Ministers, Merchants and Migrants: Cumberland Friends and North America in the Eighteenth Century Angus J. L. Winchester* I It is almost forty years since Frederick Tolles explored the origins of what he termed The Atlantic Community of the Early Friends (Friends Historical Society Supplement 24, London, 1954), in which Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic were "held together by the intangible yet powerful bonds of love, fellowship, and a common faith." He concluded that those bonds developed from and were sustained by a variety of trans-Atlantic links. Pre-eminent was the travelling ministry, the numerous men and women who traversed the ocean in both directions on religious visits, and whose missionary zeal, pastoral care and spiritual nurturing drew scattered Quaker meetings into a common religious life. Other specifically religious influences included the exchange of epistles between yearly meetings and the promulgation of a common fund of published journals and other religious writings. By the middle decades of the eighteenth century the "powerful cement of trade" had built a more worldly bridge across the Atlantic as a network of commercial links bound Quaker merchants in the American colonies to their increasingly wealthy opposite numbers in England and Ireland. Not specifically mentioned by Tolles in that essay was a third link, the ties of kinship which extended their threads across the seas as British and Irish Friends emigrated to the New World. Quaker emigration was substantial in the later years of the seventeenth century , especially to participate in the "Holy Experiment" of Pennsylvania in the 1680s. Time and distance inevitably loosened the family ties of the early generations of colonists, but emigration continued throughout the eighteenth century, maintaining a personal, family dimension to the Anglo-American Quaker community.1 This paper seeks to explore the relationship between the three strands in the trans-Atlantic connection outlined above—religious, mercantile and family bonds—by focussing on the lives of Quaker families in Pardshaw Monthly Meeting, Cumberland, in the mid-eighteenth century . It will be argued that the three strands cannot be viewed in isolation , as each fed on and nurtured the others. Answering the call to travel in the ministry, pursuing mercantile activity, and taking the Quaker History decision to emigrate were different aspects of a common AngloAmerican Quaker culture which significantly reduced the psychological distance across the eighteenth-century Atlantic. The exercise in local history presented below may be thought of as a footnote to Tolles' study of Quaker merchants in colonial Philadelphia, Meeting House and Counting House (University of North Carolina Press, 1948). The West Cumberland Quaker community was neither as numerous, nor as wealthy, nor as powerful as that in early eighteenth-century Philadelphia, and its roots remained, for the most part, firmly embedded in the soil of the small yeoman farms of the Cumbrian countryside. Nevertheless, the brief flowering of Whitehaven as a major port in the Anglo-American trade made its impact on local Quakers by opening up opportunities for trade and emigration. In the following discussion , the local evidence for contact between West Cumberland Friends and America is first presented in some detail; then one theme is highlighted for discussion: the inter-linkages between the travelling ministry and the development of mercantile links across the Atlantic. II In the mid eighteenth century, Pardshaw Monthly Meeting embraced six particular meetings: the original rural Quaker stronghold at Pardshaw Hall itself, meetings in the bustling market town of Cockermouth and in the thriving port of Whitehaven, and three smaller congregations at Broughton, Isel and Keswick. It covered an area of West Cumberland that had experienced significant economic growth in the early eighteenth century. The mining and export of coal, largely to Ireland, and a burgeoning trade with America, notably in the import of tobacco, stimulated industrial development in the vicinity of Whitehaven, which stood second only to London as a port for the import of tobacco in the 1740s.2 As we shall see, local Quakers were heavily involved in Whitehaven's mercantile growth: the opportunities for trade and for commercial contact with America were an important influence on the development of the Quaker community in West Cumberland at that time. The meeting at Pardshaw Hall was one...
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