's central themes: the limits of dissent in the antebellum Upper South; the nature of antebellum southern identity; the question of means and ends in efforts of reformers to effect social change; and the transformation of antebellum Quakerism.

This chapter chronicles the life of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson from childhood to adulthood. A.J. enjoyed a fair amount of privilege as the only son of his grandparents’ eldest child, and as a member of a locally prominent family. As a teenager, he was known as a fun-loving and carefree young man noted for his pranks and good humor. He married Mary Jane Taylor in 1889. He later joined the Chester Preparative Meeting of the Society of Friends which heralded the beginning of his spiritual journey.

The epilogue briefly traces Friends' post-Civil War efforts to aid freedpeople and Native Americans in Nebraska. More important, it raises broad philosophical questions about the issue of means and ends among those committed to social change. Throughout the antebellum period, northern Virginia Friends remained determined to end slavery and aid local African Americans, but their commitment to non-violence and desire for self-preservation compelled them to adopt tactics inoffensive to southern slaveholders and that northern abolitionists often dismissed as ineffectual. The book concludes by encouraging those who seek progressive social change to examine and question how best to balance competing values in the quest for social justice, just as Friends did in antebellum Virginia.