Читать книгу American Quaker Romances. Building the Myth of the White Christian Nation онлайн

7 страница из 42

Their Peace Testimony made them abhor war, which brought them reprisals, as seventeenth-century England did not recognize the concept of conscientious objection. However, the concern with Integrity would bring them economic rewards in the long run, especially after the passing of the Act of Toleration in 1689 which granted freedom of worship to nonconformists in Britain. In fact, as time went by, Quakers became very prominent as businessmen and bankers (Dandelion 2008: 24) because people trusted them in business transactions and as money lenders. They also invented the fixed price for merchandise at a time when haggling was the standard in business. Quakers believed that it was immoral to charge one person more than another for the same thing. This revolutionized commerce and drew in customers.

With the expansion of the British Empire, the Religious Society of Friends saw its transportation to America. The first Quakers who came to the American colonies, in the 1650s, were missionaries who faced stiff resistance, particularly in Puritan Boston, where four were hanged (Dandelion 2008: 89-90). However, in the colonies of Rhode Island and North Carolina, where freedom of religion had been established, they quickly found a foothold. The need for a refuge for the Quakers being persecuted in Britain weighed heavily on William Penn, an English Quaker. His deceased father had made a large loan to the government, and the debt was now owed to the son. Penn requested payment in the form of a grant of land; consequently, the Religious Society of Friends saw its first-scale transportation to America. In 1681 the colony of Pennsylvania, the so-called “Holy Experiment” (Dandelion 2008: 15; Hamm 2003: 27), was founded by William Penn as a refuge for Quakers. Penn’s belief in Equality, Peace, and Integrity led him to negotiate a series of purchases of land from Native Americans (the Delaware or Lenni Lenape), despite having the land grant from the King. Penn also negotiated several treaties to maintain peace, so there would be no wars with the original inhabitants as had been the case in other colonies (Hamm 2003: 28). The Holy Experiment, however, was not free from contradictions, as Penn himself was the owner of several slaves. Notwithstanding these and other incongruities, and despite the persecution they endured in the New England colonies, American Quakers kept growing in number, their communities establishing strongholds during the Colonial period not only in Pennsylvania, but also in places like Nantucket Island or, as said, North Carolina. The capital of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, known as the “City of Brotherly Love,” was, by the time of the American Revolution, one of the largest and most prosperous cities in what would become the United States. Quaker strongholds like Nantucket and New Bedford, to cite another example of the prosperity brought about by Quakers, became the centers of the whale industry in the eighteenth century. At the time of the American Revolution, whale oil was the most valuable commodity exported to England from Massachusetts and Quakers supplied the whale oil to light London’s streets at night.