CHAPTER I

THE QUAKER OF THE OLDEN TIME

The Quaker of the olden time! How calm and firm and true, Unspotted by its wrong and crime, He walked the dark earth through!

The Quaker, with his broad-brimmed hat, his queer, old-fashioned coat, and his habit of saying “thee must” and “thee must not,” was not only an honest man, but a good-natured, sensible man as well. The poet Whittier was a good Quaker, as “calm and firm and true” as the Quaker in his poem. He was also fond of children, and his best poems are about children and childhood days.

It is only a little over two hundred years since the first Quakers appeared. Whittier’s great-great-grandfather, Thomas Whittier, was said to be a Huguenot by descent. He came from England, however, as a Puritan, and held various offices in the Puritan church in Salisbury and Haverhill, in northeastern Massachusetts, where he settled.

It happened that two Quakers, Joseph Peasley and Thomas Macy, who had come to Haverhill, were arrested and fined for “exhorting” on the Lord’s day. They did it in their own houses; but in those Puritan times, all the exhorting had to be done in church by regular ministers. Thomas Whittier thought these men had been treated rather unjustly, and he and others petitioned the legislature, or General Court, to pardon them. But the old Puritans thought these petitioners about as bad as the “heretics” themselves, as the Quakers were regarded, and notified them that they must take back their petition or be punished. Thomas Whittier and Christopher Hussey, though not Quakers, refused, and were deprived of their right to vote, or, as it was called, “their rights as freemen.”

Thomas Whittier was such a good, sensible man, however, that the people, although he was suspended from voting, had to ask him to help them do various things in the church; and after a while the General Court restored his “rights as a freeman.” He himself never became a Quaker, but his son married a daughter of Joseph Peasley, and so most of the Whittiers after that were Quakers. Yet there were some who were not; for history tells of a Colonel Whittier about the time of the Revolution. He could not have been a Quaker, for no good Quaker ever goes into the army.

The Quakers are a peculiar people. They do not believe in fighting or going to war on any account. They are always for peace. The poet Whittier was opposed to war, and often wrote against it; and he refused to favor the Civil War, which freed the slaves, although he had himself been for many years a great antislavery reformer, along with his friend William Lloyd Garrison. But he admits that he had a sort of diabolical liking for the army and war, and once he wrote a war poem and had it published anonymously. He thought no one would ever know who wrote it, for it didn’t sound much like a Quaker; but when he had become an old man some one did find it out, and he had to admit that he was its author.

Another thing the Quakers will not do is to swear, either in a profane way, or before a court of justice. They declare that the Scriptures say, “Swear not at all,” and that it is just as wrong to swear in court as in anger. They are not great talkers; and in meeting, if no one has anything to say that is worth saying, they think it much better to sit in silence for an hour than to listen to a dull sermon.

Your grammars will tell you that it is just as incorrect to say “thee is,” or “thee must,” as it is to say “me is,” or “him ought.” It seems strange that most of the Quakers in the world, from the earliest time, should make a grammatical blunder like this. Of course Whittier, and many others, knew it was not correct; but they said that Quakers had used this form of speech from the very first, and they would not try to change the custom.

These queer people also said they were plain, sensible folk, and therefore would not cater to the “world and the devil” by wearing fine clothes. All dressed in the same way, in what was called Quaker drab, the men with broad-brimmed beaver hats, the women with plain bonnets of black or “dove-colored” silk, unadorned with ribbons or other ornaments.

Neither did they have any music, nor indulge themselves in any unnecessary luxuries. They were sharp and shrewd, however, and as we shall see in the case of Whittier, did not forbear to have a little fun now and then.

The Puritans had revolted from the Church of England, and came to America for religious freedom. The Quakers had likewise revolted from the established forms of worship, but their belief was very different from that of the Puritans.

At first the Puritans in Massachusetts thought they would keep the Quakers out of their colony. They therefore punished severely every one who dared to come among them. They condemned four of them to death, and others they whipped and imprisoned and banished. But these persecutions did not prevent the Quakers from coming to Massachusetts, and finally the Puritans became ashamed of their intolerance, and left them to themselves.