Extracted from Pacifism in the United States, this work focuses on the significant contribution of the Quakers to the history of pacifism in the United States. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In 1758, a Quaker tailor and sometime shopkeeper and school teacher stood up in a Quaker meeting and declared that the time had come for Friends to reject the practice of slavery. That man was John Woolman, and that moment was a significant step, among many, toward the abolition of slavery in the United States. Woolman's antislavery position was only one essential piece of his comprehensive theological vision for colonial American society. Drawing on Woolman's entire body of writing, Jon R. Kershner reveals that the theological and spiritual underpinnings of Woolman's alternative vision for the British Atlantic world were nothing less than a direct, spiritual christocracy on earth, what Woolman referred to as "the Government of Christ." Kershner argues that Woolman's theology is best understood as apocalyptic-centered on a supernatural revelation of Christ's immediate presence governing all aspects of human affairs, and envisaging the impending victory of God's reign over apostasy. John Woolman and the Government of Christ explores the theological reasoning behind Woolman's critique of the burgeoning trans-Atlantic economy, slavery, and British imperial conflicts, and fundamentally reinterprets 18th-century Quakerism by demonstrating the continuing influence of early Quaker apocalypticism.

This book illuminates the evolution of Quaker war tax resistance in America, as told by those who resisted and those who debated the limits of the Quaker peace testimony where it applied to taxpaying. Among the writers featured in this documentary history are Isaac Sharpless, Thomas Story, William Penn, James Logan, Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, John Churchman, James Pemberton, Joshua Evans, Anthony Benezet, Job Scott, Warner Mifflin, Timothy Davis, James Mott, Isaac Grey, Samuel Allinson, Moses Brown, Stephen B. Weeks, Rufus Hall, Gouverneur Morris, Elias Hicks, Joshua Maule, and Cyrus G. Pringle.

Called "a pioneer work of the first importance" by Staughton Lynd, this book traces the history of pacifism in America from colonial times to the start of World War I. The author describes how the immigrant peace sects-Quaker, Mennonite, and Dunker -faced the challenges of a hostile environment. The peace societies that sprang up after 1815 form the subject of the next section, with particular attention focused upon the American Peace Society and Garrison's New England Non-Resistance Society. A series of chapters on the reactions of these sects and societies to the Civil War, the neglect of pacifism in the postwar period, and the beginnings of a renewal in the years before the outbreak of war in Europe bring the book to a close. The emphasis on the institutional aspects of the movement is balanced throughout by a rich mine of accounts about the experiences of individual pacifists. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Writings from over 2,000 years of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns, covering both tax resistance as an act of individual conscience and revenue refusal as a technique of nonviolent resistance.

This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. Contributors from a range of disciplines, nations, and faith backgrounds show Quaker's beliefs to be far from monolithic. They often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about the morality of slaveholding and the best approach to abolition. Not surprisingly, contributors explain, this complicated and evolving antislavery sensibility left behind an equally complicated legacy. While Quaker antislavery was a powerful contemporary influence in both the United States and Europe, present-day scholars pay little substantive attention to the subject. This volume faithfully seeks to correct that oversight, offering accessible yet provocative new insights on a key chapter of religious, political, and cultural history. Contributors include Dee E. Andrews, Kristen Block, Brycchan Carey, Christopher Densmore, Andrew Diemer, J. William Frost, Thomas D. Hamm, Nancy A. Hewitt, Maurice Jackson, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner, Gary B. Nash, Geoffrey Plank, Ellen M. Ross, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, James Emmett Ryan, and James Walvin.