Midway through the 19th century, Janet Moore Lindman observes in A Vivifying Spirit: Quaker Practice and Reform in Antebellum America, “American Quakers had trampled a tortuous path” (201). “Paths” might be more accurate, but “tortuous” is the key word here. While Friends dealt with their share of internal tensions in the 17th and 18th centuries, the 19th century witnessed a series of unprecedented and enduring schisms that left their Society fragmented and dramatically altered. The history of Quakerism in the antebellum United States is largely a story of these schisms and their animating factions. Lindman contributes to this complex but well-studied history of division by shifting attention toward how Quakers practiced their faith during this period. The result is a rich evocation of the permutations of 19th-century American Quaker piety.
A Vivifying Spirit is an archive-driven project, drawing in particular on the resources available at various mid-Atlantic institutions where so many Quaker materials are housed. By utilizing a wide range of documents produced by 19th-century Friends, especially personal writings such as diaries, commonplace books, and letters, Lindman is able to elaborate on the details of what she calls “practical Quakerism,” which was practical in the sense that it was both oriented around specific practices and pragmatic in its response to everyday life (6). While this makes for a book that can often read as more descriptive than argumentative, Lindman’s focus on elucidating Quaker practice is helpful for two reasons. First, it moves, for the most part, beyond the institutional and doctrinal history that 19th-century Quakerism’s schisms easily lend themselves to, and, second, it makes visible what often remains unseen in the study of Quakers: a “Friends’ spirituality that—inward, silent, and atomized–is not always readily discernable” (4).
Lindman’s ability to reconstruct a sometimes-elusive form of piety is the greatest strength of the book, and it is most on display in chapters 1-3, which trace the arc of Quaker practice from childhood through schooling and up to the point of death. The emphasis throughout the Quaker lifecycle was on the “ongoing,” even “relentless” effort to align an inward state of contemplative waiting on God with one’s outward life of action in the world (17-18). “Watchfulness,” Lindman writes, “was paramount to spirituality” for most Friends (19). This necessitated the cultivation of silence, not just during regular meetings for worship, but also during times of solitude and in the household throughout the day.
Such “habitual silence” was the core practice of Quaker spirituality (32). It was inculcated not only in meetings and at home, but also in school, where young Friends were taught “that stillness was particularly fitting not only in meeting but also for beginning their day as well as when dressing, walking downstairs, and going to class” (49). Silence and stillness were not ends in themselves, but aids to watchful attentiveness over one’s internal state and external conduct before God, and such watchfulness was to extend to the final moments of life. Meditation, resignation, and equanimity were the characteristic virtues of the Quaker deathbed—at least until the influence of evangelicalism pushed some Friends in a more expressive direction as the 19th century progressed.
Quaker schisms and their effects on pious practice are alluded to in the opening chapters of the book, but they are explicitly addressed in chapters 4-6, which move through various separations chronologically. Here, Lindman gives a more straightforward account of the divisions between Friends in the 19th century that will be very familiar to some, but which functions as an excellent introduction to those less acquainted with the history. There is the Hicksite-Orthodox schism of the 1820s that pitted followers of the Long Island minister Elias Hicks concerned with fidelity to Friends practices of watchfulness against Quakers influenced by evangelical theology. This was followed by an intra-Orthodox split between those associated with British Quaker Joseph John Gurney, who was willing to make a further rapprochement with the practices of mainstream evangelicalism, and those following John Wilbur, a Friend from New England who was critical of Quakers making a full embrace of conventional Protestantism.
Social issues also divided Friends, as some, like Lucretia Mott, threw themselves wholeheartedly into the activism associated with 19th-century reform, while others advocated that such work should proceed within the boundaries of the Society of Friends. Over the course of all these divisions, Lindman emphasizes the emerging “plethora of spiritual choices for American Friends”—ranging from traditional to stridently evangelical—where there had once been a more unified spiritual culture (86).
Chapters 7 and 8 of the volume focus on Quaker writings in the 19th century. These two chapters leave the history of Quaker schisms and to return more explicitly to practice, although Lindman makes clear that 19th-century divisions loomed over the manuscript and print culture of Friends, as well as their habits of memory. Given that Quakers are sometimes seen as less bookish than other religious groups in the United States, the focus on manuscript and print culture is welcome, although the recent work of literary scholars in this area is an unfortunate omission that would have supported and strengthened Lindman’s observations. As the entire project reveals, Quaker manuscript exchange and print publication were robust, and controversy served to energize these practices, with Hicksite and Orthodox periodicals taking up their specific agendas. These dynamics extended to memory itself, as 19th-century Friends looked to their forbearers in order to justify their own diversifying practices.
Thus, by the end of the period Lindman examines, American Quakerism looked, for better or for worse, much like the larger landscape of American Christianity: “rich in contradiction, diversity, and innovation,” with practical Quakerism forking into several divergent paths (203). One wonders what picture of American Quakerism might have emerged if Lindman had been able to include sources not only from the mid-Atlantic, but the South and Midwest as well, but this scope would have made the study more challenging to conduct. For me the book tells the usual sad story of religious division and acrimony that is 19th-century Quakerism, but with a difference, giving attention to the persistence of Friends in practicing moving forms of piety that feels almost—if not quite fully—redemptive. Lindman’s pairing of textured descriptions of pious practices with accessible accounts of how the Society of Friends changed over time makes her book an excellent introduction to the history of Quakerism in 19th-century America, a study I would recommend students new to the field to consult first.
Jay David Miller is an assistant professor of English at George Fox University.
Jay David Miller
Date Of Review:
August 29, 2023