Friends for Three Hundred Years: It's A Good Life!
An address by Max L. Carter, Guilford College, August 1997 on the occasion of celebrating the 300th anniversary of Quakers in North Carolina

Three hundred years! That's longer than Dean Smith has been at UNC! Almost as long as Strom Thurmond has been in the Senate! 300 years ago! Pssst-don't tell anyone, Virginia, but Thomas Jefferson wasn't even alive then!

300 years of North Carolina Yearly Meeting-a common heritage leading to two distinct and vibrant communities of Friends by that name. Quakerism itself has an even longer history in the South. It has been a storied saga, one that will be celebrated in many ways during this climactic week of the five-year Tercentenary observance.

Yet many Friends are hesitant to trumpet our own triumphs as a religious society-consistent with the Quaker virtues of meekness, humility, and understatement-if not of honesty and integrity! But this is a week to be proud and tell our story, not only to each other, to the world as well. As the scripture enjoins: time to take the light out from under the bushel. As my mother was wont to say, "She who tooteth not her own horn, the same shall not be tooted!"

Think of what the world might be like without Quakers! Without the likes of religious visionaries: Margaret Fell, George Fox, Hannah Whitall Smith, Thomas Kelly, Elton Trueblood; social and political reformers: William Penn, John Woolman, Elizabeth Fry, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony; writers and poets: Jessamyn West, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Michener, Jan de Hartog; musicians and artists: Edward Hicks, Bonnie Raitt, Donald Swann, Fritz Eichenberg, Dave Matthews; business and industry-steel;, railroads, Barclays Bank, Lloyd's of London, Macy's; or beloved products like the Slinky, Monopoly, the Flexible Flyer sled, Cadbury's Chocolates, and Hires Root Beer! What untold human tragedies would there be without the American Friends Service Committee?

As true as this is for the world at large, it is also true for the region encompassed by the bound of the North Carolina Yearly Meetings. Imagine life in this vale of humility had Friends never arrived! In a summer that has seen the passing of Jimmy Stewart (not that he was a Friend, mind you!), we are reminded of an artifice by which we can contemplate such a Tarheel world, a world without Quakers.

With apologies, then, to the late actor and his character in, It's A Wonderful Life, let's envision this region-and the wider world-had Carolina Quakers never existed.

To start our fantasy, we must return to the 1660's, when a few isolated settlers were filtering into the area of the Great Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia and northwestern North Carolina. Without Quakers and their testimony of peace and experience of finding the Light of Christ in all people, would early settlers' relationship with the Native Americans have been as peaceful? Quaker-vacant central Virginia experienced devastating Indian wars in the 1670's, as did Puritan Massachusetts-also devoid of Quakers! The only Quakers hanging around in Massachusetts back then were, literally, hanging around!

Would the absence of Indian-European strife in Carolina have persisted had their not been a Quaker governor, John Archdale, guaranteeing that Indians would not be enslaved and would serve in equal numbers with whites on juries when their rights were in question? Hey! This is our fantasy-we can say no, that this could have been a "dark and bloody ground" too!

To carry our Quaker-free territory on into the 1700's, it would have been left to others to erect the first school in Carolina, to introduce the first organized Christian religious system-for contrary to popular notion, there weren't even Southern Baptists here then!

Without Quakers in southern Virginia and in the Carolinas in the mid-1700's, John Woolman would not have visited the states, urging abolition of slave-holding, and his clarion-call for loving all children of God would not have been heard in these parts. And without that, a powerful abolition movement would not have started in Belvidere, NC in the 1770's when conscience-stricken slave owners freed those held in human bondage. Without that vision, thousands of slaves would have toiled under cruel masters and died without ever having tasted freedom.

Had Friends not migrated into the piedmont in the mid-1700's, forming communities such as Cane Creek, New Garden, Deep River, and Centre, other untold suffering would have occurred: scores of dead and dying from the Revolutionary War battles of New Garden and Guilford Court House would not have been ministered to, given loving burial, or nursed back to health by the women of the Quaker community.

There would have been no stirring story-worth retelling through the ages-of Jamestown's Matthew Osborn, a gunsmith, buying back the precision rifles he had sold and bending the barrels so they could not be used in the Revolutionary War battles in Guilford County. For that matter, there would have been no "Jamestown Rifles," a.k.a. "Kentucky Rifles" for old ex-Quaker Daniel Boone to carry into Kentucky and "kill him a b'ar" and a few other living creatures! There would have been no Beard's Hat Shoppe in Jamestown, either, and thus no popular children's book Benji's Hat many years later.

Come the 19th century, the Carolina landscape would have looked much different without the tidy Quaker farms stretching from Randolph County to Rockingham County and Pasquotank and Perquimans to Surry and Yadkin. And the political landscape would look much different, too! No First Lady in the Madison White House, because there would have been no Dolley Payne born into the North Carolina Quaker community and later married to James Madison-no snack cakes bearing her name, either, lending reality to the name, Washington!

No 16th president of the United States, for Nancy Hanks would not have been born into a Surry Quarter Quaker family and birthed Abraham Lincoln (no cheering from the hard-core Confederate Quaker gallery!)/ In fact, a severe bite would have been taken out of the national Republican Party! No Speaker of the House Joseph Gurney Cannon, and hence no Cannon Office Building in D.C., for young Iron Joe wouldn't have been raised north of here and moved to Illinois to serve in the Congress. No Herbert Hoover, for there would have been no Hoovers in Randolph County leaving to settle Richmond, IN and then moving on to West Branch, Iowa. No David Worth Dennis or Howard Coble, Congressmen of Carolina Quaker lineage and education.

But let Democrats feel left out-no Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles-whose family is just across the road in New Garden Friends cemetery. Not to feel sorry for Bill and Hillary, though, their daughter would still have been able to attend the District's Sidwell Friends School.

Imagine a 19th century South without the conscience-saving presence of an active Underground Railroad and Negro Schools, begun in this region by Quakers such as the Coffins and operated in conjunction with the black community of Friends. We hardly have to imagine such an absence, for most paid the price of their gospel fidelity by having to emigrate from the South. The only Coffins left in the region now are those in numerous Quaker graveyards!

Had there been no Quakers here, obeying the simple dictates of the Sermon of the Mount, the geographical landscape of the United States would be markedly different. No mass migration of Friends into the free soil of Ohio and Indiana; no Orange County, Randolph County, Henry County, or Wayne County, IN. No New Garden, Rich Square, or Greensboro, IN, either. Without the migration of NC Quakers, there would have been no Earlham College in Indiana, and possibly no ex-president Landrum Bolling to speak to a non-existent gathering of Quakers tomorrow, or even former Earlham student (and descendant of NC Quakers) Don McNemar to welcome that excised community to the campus of a Guilford College that wouldn't be here!

Had the good Quaker Timothy Nicholson from Belvidere never existed or moved to Indiana and established a human Reformatory for Boys near Plainfield last century, the boxer Mike Tyson would have had no Correctional Facility to stay in for his 4-year incarceration: he would have had to sit in a central Indiana cornfield, chomping on ears other than Evander Holyfield's!

Imagine a North Carolina without a Quaker remnant remaining after the Civil War, attracting the care and concern of northern Friends-especially that of the Baltimore Association to Advise and Assist Southern Friends. No Allen Jay to bring spiritual refreshment to a parched region. His absence would leave a Springfield Baptist Church without a name! The loss of his quietist Quaker perspective in the revivals of the 1860's and 70's would have tipped the balance in favor of pulpit-pounding dogmatists too quick to run rough-shod over congregations with "new measures."

No Baltimore Association, no Model Farm to rejuvenate Southern agriculture; no 29 schools established to educate freed slaves and no Winston-Salem State University or NC A&T State University developing, in part, from that concern. No 40+ Quaker monthly meeting schools, academies, and normal institutes-leading in the 1880's directly to NC's first system of public education. No Friends, no Guilford College-or Duke, for that matter-a combined Quaker/Methodist institution when it was in Trinity, NC and heady by a New Garden Boarding School graduate, Baritone Craven. Imagine a state with three fewer national basketball championships (one for Guilford, two for Duke!)-and countless thousands fewer teachers, coaches, doctors, attorneys, engineers, and business people.

Nor would there have been a Woman's College, now UNCLOG, apart from the efforts of May Mendenhall Hobbs.

And what of the 20th century? NC might still be "first in flight"-there would have been Orville and Wilbur (but without Conservative Yearly Meeting, no Wilburites!). However, there would be no Lindley Field carved out of Quaker farmland in the 1920's to become Piedmont Triad Airport today. The first baseball all-star game in the 1930's would have been an embarrassment to the American League. Without starting catcher and future Hall of Farmer Rick Ferrell-a Quaker farm boy and Guilford College grad-the pitchers would have been plunking the chest protector of the home plate umpire with their deliveries until Bill Dickey and Mickey Cochrane could be summoned to don the "tools of ignorance."

For that matter, the Boston Celtics would have been coachless the last two years (not that it would have made any difference!), since without Guilford College, there would have been no M. L. Carr. No college, no Dave Odom to restore Wake Forest's basketball glory. Nor would today's Pittsburgh Pirates be able to keep opponents from hitting up the middle, since starting 2nd-baseman Tony Womack wouldn't have graduated from Guilford, either!

No Quakers in this century and we wouldn't have seen the milk of human kindness from Yardley Warner's concern for adequate housing for freed slaves develop into Greensboro's Warnerville. Nor would we have the Carnation Milk Co., begun by a Quaker from High Point.

How much additional human suffering without the development of the MRI by Waldo Hinshaw, or the dedication of NC Friends Disaster Service in putting people's lives back together after tragedy strikes. How many chronologically challenged people would be left with lives far less rich and fulfilling without Friends Homes and other retirement villages sponsored by Friends?

What tragedies of human origin might have emanated from national greed without the long, patient efforts of our own Sam and Miriam Levering to bring about a Law of the Seas Treaty? How many communities wouldn't have taken a stand for peaceful integration without the concern and work for reconciliation of Quaker activists, school board members, and common citizens? How many would have to stand, since without Quakers much of High Point's furniture industry would be non-existent.

Would we have a place to walk and drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway without Quaker Civilian Public Service work camp labor during W.W. II?

Would the Cones have chosen NC over other cotton-producing states in the South for their textile empire had there been no Quaker community here, signaling the presence of a tolerant and open people among whom Jews might live with respect?

Indeed, the Carolinas, southern Virginia, and the wide world would be a significantly different place had only these Quaker men and women of the past 300 years never materialized. Imagine the difference without all the Friends who have lived and loved, worked and ministered here for three centuries, striving, in George Fox's words, to be patterns and examples, letting their lives preach, living in fidelity to the Quaker testimonies of peace, integrity, simplicity, and equality; bearing witness to God's loving ministrations to the heart and soul of each and every one of God's children.

Remove all the Quaker missionaries and ministers, teachers and physicians, farmers and parents, along with the distinctive outlook on life Friends possess-how does one measure the difference in the quality of life that would result for the rest of the community? No James Childress serving on the President's commission on medical ethics? No Carolina Friends School, Virginia Beach Friends School, Wilmington Friends School, New Garden Friends School?

Remove Friends' insistence on the efficacy of an inward and unmediated relationship with the Light of Christ; the importance of quiet, obedient waiting on the Lord; the witness to men's and women's equality in ministry; the focus on living one's faith rather than merely professing it-remove all these Quaker distinctives and the body of Christ is weakened. No writings and ministries of Set and Mary Edith Hinshaw, Algie and Eva Newlin, Louise Wilson? No ministry of Fayetteville and Norfolk Quaker House, United Society of Friends Women, Quaker Men, the mission in Matamoros?

But we don't have to imagine such a world. We can awaken from our reverie of a Quaker-deprived North Carolina. We are here, and though we number fewer than 15,000 in NC and southern VA, with proper Quaker integrity and less than characteristic humility, we can say that 300 years and counting has meant a good life, a wonderful life-for us and the communities we live in.

Not that we don't have our issues. We are now a mixed lot-some six different Quaker affiliations and lack of affiliations in NC alone! We are plain as well as fancy; pastoral as well as traditionally unprogrammed. There was that little matter of an honest difference of opinion over the nature of local Meeting versus Five Years Meeting authority and the degree to which ancient Quaker worship practices should be conserved-a difference that led to a parting of the ways in 1903-04. Now, though, we are within the two resulting bodies politically and theologically both liberal and conservative; we are of mixed opinion on the "red button" social issues of the day. Readers of local papers' Letters to the Editor are left scratching their heads over the Quaker position on an issue being expressed this week, only to be contradicted by the Quaker position expressed the following week.

Today one is tempted to say that if there are 3 Quakers in a community, there will be 4 Meetinghouses!

But this week is one for us to focus on our commonalities, revel in our heritage, and draw from that strength to minister to a hurting world for the next several centuries. When Friends gather at Guilford College in 2197 to celebrate our quincentennial (hah! you thought tercentenary was tough!) and play the Jimmy Stewart "What If?!" game, the resolve of those of us assembled here will have given a speaker at that occasion ample opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of a vital Quaker community in all walks of life.

We do have a bridge into the 21st century, President Bill! And it is not the bridge from which Jimmy Stewart hallucinated in the movie-not even that first iron bridge built by Quakers in England-it is the strength that comes from our bridging our differences, maximizing our distinctive strengths as Quakers, and walking cheerfully over that bridge, answering that of God in everyone!

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