Quaker Hill Part 7

One may explain the high rates of many of these commodities, and the relatively high rate paid for labor by the prevalence of war prices at the time. Commodities such as mola.s.ses would be expensive as a result of the stoppage of sea-trade; and the labor market was exhausted to supply the army with soldiers.

In 1824 Toffey imported, for Costuming, shawls, crepe at $1 per yard, silk, skein-silk, twist, ribbon, velvet at 90c. per yard, drab-cloth, flannel, braid, handkerchiefs, b.u.t.tons and b.u.t.ton-moulds, gloves, suspenders, calico, vest patterns, pins, chrome-yellow, "bearskin" at 82c. per yard, dress handkerchiefs, beads, buckles, silk flags and morocco skins.

Of new foods he imported mola.s.ses at 35c. per gallon, oranges at 2c.

each, which he seems to have sold only one by one, sugar at 6c., tobacco at 12c., alum, tea at 85c., salt at $1 per bushel, pepper, all-spice, raisins, salt-peter, pearlash, castile soap, hard soap, paregoric, ginger, logwood, vitriol, cinnamon, snuff, sulphur, cloves, mustard, opium, coffee, loaf sugar, watermelons, and seeds for beets, lettuce, parsnips.

Of House-furnis.h.i.+ngs, he had for sale, knives, forks--one set of knives and forks selling for $13, plates, bowls, pitchers, mugs, teacups, teapots, decanters, almanacs, brooms, oilcloth, gla.s.s and putty, inkstands, bedsteads, spoons in sets, sugar-bowls, tin pans.

Of Tools and Materials for Industry he sold nails by the "paper," by the hundred and by the pound, files, oil at 75c. a gallon, locks, slates, paper, pocket-books, pencils, turpentine, raw steel and iron, spectacles at 34c., sandpaper, shovels and spades, screws, gimlets.

Rum, brandy and gin appear also, with powder, shot and fishhooks, as tributes to the convivial and adventurous spirit. But the convivial spirits were the better patrons, for there was scarcely an entry in certain years in which was not an item of alcoholic spirits. The sporting goods were only occasionally purchased.

In 1833 for Costuming, cotton-batting had appeared, and canton flannel, canvas, blue jeans at 83c. per yard, brown Holland, cloth at $3.64 per yard, hats at 44c. each, hooks and eyes, pearl b.u.t.tons at 10c. a dozen, side combs, bandanna handkerchiefs; while sole-leather was still sold in quant.i.ty, with buckskin mittens, which were scarcely made on the Hill.

For Industry, behold the arrival of pincers, gum arabic, "Pittsburgh cord" at 21c. per yard. In Housings, candles, frying pans, tin pails, dippers, tin basins, wash-tubs made their appearance; and in this year for the first time window-blinds were sold, for 75c.

For Food and Medicines John Toffey offered at this time codfish, coffee, souchong tea, crackers, castor oil, camphor gum, Epsom salts.

Meantime, a day's wages had fallen from $1 and $1.50 to 65c. and 75c.

per day.

The growth of trade in John Toffey's store is summarized in Table I. In this table may be seen also the growth of economic demand. The increase of the number of kinds of commodities in each evidences the acquirement of varied tastes by this people of the Hill.

TABLE I. JOHN TOFFEY'S STORE.

--------------------+---------+--------+--------- Commodities | 1814-16 | 1824 | 1833 --------------------+---------+--------+--------- Costume | 5 | 25 | 38 Food and Medicine | 5 | 29 | 36 Tools and Materials | 5 | 18 | 21 House Furnis.h.i.+ngs | | 18 | 24 --------------------+---------+--------+--------- Daily Wage |$1.-$1.50| |65c.-75c.

The above summary of the importations to the Hill in the years 1814-1833 casts light upon the social and religious history of the period in question; in which occurred the greatest social convulsion this community has ever known. In the year 1828 the Religious Society of the Friends was divided, never to be united, the integrity of the community as a social and religious unit was ended, the ties of a century were severed, and instead of the "unity" of which Quakers are always so conscious, came mutual criticism, recrimination, and excommunication of one-half of the community by the majority of the Meeting. Thus ended the communal life of Quaker Hill, and began the disintegration of the community which is now almost complete.

It is true that this schism was general throughout the denomination, in all the United States; and that it was shared in its doctrinal influences by the Congregational churches, the Unitarian a.s.sociation having been formed in Boston in 1825. But nevertheless it had roots on Quaker Hill in an economic condition; and that economic condition may have been general throughout the Eastern States.

Let the doctrinal causes of this schism be considered elsewhere.[32]

Economic causes are hinted at in the above paragraphs. There came in many embellishments of life which must have seemed to early Friends mere luxuries, and to the stricter few must have appeared instruments of sin, as "beads," "ribbons," velvet, silk, braid, crepe, shawls, dress handkerchiefs, buckles, silk flags, pearl b.u.t.tons--these are expressions of new states of mind. The economic change underlying the social convulsion is seen in the increase of varied stuffs for costume, articles and materials for the food and medicine cupboards of the farmhouses, and in more varied tools and materials both for industry and house furnis.h.i.+ng.

Even more influential than the exciting power of luxuries would be the quieter and more pervasive stimulus of comfort. Houses that are glazed and ceiled and furnished with well adapted implements in every room; tables set with all the wares of leisurely and pleasurable feeding speak a new state of affairs. The people so clothed and so fed begin to produce in every family some members of cultured tastes, some of independent thought, who are restive under the denials of Quakerism.

Business and industry too become more varied; and the effect of this prosperous and varied industry shows itself in active and critical minds. Importation from places beyond Poughkeepsie awakened imagination and invited reflection upon the state of the world.

All this time the daily wage continued to fall, from $1 and $1.50 in 1814 to 50c., 65c. and 75c. in 1833. It is said that men bitterly commented, in those days of the rapid development of the country, that a farmer who paid a laborer fifty cents for a day's labor in the hay-field from daybreak to dark, would pay the same amount, fifty cents, for his supper on the Hudson River boat, when he made his annual visit to the great city of New York.

We have, then, in John Toffey's daybook a reflection of conditions which had to do with the break-up of the community, as truly as did the theological difference between Elias Hicks and the Orthodox. Comfortable living, diversified and intensified industry, importation of expensive and stimulating comforts, leisure with its sources in wealth, and its tendencies toward reflection, and especially a differentiation of the h.o.m.ogeneous community into diverse cla.s.ses, owing to lowered wages and multiplied embellishments of life, made up altogether the raw materials of discontent, criticism and division.

These factors go with a state of growing discontent and disintegration.

The men and women possessed of leisure cultivated a humanist state of mind, with which arose a critical spirit, a nicer taste and a cultured discrimination. They were offended by literalism, bored by crudeness however much in earnest, and disgusted with the illogical a.s.sertions of pietists. The imperative mandate of the meeting awakened in them only opposition. They found many to sympathize with their state of mind.

On the other side there were those who seriously feared the incoming of luxurious ways. They distrusted books, remembering the values of one Book to the laborer who reads it alone; they believed in plainness, and their minds a.s.sociated freedom of dress with freedom of thought. They resented also the new privileges conferred on some by wealth, because to most had come only harder work with discontent.

The schism which rent the community was an economic heresy, the belief in the use of money for embellishment of life. All the Quakers regarded with favor the making of money. The Liberals, however, saw ends beyond money, and processes of ultimate value beyond administration and business. They looked for household comforts, books, travel, and the leisure with great souls who have written and have expressed the greatest truths. They believed in a divinity such as could have made, and regarded with favor, the whole teeming world.

The Orthodox saw the values of prosperity only in plainness of life, recognized no divinity in humanized manners, and sternly but ineffectually called the community back to idealized commonplaceness, and to hear the utterances of rude ploughmen and cobblers in the name of Deity.

One ventures to believe, too, that there was a falling away from all religious exercises at this time, and that the pious of both schools were troubled about it, and accused one another. The poor were too hard worked and too poorly paid to feel anything but discontent; and the leaders of the community differed as to the solution of the religious problem. Hence came division.

The Quakers are conscious of religious "unity," but their mode of life is a true economic unity. The Quaker Community was re-arranging itself economically, but the members felt a religious change. Cla.s.s division was coming upon them, and they felt it as a sectarian division. It was indeed the end of the old community ruled by religion, and the formation of a new neighborhood life; a new Quakerism, ruled by economic cla.s.ses: the persons of influence being invariably persons of means, and the dominating leaders rich. Doubtless the Quakers who led in the Division of 1828 hoped, in each party equally, to maintain the old religious domination. The community has never granted that leaders.h.i.+p to the divided Meeting, neither to the Orthodox, nor to the Hicksites. The real power has, since a period antedating the division, been in the hands of those who have owned farms centrally located; who in addition to owning land centrally located have been possessed of large means: the "rich men" and "wealthy women" have possessed a monopoly of actual leaders.h.i.+p.

If also, they have been religiously inclined, their leaders.h.i.+p has been absolute.

[31] "Thomas Taber and Edward Shove--a Reminiscence," by Rev.

Benjamin Shove; Quaker Hill Series, 1903.

[32] The matter is fully treated in "Quaker Hill in the Nineteenth Century," by Rev. Warren H. Wilson; Quaker Hill Series of Local History No. IV.

CHAPTER III.

RELIGIOUS LIFE IN TRANSITION.

In religion the solidarity of this country place has been best shown in the fact that, during most of its history, it has had but one church at a time. For one hundred years there was the undivided meeting. From 1828 to 1885 the Hicksite--Unitarian, branch of the Friends held the Old Meeting House, with diminis.h.i.+ng numbers. The Orthodox had their smaller meeting house around the corner, attended by decreasing gatherings. In 1880 was organized Akin Hall, in which till 1892 were held religious services in the summer only. Since that time religious services have been held there all the year round. The early united meeting had a members.h.i.+p of probably two hundred, and audiences of three hundred were not uncommon.

The church in Akin Hall, named "Christ's Church, Quaker Hill," had in 1898 a members.h.i.+p of sixty-five, and audiences of fifty to two hundred and fifty, according to the occasion and the time of year. In the past the general att.i.tude of the community toward religion has been reverent and sympathetic. It is no less so to-day.

Of religious ceremonies the Quakers claim to have none. But they are fond of ceremoniousness beyond most men. The very processes by which they abolish forms are made formal processes. They have ceremonies the intent of which is to free them from ceremony. The meeting is called to order by acts ever so simple, and dismissed by two old persons shaking hands; but these are invariable and formal as a doxology and a benediction. They receive a stranger in their own way. A visiting minister is honored with fixed propriety. An expelled member is read out of meeting with stated excommunicatory maledictions.

Wors.h.i.+p has had on Quaker Hill a large place in characterizing the social complexion of the people. By this, I mean that the peculiarities of the Quaker wors.h.i.+p, now a thing of the past, have engraved themselves upon character. Those peculiarities are four: the custom of silence; the non-employment of music, or conspicuous color or form; the separate place provided for women; the a.s.sertion and practice of individualism.

The silence of the Quaker meeting is far from negative. It is not a mere absence of words. It is a discipline enforced upon the lower elements of human nature, and a reserve upon the intellectual elements, in order that G.o.d may speak. I think that in this silence of the meeting we discover the working of the force that has moulded individual character on Quaker Hill and organized the social life. For this silence is a vivid experience, "a silence that may be felt." The presence and influence of men are upon one, even if that of G.o.d be not. The motionless figures about one subtly penetrate one's consciousness, though not through the senses. They testify to their belief in G.o.d when they do not speak better than they could with rhetoric or eloquence. It is the influence of many, not of one; yet of certain leaders who are the organs of this impression, and of the human ent.i.ty made of many who in communion become one. The self-control of it breathes power, and principle, and courage. One would expect a Quaker meeting to exert an imperious rule upon the community. It is an expression of the majesty of an ideal. I believe that the Quaker Hill meeting has been able to accomplish whatever it has put its hand to do. The only pity is that the meeting tried to do so little.

The original religious influence of Quakerism, carried through all changes and transformation, was a pure and relentless individualism. It was the doctrine that the Spirit of G.o.d is in every heart of man, absolutely every one; resisted indeed by some, but given to each and all. With honest consistency it must be said, the Quakers applied this--and this it was they did apply--to the status of women, to the question of slavery, to the civic relations of men. This it was that made Fox and Penn refuse to doff their hats before judge, or t.i.tled lord, or the king himself.

The character of the common mind of the community has been much influenced by the fact that the Quakers made no use of color, form and music either in wors.h.i.+p or in private life; that they also idealized the absence of these. They made it a matter of n.o.ble devotion. In nothing do local traditions abound more than in stories of the stern repression of the aesthetic instincts. One ancient Quakeress, coming to the well-set table at a wedding, in the old days, beheld there a bunch of flowers of gay colors, and would not sit down until they were removed. Nor could the feast go on until the change was effected. So great was the power of authority, working in the grooves of "making believe," that those who might have tolerated the bouquet in silence, as well as those who had sensations of pleasure in it, supported her opposition.

I have spoken elsewhere of the effect of this century-long repression and ignoring of the aesthetic movements of the human spirit, in banking the fires of literary culture in this population. The present generation, all inheriting the examples of ancestors ruled in such unflinching rigor, has in none of its social grouping any true sense of color or of the beauty of color. Neither in the garments of those who have laid off the Quaker garb, nor in the decorations of the houses is there a lively sense of the beauty of color. None of the women of Quaker extraction has a sense of color in dress; nor can any of them match or harmonize colors. I except, of course, those whose clothing is directly under the control of the city tailor or milliner. The general effect of costume and of the decorations of a room, in the population who get their living on the Hill, is that of gray tones, and drab effects; not mere severity is the effect, but poverty and want of color.

In forms of beauty they know and feel little more. I do not refer to the lack of appreciation of the elevations and slopes of this Hill itself--a constant delight to the artistic eye. Farmers and laborers might fail to appreciate a scene known to them since childhood. But there is in the Quaker breeding, which gives on certain sides of character so true and fine a culture a conspicuous lack in this one particular.

As to music, even that of simplest melody, it has come to the Hill, but it "knows not Joseph." An elderly son of Quakerism said: "You will find no Quaker or son of the Quakers who can sing; if you do find one who can sing a little, it will be a limited talent, and you will unfailingly discover that he is partly descended from the world's people."

The effect of this aesthetic negation appears, it seems to the present writer, in a certain rudeness or more precisely a certain lack in the domain of manners, outside of the interests in which Quakerism has given so fine a culture. This appears to be keenly felt by the descendants of Friends. Not in business matters; for they are made directors of savings banks and corporations, and trustees, and referees, and executors of estates, in all which places they find themselves at home. Nor is it a lack of dignity and composure in the parlor or at the table. Nor is it a lack of sense of propriety in meetings of wors.h.i.+p. But it is in matters ethical, civic and deliberate, and in the free and discursive meetings of men, in which new and intricate questions are to arise; in positions of trust, in which the highest considerations of social responsibility const.i.tute the trust; in these, the men and women trained in Quakerism are lacking throughout whole areas of the mind, and lacking, too, in ethical standards, which can only appeal to those whose experience has fed on a rich diversity of sources and distinctions.

In this I speak only of the Quaker group and of those who have been under its full influence. It does not apply to the Irish Catholics, nor to the incomers from the city. The Quakers and their children lack precisely those elements of aesthetic breeding which would be legitimately derived from contemplation and enjoyment of beauty aside from ethical values. Ethical beauty, divorced from pure beauty, a stern, bare, grim beauty they have, and their children and employees have. But they have little sense of order in matters that do not proceed to the ends of money-making, housekeeping and wors.h.i.+p. They do not seem to possess instinctive fertility of moral resource. It may be due to other sources as well, but it seems to the present writer that the moral density shown by some of these birthright Quakers, upon matters outside of their wonted and trodden ethical territories, is due to their long refusal to recognize aesthetic values, and to see discriminations in the field in which ethics and aesthetics are interwoven.

They made red and purple to be morally wrong, idealizing the plainness of their uncultured ancestry, and sweet sounds they excluded from their ears, declaring them to be evil noises, because they would set up the boorishness of simple folk of old time as something n.o.ble and exalted, "making believe" that such aesthetic lack was real self-denial and unworldliness. It is not surprising that in a riper age of the world, after lifetimes of this idealization of peasant states of mind, their children find themselves morally and mentally unprepared for the responsibilities of citizens.h.i.+p, of high ethical trust and of the varied ways of a moral world, whose existence their fathers made believe to ignore and deny.

Women have always occupied in Quakerism a place theoretically equal to that of the men, in business and religious affairs. George Fox and his successors declared men and women equal, inasmuch as the Divine Spirit is in every human soul.