'Keeping clear from the gain of oppression': 'Public friends' and the de-mastering of Quaker race relations in late colonial America

This dissertation focuses on the site of eighteenth-century Quaker texts—particularly the journals of traveling ministers—as they converge on the political and military crisis of late colonial Pennsylvania. In particular, the present study is concerned with the religious and ideological response to these events that triggered major reforms in the Society of Friends, including efforts to protect the land rights of the Delaware Indians and the abolition of slavery. One always writes in reference to power structures, and the foregrounding of Quaker life writings in the Seven Years' War (1756–63) elucidates a nascent critique of the British colonial modes of expansion and production (particularly dishonest land deals and slave labor), in which binaries such as self/Other, civilized/savage, us/them are complicated and challenged.;Chapter 1 examines the nature of the declension diagnosed by reformist ministers and the consequent redefinition of Quaker relations with the world in the face of secularization. Unlike earlier leaders of Pennsylvania, the ministerial elite saw material prosperity as detrimental to spiritual health, rather than an accompanying blessing. Chapter 2 takes up the revitalization of pacifism by Quaker ministers in the 1750's, the “testimony” that typifies this newly constructed relationship of opposition with the world. Increasingly, they recognized the inextricable connection between material prosperity and the exigency of defense. Chapter 3 discusses Quaker-Indian relations during the Seven Years' War. The revitalization of pacifism involved an attempt to counter racialized violence in the colony, a position which Quaker leaders came to reluctantly because of their commitment to the myth of Pennsylvania as a uniquely peaceable space in British North America. Chapter 4 examines the issue of Quaker anti-slavery as it relates to pacifism and the advocacy of Indian land rights. Ministers denounced the inherent violence of slavery, emphasizing universal “love” which, when put into practice, de-mastered inequitable power relations and had the potential to “extirpate oppression” from the world.