Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner
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found another way to demean Hicks. While Hicks was delivering his sermon to the women, Evans proposed adjourning the men’s meeting. Hicks returned to an empty room, leading his supporters to complain bitterly about Evans’s rudeness. This infamous adjournment was not the only time that the two men disagreed over free produce. On at least two other occasions, Hicks’s sermons prompted a protest from Evans.15
In the period leading up to the schism, Lucretia became more openly critical of the power of the elders. In a letter to James Mott, Sr., she bemoaned the “departure from simplicity of Quakerism as reflects trade, with the consequent embarrassment attendant thereon,” adopting Elias Hicks’s perspective on the wealth and worldliness of the prominent Quakers in her city. She later referred to Jonathan Evans as “the Pope of that day.”16 Mott’s disapproval of their heavyhandedness was also reflected in her concern over a series of disownments in 1822. Two daughters of Rebecca Paul, a “poor widow” and a minister in the Society of Friends, were excommunicated for marrying outside meeting, the Quaker phrase describing an interfaith marriage. From her childhood on Nantucket, Lucretia had viewed this type of repudiation as an unnecessary abuse of power. But the Philadelphia elders pushed their authority farther than Nantucket’s Quaker leaders. The elders heard a complaint against Paul herself for “conniving” to arrange the marriages of her children. In the end, Philadelphia Monthly Meeting disowned Rebecca Paul. Mott described this case as “trying” and wondered if there could be “improvement in the Discipline relative to out-goings in marriage.”17 Two years later, Lucretia witnessed the disownment of her youngest sister Martha, who married Captain Peter Pelham, a War of 1812 hero and one of Anna Coffin’s paying boarders.18
These internal troubles spilled beyond the borders of the Society of Friends beginning in 1821, in a series of inflammatory letters printed under pseudonyms in the Christian Repository, an evangelical newspaper published in Wilmington, Delaware, later published as a book titled the Letters of Paul and Amicus. The correspondents were Eliphalet Gilbert (Paul), a prominent Presbyterian minister, and Benjamin Ferris (Amicus), one of the leaders of Hicks’s sympathizers in Wilmington. Gilbert’s goal was to prove that Quakers were not Christians, but infidels, deists, atheists, and Unitarians. He started by condemning the Quaker belief in the inner light as “superior to the sacred scriptures,” referring to Elias Hicks as an example of this Quaker heresy. The exchange, which went on for two years, horrified evangelical Quakers not only because Gilbert accused all Quakers of “holding doctrines and practices inimical to the principles of the Gospel,” but because Benjamin Ferris’s defense of the Quakers adopted Hicks’s views rather than their own. As a result, the correspondence won approval from Hicks’s allies like Mott, who later recommended Ferris’s letters to Irish Friends.19
The Letters of Paul and Amicus show the clashing worldviews of evangelical Christians, in the midst of expanding their Protestant empire, and the “liberal views” of many Hicksite Quakers, Unitarians, and free thinkers. Benjamin Ferris, writing as Amicus, defined the age as “distinguished by a Spirit of Free Enquiry,” pointing to the individual duty and ability to seek religious truth. In contrast, he singled out Lyman Beecher, the famous minister and leader of the Second Great Awakening, as “intending to establish a Calvinistic influence in this country,” noting the establishment of seminaries and colleges under Beecher’s control. In addition to violating the separation of church and state, Ferris viewed missionaries and other “hireling ministers” as examples of greed and corruption; he referred to them as “MERCENARY CLERGY.” 20 Gilbert responded that free enquiry must inevitably lead to the Scriptures, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the network of Bible, Sabbath, tract, and missionary societies. He cited the “astonishing, numerous, and extensive revivals of religion” taking place in the country as evidence of the truth of his position. And he complained of Quakers’ “indiscriminate opposition to all ministers of the gospel.” 21 In reply, Ferris referred to Bible societies and revivals as “carnal” rather than “spiritual” manifestations of religious belief. Like Hicks, Ferris viewed custom and tradition as poor arguments for religious doctrine.22
The debate between Gilbert and Ferris revealed one of the principal dividing lines in American religion: slavery. Gilbert criticized the Society of Friends for its opposition to missionary societies. In reply, Ferris argued that missionary efforts were “ill timed.” Using India as an example, he pointed out that missionaries had only succeeded in subjecting “Hindoos” to “political slavery” and “religious domination.” And while Gilbert and other missionaries labeled South Asians heathens and idolaters, Ferris argued that “the love of God is extended to all his rational family.” Finally, Ferris contrasted evangelical benevolence in foreign lands to their neglect of the homegrown problem of slavery. Christian missionaries, he wrote, were unwilling “to extend this divine government through our own land. Here we see One million five hundred thousand of our fellow creatures unjustly held in a degrading bondage, which is entailed on their innocent posterity.”23 Gilbert, in turn, noted his own opposition to slavery, but argued that slavery was not a religious issue: “A man, on mere principles of humanity and sound policy, may be as strongly opposed to oaths, slavery, and war, as any of your society can be, yet be a deist or an atheist. What should hinder? Your opposition to these civil and political evils, therefore, does not prove you a Christian society.” Gilbert’s statement reflected the views of most mainstream Protestants, who desperately sought to avoid involvement in the debate over slavery. Yet as the Philadelphia elders worked to position their sect in the evangelical tradition, the exchange between “Paul” and “Amicus” further distinguished Quakers from other Protestants. As Lucretia recalled, the Philadelphia Meeting for Sufferings, a standing committee charged with governance, issued a disclaimer and protest against Benjamin Ferris.24
The harsh reaction of the Philadelphia leadership provoked new entries into the ongoing pamphlet war, with Quaker women playing a central role in these theological and political battles. Phebe Willis was the first to publicly question Hicks’s views on the Bible. Anna Braithwaite, a British traveling minister closely associated with evangelical Quakers in her home country, entered the American fray with a vengeance. Braithwaite’s style was both confrontational and aristocratic—she traveled in a fine carriage with a female servant beside her—and thus guaranteed to alienate the Hicksites. She made three trips to the United States during the controversy; the first visit was in 1823, when she sought an interview with Elias Hicks. Unsurprisingly, the two sides disagreed about Braithwaite’s motivations. Evangelicals described Braithwaite as “unprejudiced”; the Hicksites criticized her intention “to bring the American people into all the glorious consistency of the Mother Church [London Yearly Meeting].”25
Anna Braithwaite’s published account of her interview with Hicks was intentionally provocative, casting Hicks as a heretic and a crank. According to Braithwaite, Hicks claimed that the Bible was unnecessary. He denied the account of creation in Genesis. He also questioned the doctrine of the Atonement, asking her “whether she could suppose the Almighty to be so cruel as to suffer Jesus Christ to die for our sakes.” He demonstrated the same broad and scandalous conception of spirituality as Benjamin Ferris, asserting that “the heathen nations, the Mahometans, Chinese and Indians bore greater evidence of the influence of Divine light, than professing Christians.” Finally, according to Braithwaite, Hicks testified to the absolute universality of the inner light, stating “the fullness of the Godhead was in us and in every blade of grass.”26
Elias Hicks’s defense, written as a letter to Dr. Edwin Atlee, a Philadelphia ally, indicated his distance from the evangelical position. Though he acknowledged the importance of Scripture among Christians, he reiterated his belief in the inner light: “we ought to bring all doctrines, whether written or verbal, to the test of the Spirit of Truth in our own minds, as the only sure director relative to the things of God.” And he remained skeptical of the Atonement as the test of Christian faith. In an introduction to the published version of the letter, Hicks’s friends further linked the minister to William Penn, who had also been “egregiously slandered, reviled and defamed by pulpit, press and talk, terming him a blasphemer, seducer, Socian, denying the Divinity of Christ and what not.”27 They saw Hicks as protecting the Society