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Authors: Mark Kurlansky
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as a fight for freedom and how rarely that is the true goal.
War burdens the working class, and that was traditionally the source of antiwar sentiments. Quaker founder George Fox was a shoemaker. But William Penn, a convert to Quakerism in 1667, at the age of twenty-three, was the son of a British admiral and an aristocrat with a personal acquaintanceship with King James II. Even after his conversion, he was reluctant at first to drop the aristocraticfashion of wearing a sword. Penn wrote of the persuasive power of love and the unchristian, warlike nature of Christians, whom he termed—in the ultimate seventeenth-century European insult—to be worse than the Turks. It was Penn who offered the simplest formula for ending war, that it starts with an individual refusing to fight. According to Penn, “Somebody must begin it.”
The governments of the earth have built up a structure that exists only by the power of money. The head of the land—the Queen—is honored in proportion to the pomps and vanities of her immediate attendants. Her governors all hold out their hands for their wages, without which their patriotism would shrivel up.
—TE WHITI, Maori chief, 1879
A not insignificant piece of misinformation passed on to American schoolchildren is that Pennsylvania was named after the Quaker leader, William Penn. Penn was the founder of the colony after obtaining a charter from King Charles II of England for a “holy experiment.” But Charles named the colony not for this questionable Quaker pacifist but for his father, the great British admiral Sir William Penn, who had served in the First and Second Dutch Wars and captured the island of Jamaica from the Spanish. This was the kind of man kings named holdings after—not his son, who while the admiral was fighting for England was expelled from Oxford for unorthodox religious beliefs and had been getting into trouble ever since.
Quakers went to other colonies as well. The first recorded case of an American conscientious objector was Richard Keene, a Quaker convert who refused training in the Maryland militia and was fined and angrily threatened with a drawn saber by his commanding officer. The first two Quakers known to arrive in America— although a missionary also arrived in Maryland around the same time and two years earlier a Long Island resident had converted during a visit to England—were two women missionaries who landed in Boston in 1656. Within two months they were expelled. Seven more arrived and Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies both began passing increasingly brutal anti-Quaker ordinances—from heavy fines to men and women being stripped to the waist and beaten, to mutilations of ears and tongues. By 1658, four Quakers had been executed.
But Pennsylvania was different. Penn's holy experiment attracted to America not only Quakers but Mennonites, Dunkers, and other pacifists and idealists. Penn had intended Pennsylvania to be a model for the world, a pacifist state, what Penn called “a precedent.” The early years of the colony were marked by an unusually open relationship with the Indians and a firm stance against war.
Pennsylvania militias were volunteer forces. The colony did not accept British conscription in local militias as the other colonies did. Although in Rhode Island Quakers were automatically exempt from military service, most other colonies insisted that conscientious objectors pay a fine or hire someone to serve as a replacement, neither of which was an acceptable alternative to Quakers. In time of war this led to persecution, often imprisonment. Even before the French and Indian War, an American extension of the nearly global Seven Years War, there was almost constant warring with Indians and between European powers in North America and the Caribbean, including King William's War (1689–97), Queen Anne's War (1702–13), and King George's War (1744). To live in a European colony was to constantly be called upon to fight Europe's
War burdens the working class, and that was traditionally the source of antiwar sentiments. Quaker founder George Fox was a shoemaker. But William Penn, a convert to Quakerism in 1667, at the age of twenty-three, was the son of a British admiral and an aristocrat with a personal acquaintanceship with King James II. Even after his conversion, he was reluctant at first to drop the aristocraticfashion of wearing a sword. Penn wrote of the persuasive power of love and the unchristian, warlike nature of Christians, whom he termed—in the ultimate seventeenth-century European insult—to be worse than the Turks. It was Penn who offered the simplest formula for ending war, that it starts with an individual refusing to fight. According to Penn, “Somebody must begin it.”
The governments of the earth have built up a structure that exists only by the power of money. The head of the land—the Queen—is honored in proportion to the pomps and vanities of her immediate attendants. Her governors all hold out their hands for their wages, without which their patriotism would shrivel up.
—TE WHITI, Maori chief, 1879
A not insignificant piece of misinformation passed on to American schoolchildren is that Pennsylvania was named after the Quaker leader, William Penn. Penn was the founder of the colony after obtaining a charter from King Charles II of England for a “holy experiment.” But Charles named the colony not for this questionable Quaker pacifist but for his father, the great British admiral Sir William Penn, who had served in the First and Second Dutch Wars and captured the island of Jamaica from the Spanish. This was the kind of man kings named holdings after—not his son, who while the admiral was fighting for England was expelled from Oxford for unorthodox religious beliefs and had been getting into trouble ever since.
Quakers went to other colonies as well. The first recorded case of an American conscientious objector was Richard Keene, a Quaker convert who refused training in the Maryland militia and was fined and angrily threatened with a drawn saber by his commanding officer. The first two Quakers known to arrive in America— although a missionary also arrived in Maryland around the same time and two years earlier a Long Island resident had converted during a visit to England—were two women missionaries who landed in Boston in 1656. Within two months they were expelled. Seven more arrived and Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies both began passing increasingly brutal anti-Quaker ordinances—from heavy fines to men and women being stripped to the waist and beaten, to mutilations of ears and tongues. By 1658, four Quakers had been executed.
But Pennsylvania was different. Penn's holy experiment attracted to America not only Quakers but Mennonites, Dunkers, and other pacifists and idealists. Penn had intended Pennsylvania to be a model for the world, a pacifist state, what Penn called “a precedent.” The early years of the colony were marked by an unusually open relationship with the Indians and a firm stance against war.
Pennsylvania militias were volunteer forces. The colony did not accept British conscription in local militias as the other colonies did. Although in Rhode Island Quakers were automatically exempt from military service, most other colonies insisted that conscientious objectors pay a fine or hire someone to serve as a replacement, neither of which was an acceptable alternative to Quakers. In time of war this led to persecution, often imprisonment. Even before the French and Indian War, an American extension of the nearly global Seven Years War, there was almost constant warring with Indians and between European powers in North America and the Caribbean, including King William's War (1689–97), Queen Anne's War (1702–13), and King George's War (1744). To live in a European colony was to constantly be called upon to fight Europe's
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