Abstract
ELIAS HICKS — PROPHET OF AN ERA By Bliss Forbush* NO MAN can be understood apart from the period in which he lived. To appreciate and understand the life and contribution of Elias Hicks we must have some knowledge of American history between the years of 1748 and 1830. These were stirring and glorious times ; in the freshness of a new nation the minds of men had cast off many shackles of the past. Elias Hicks was seventeen when Patrick Henry cried, "If this be treason. . ."; he was twenty-five at the time of the Boston Tea Party; he was twenty-eight when the Revolutionary War began and the Hessian troops occupied Jericho and directed that the Judge Advocate of the regiment should occupy two "% rooms" in his house.1 Elias Hicks was forty-one when George Washington became President of the new nation, fifty-five at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, sixty-four at the outbreak of the War of 1812, seventy-five when the Monroe Doctrine was promulgated , eighty at the time of the democratic revolution led by Andrew Jackson, and he died in the year that Daniel Webster made his famous reply to Hayne. When Elias Hicks was eighteen years of age the American people lived east of the Allegheny Mountains and numbered less than one and a half millions. There were as many Dutch as English in the Province of New York and a third of the population of Pennsylvania was of German nationality. The first newspaper in the colonies was less than a generation old, the first postal system had just begun, and the three-day stagecoach between Philadelphia and New York had only been running for ten years. In his early manhood Hicks saw the abolition of the colonial system of feudal tenure, quitrents, primogeniture * Bliss Forbush is Headmaster of Friends School, Baltimore, and Chairman of Friends General Conference. This essay is based upon an address given at the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Elias Hicks, held in the Jericho Meeting House, Long Island, under the care of Jericho Monthly Meeting, Fifth Month 16th, 1948. 1 From "Return of the Inhabitants of Jericho, Captain Walvenfalls Company, John Hanfseil, Quartermaster." Photostatic copy supplied by Jesse Merritt of Farmingdale, N. Y. 11 12Bulletin of Friends Historical Association and entail. He experienced the changes which went with the disruption of such great estates as that of the Philipse family which extended over an area three hundred miles square and the Penn family estates which were valued at a million pounds. He lived through a "new deal," led by Jefferson, and a later one led by Jackson. He saw the economy pass from free trade to a protective tariff. The invention of the cotton gin, which was to change the situation regarding slavery and make cotton "king," did not take place until Hicks was forty-five. He began to free his own slaves in 1778.2 Elias Hicks lived in a time of great mental stirrings, a threshing time for religiously minded persons. He was ten when Jonathan Edwards, the father of New England revivalism, died. In the same year John Wesley had his "conversion" experience in the Moravian Chapel in London. Nowhere in the world have so many divergent religious ideas been poured into one melting pot as in the American colonies. Each European group that migrated to America brought its religious thought and custom with it. When Elias Hicks was recorded as a minister in 1778 the number of churches in the colonies was divided as follows: Congregational 658, Presbyterian 543, Baptist 498, Anglican 480, Quaker 295, Reformed bodies 251, Lutheran 151, Catholic 50.3 Within these church brotherhoods there was much cross-fertilization. New waves of thinking reached the colonies and penetrated the religious denominations to different degrees and at different speeds. The new rationalism of English liberalism combined with the romanticism of the French revolution. Equalitarianism was born of the New England town meeting and the conditions of frontier life. The scales were weighted in favor of religious liberalism, a more exalted idea of the nature of man, and the release of the mind from rigid systems of church control and authoritative interpretation...
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