11 - Reformation and Reputation

Summary

The seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Society of Friends was a transatlantic community. Friends from Europe and America corresponded, travelled, worshipped and traded together. Consequently, major events affecting Quaker meetings in one geographical region also impacted meetings in another. Political and religious developments on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean influenced and shaped each other. The series of wars that threatened Pennsylvania during the 1750s and 1760s constituted such events. They met with nascent reform efforts within the Society to create challenges to the Quakers’ political hegemony in Pennsylvania. These challenges in turn influenced Quakerism's ideological developments and fuelled its reformation. In the course of these conflicts, the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the Seven Years’ War and the Paxton Pamphlet War during Pontiac's Uprising, the Society of Friends suffered grave reputational damage. The public in England and Pennsylvania began to perceive Quakers as greedy and hungry for power. A morally corrupted sect, Friends were thought to place their own political and financial interests before the welfare of their fellow colonists and the Empire.

Reputation was of crucial importance in the pre-modern world. It determined a person's standing in their community, both socially and economically. With little currency in circulation, economic transactions, from purchasing bread at the local baker's to intercontinental trade, were based on credit. Credit was only available to those whose reputation suggested that they would honour the commercial contracts they engaged in, and pay their debts. One's name needed to be associated with honesty, diligence and reliability. It must not ever be linked to wastefulness, tainted with the slightest whiff of dishonesty. The understanding was that misconduct in one area of one's life suggested the possibility of unreliability and misconduct in other areas of life as well. Any form of moral failure was damaging, not only those aspects immediately related to the conduct of business. Hence the rumours of merchant Israel Pemberton's extramarital sexual relations with a Delaware woman reflected badly on him as a businessman. If a person's reputation was tarnished, this could mean that others would refuse to deal with them, spelling economic and social catastrophe.