labour.”11 For the rest of his career, Hicks placed “free produce” at the center of Quaker anti-slavery testimony. By this time Friends had severed all direct ties to the peculiar institution, but Hicks believed that until they abjured slave products Quaker testimony was incomplete, and their “hands stained with blood.”12
Hicks’s pamphlet on slavery caused little debate until Quakers began questioning his other theological views. Phebe Willis (not to be confused with Lucretia’s school friend, Phebe Post Willis), a member with Elias Hicks of Jericho Monthly Meeting, called upon Hicks to clarify his views on the Bible in writing. On May 5, 1818, Hicks wrote Willis that the Scriptures, as they have been interpreted, “have been the cause of four-fold more harm than good to Christendom.” Citing Quaker founder George Fox, Hicks viewed “the light and spirit of truth in the hearts and consciences of men and women, as the only sure rule of faith and practice.” These views would have scandalized most American Christians, but Hicks was surprised at the negative response he got from Quakers. In another letter to Willis, Hicks denied that these statements deviated from his previous sermons or beliefs; he had always condemned “professors of Christianity” for idolizing the Bible. Ingle notes that these letters dropped like a “bombshell” in the midst of the Society of Friends. Indeed, Hicks’s replies set off a wave of recriminations, polemics, and pamphleteering among Quakers and non-Quakers alike.13
Trends within the Society of Friends made Hicks’s statements more troubling to the elders than they might have been at the beginning of his ministry. In both England and the U.S., evangelical Christianity was undergoing a period of revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening. In the U.S., revivalism coincided with religious disestablishment, which prompted denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists to compete with previously state-supported religions for potential converts, especially women, through a vibrant proliferation of charitable voluntary societies. At the same time, prosperous Quaker businessmen and merchants began to drop their opposition to worldliness. Particularly in Philadelphia, the wealthy Quaker leaders saw themselves as similar to other Protestants, basing their doctrines on the Bible, establishing a clear hierarchy to rule the religion, and joining Bible, tract, missionary, Sabbath, and temperance societies to establish their place in mainstream American culture. These respectable elders wanted to remove any taint of disrepute from their religion, which had been associated with dangerous dissenters in the colonial period. One sign of this change was the decision by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1806 to disown those who denied Christ’s divinity or a literal interpretation of the Bible. By the 1820s, the Philadelphia elders were exerting their power on a regular basis, targeting Hicks and his supporters.14
The elders took special exception to Hicks’s sermons on free produce, which they rightly perceived as attacking both their piety and their business practices. In October 1819, Hicks preached at Pine Street Meeting in Philadelphia, where Lucretia had taught school and married James. Pine Street Meeting was now the spiritual home of Jonathan Evans, leader of the evangelical Quakers, who had retired from the lumber industry in 1817, having accumulated a fortune of $43,000. During the American Revolution, he had served a short jail term for refusing military service, and for a time he abstained from slave products. But by 1819 Evans had given up on free produce as too cumbersome in an economy so closely tied to slavery. In his sermon, Hicks remarked that Friends who had previously embraced free produce and had now fallen away were little better than “thieves and murderers.” When Hicks asked permission to preach on the same subject to the women’s meeting, Evans initially rejected his request, but eventually the men’s meeting gave permission. Still, Evans 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
