Old Elias Hicks had a farm on Long Island. When a young man he had traveled as an itinerant Quaker evangelist between Vermont and the Chesapeake, preaching the Inner Light, "that lighteth every man that cometh into the world" (John 1:9(…A decade after his death they would still tell the story of how, in Virginia, he courageously called upon a planter who had threatened to shoot him for preaching against the sin of slavery, and after repeated visits persuaded the man to set his people free…Throughout his life Hicks rigorously defended the right as he saw it: the austere Quaker tradition of refusing to compromise with worldliness. He insisted that principled persons should avoid consuming the products of slave labor, such as sugar, rice, or cotton textiles. Besides slavery, he denounced banks, politics, and the Erie Canal. ("If the Lord had intended there should be internal waterways, he would have placed them there.") As for scientific learning, he considered it as "trivial" as "ribbons on a young woman's head."…In the 1820's, he became the focal point of a controversy that irreparably split the American Society of Friends.
Ever since the seventeenth century, the Society of Friends (nicknamed "quakers" for their occasional emotional trances) had conceived themselves as a people apart. Within Protestantism, they were super-Protestants. Where Protestants demystified and simplified the Eucharist, [communion] Quakers did not observe it at all, nor did they practice baptism. Their silent meetings had no order of service. They wrote no systematic theology. Since both women and men possessed the divine Spirit, the Inner Light, they practiced a substantial degree of gender equality. They did not ordain clergy, though they "recorded" the fact that God's Spirit particularly spoke through designated individuals. They dressed plainly and spoke plainly, using "thee" and "thou," the familiar form of address, instead of "you," considered more polite. They refused to serve in the armed forces. They refused to take oaths in court, on the grounds that one should tell the truth all the time, not just in special circumstances. But the international evangelical movement affected them in ways that two hundred years of persecution had never done…They started associating with non-Quakers in philanthropic organizations. Sometimes they seemed more interested in cooperating with other white evangelicals than in bearing uncompromising witness against slavery…Elias Hicks stood out against these trends. He also criticized those Quakers, chiefly in Philadelphia, who had adapted sufficiently to the ways of the world to become successful merchants and entrepreneurs…In April 1827, dissension wracked the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (analogous to a synod in Presbyterianism). The followers of Hicks walked out and set up their own Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Other yearly meetings had to decide which of the two Philadelphia meetings to recognize, and in doing so they precipitated a schism throughout American Quakers…[along with] temperance, prison reform, and public support for elementary schools…the Hicksites displayed a willingness to pursue causes that others thought quixotic. Hicksite Quakers provided a disproportionately large number of recruits to the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery. And when at last a movement endorsing equal rights for women surfaced, the little minority of Hicksite Quakers would make themselves conspicuous in its support.
—Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, pp. 195-197 [insertions in brackets mine, to make text more coherent after shaving ancillary explanation cause lord Howe can maunder]
God, it's stories like this that make me love history! It's tempting to write Hicks off as a total _crank! But his story forces us to confront how complex, often contradictory the ideology most people hold is in practice. How they can be entirely! wrong-headed on issue A and still do immeasurable good on issue q over here. And learn the cognitive dissonance of holding what they've done worth applauding alongside that with which we disagree.
