“The Union Forever”
“The Union Forever”
Northern Virginia Quakers in the Civil War
Chapter 8 examines the experience of northern Virginia's Friends during the Civil War. Friends faced arrest, conscription, and imprisonment from hostile Confederate forces and confiscation of their property by both Union and Confederate armies, particularly after the region descended into guerrilla war. However, the biggest casualty of the war was Friends' peace testimony, which called on Quakers to be neutral in thought and deed. Only a small number of the region's Friends entered the military, but few Friends remained neutral. Seeing the Union as the source of their religious liberty and committed to ending slavery, nearly all the region's Friends embraced the northern cause, with Quaker women taking a leading role. The war transformed Friends' adherence to and interpretation of the peace testimony and their disciplinary standards, giving rise to a more permissive and individualist Quakerism.
Keywords: Quakers, Society of Friends, Civil War in Virginia, Antislavery, Non-violence, Guerrilla war, Civilians in war, Gender
Florida Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
