The Quaker Origins

1. The Quaker Origins

Pennsylvania was founded on pacifist Quaker principles. Still, it had to maintain good order which required the application of force on occasion. Many Quaker merchants supplied rum to the Amerindians, inducing them to commit atrocities against the colonists as early as 1682. Some Quakers were willing to allow for a military-police force to stop the illicit rum trade.(1) Moreover, the Quakers had a brutal system of criminal law which mandated the use of force in punishment. Early in the colony's history there were no less than a dozen offenses which were punishable by death, including riotiuous assembly,(2) an act usually suppressed by militia or other military force.

The Society of Friends [Quakers] who settled Pennsylvania were pacifist whose religious teachings compelled them to avoid scrupulously war and violence.(3) They opposed enactment of a militia law, but the Duke of York and the Stuart monarchy initially compelled them to make such a law. In 1671 Pennsylvania enacted a short-lived militia law under what is commonly known as the Laws of the Duke of York. The law required,

that every person who can bear arms from 16 to 60 years of age be always provided with a convenient proportion of powder and bullet for service for their Mutual Defence, upon a penalty for their neglect . . . . That the quantity of powder and shot . . . be at least one pound of powder and 2 pounds of bullet. And if the Inhabitants . . . shall not be found sufficiently provided with arms, His Royal Highness the Governor is willing to furnish them.(4)

The early militia law was soon abandoned under pressures from the pacifist Society of Friends. Later claims to the contrary notwithstanding, William Penn was not wholly a pacifist"


Station Master on the Underground Railroad: The Life and Letters of Thomas Garrett