The Hicksite Quaker World, 1875-1900

Abstract

The Hicksite Quaker World, 1875-1900 Thomas D. Hamm* In the spring of 1897, a Vassar College professorpublished a little book onHicksite Quakers. The author, JamesM. DeGarmo, ashisname suggests, came from a Quaker family, but he had left Friends for a more fashionable Episcopalianism. DeGarmo found much to admire in his ancestral faith. He thought its emphasis on good deeds, its focus on the divine immanence, and the general level of morality and virtue among members all praiseworthy. Nevertheless, DeGarmo concluded that Hicksite Quakerism was dying, dying because it had become static and ossified. Their numbers declining, and their young people seeking a deeper and more progressive religious experience, Friends faced an unpromising future. He confidently predicted thatQuakerswouldultimatelyreturnto theProtestantEpiscopal Churchthat they had left two and a half centuries before.1 DeGarmo was no prophet. Hicksite Quakerism did not die, nor was it as static and unchanging as he believed. The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a critical period for Hicksite Friends in North America. Faced with myriad challenges, ranging from social and economic upheavals that werebreakingup old Quakerfarmingcommunities and scatteringmembers, to determining the meaning and role ofplainness, to responding to currents in the larger intellectual and religious life of the United States, Hicksite Friends did change, and change significantly. While the transformation of the Hicksite yearly meetings was not as outwardly apparent as that which took place among Gurneyite Friends, with the introduction of revivalism and the pastoral system after 1870, Hicksite Friends were, by 1900, nevertheless fundamentally different from what they had been a generation earlier.2 Some Quaker distinctives, such as the deep-seated fear of art and music, had disappeared. Other peculiarities, such as most ofthe features of the plain life, were still seen, but no longer mandatory. On the other hand, Hicksite Friends were showing considerable openness toborrowing institutions and methods from the larger American society. The development of First-day schools was one manifestation; the whole emphasis on organized philanthropy on the "latest scientific basis" was another. Finally, Hicksite spirituallifehadthe samefundamentalbases—unprogrammedworship, the centrality ofthe Inner Light, continuing revelation, nonpastoral ministry— as it had at the time ofthe Separation ofthe 1820s. But in important ways, Hicksite Friends now understood the foundations of these doctrines, and explainedthemto each otherandto non-Friends, inways that often differed with the views of Hicksites before 1860. ?Thomas D. Hamm is archivist and professor ofhistory at Earlham College. He is currently at work on a book on Hicksite Friends from 1827 to 1900. 18Quaker History Anyone undertaking a census ofHicksite Friends about 1900 wouldhave been struck with their distribution. The core was the Delaware Valley— Philadelphia Yearly Meeting accounted for over halfofthe roughly 20,000 Hicksites in North America, 1 1,586 in 1900. Another third were found in Baltimore (roughly 3,000) andNew Yorkyearlymeetings (about2,500), the formermade up ofFriends inMaryland, Virginia, and central Pennsylvania, the latter embracing Quakers on Long Island, in New York City, and in the Hudson Valley. The once-thriving Quaker communities of western New York had faded—Genesee Yearly Meeting was less than a thousand members, about half scattered between Syracuse and Buffalo, the rest in Canada. A visitor in 1898 noted that in the 1830s, yearly meeting sessions drew up to 2,000 Friends. Now all present did not fill one room of the meetinghouse in Farmington, New York.3 West of the Appalachians, Hicksites were even more scattered. Ohio Yearly Meeting, which in 1 828 had claimed almost four thousand members in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, now numbered less than four hundred in about a dozen meetings on the west bank of the Ohio River. Indiana Yearly Meeting, which had been the smallest Hicksite yearly meeting at the time of the Separation, had done better, with about fifteen hundred members, roughly two thirds of them in the three large monthly meetings of Miami, Whitewater, and Fall Creek. Illinois, the newest Hicksite yearly meeting, was also the most dispersed, stretching from southern Indiana through Illinois and Iowa into Nebraska, but still numbering a little over a thousand Friends. One visitor noted, not unkindly, that Illinois's entire membership was roughly that of Green Street Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia.4 As these...