reading

Contents

Introduction

Prologue: From the Old Books—England

Crisis in England

A Vision of Light

Pilgrims to a New World

A Nation’s Conscience in Simple Garb

Freedom and Bondage

Part I: A Nation Divided

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Part II: Reunions and Losses

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Part III: Confused Loyalties

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Part IV: Beginning of Healing

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Part V: Missing

Fifty-Five

Fifty-Six

Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Eight

Fifty-Nine

Sixty

Sixty-One

Sixty-Two

Sixty-Three

Sixty-Four

Sixty-Five

Sixty-Six

Sixty-Seven

Part VI: Roots

Sixty-Eight

Sixty-Nine

Seventy

Seventy-One

Seventy-Two

Seventy-Three

Seventy-Four

Seventy-Five

Seventy-Six

Seventy-Seven

Seventy-Eight

Seventy-Nine

Eighty

Eighty-One

Eighty-Two

Eighty-Three

Eighty-Four

Families in Dream of Love

Endnotes

Introduction

Probably the most frequent question posed to writers is: “Where do you get your ideas?”

As simple as the question seems, I find it a very difficult one. One cannot anticipate when or how an idea is going to come. Suddenly a lightbulb goes off somewhere in the brain and you think, “What if…?” At least that’s how it happens with me, wondering, “Where is the garden of Eden?” or, “What would a white girl and black girl do if they found themselves orphaned together during the Civil War?” or, “How did the first humans migrate to so remote a spot as Scotland, and why?”

The germ for American Dreams goes back many years. Judy and I have been intrigued by genealogy since we first met. Those preceding us kept sufficient records through the years that we were fortunate to know a number of details about both our families’ heritages—native Cherokee in Judy’s case, and English Quaker in mine. A fascinating potential connection between our two lines also existed whose roots extended back to Oklahoma. Judy’s Cherokee ancestors came to the territory on the Trail of Tears. Some of those Indians eventually married whites, and many of those families of mixed blood remained in Indian Territory in Oklahoma, where Judy’s grandmother was raised. My father, too, grew up in Oklahoma and used to tell stories of the long Cherokee names of his childhood Indian friends.

After we were married we took a trip to Oklahoma with our three sons, visiting both the little town of Vian where my father was raised, and also places in Craig County where Judy’s ancestors had once lived. During that trip we realized just how close our two families had been. They had lived less than fifty miles apart back in a day, when, as the saying goes, everybody knew everybody.

As we stood in one of the several cemeteries we visited on that trip, poring over gravestones for familiar names from one of our two families, the lightbulb moment occurred: “What if some of our ancestors knew each other…? What if we might even be distantly related!”

That possibility never left us. Eventually it developed into an idea for a book in which two girls would investigate their roots, and somehow discover their common ancestry.

But book ideas often go in directions you don’t anticipate. Before that book was written, Katie and Mayme of Shenandoah Sisters came along and I couldn’t help borrowing parts of the idea for their story. Yet in the back of our minds, Judy and I remained curious about the possibility of a tie between our two family lines.

The link, however, did not come in Oklahoma, nor through Judy’s Cherokee roots, where we expected it.

I had known for years of Quaker connections in my ancestry. I had not been aware, however, that they extended back to the very founding years of the Society of Friends in England, nor that my Borton forebears were among the first Quaker immigrants to the American colonies and had come to escape persecution by English Puritans. Neither was I aware just how closely fused were the two names Borton and Woolman as two of the leading early Quaker families in New Jersey.

While traveling in Scotland several years ago with our friends Josanna Simpson and Julia and Grace Yacoubian and my sister Janet Stanberry, and—as was our frequent custom!—browsing in secondhand bookstores, Josanna spied on the shelves an old volume by Janet Whitney entitled John Woolman, Quaker. Not only did the discovery turn out to be a pearl of great price in illuminating the life of John Woolman, in its opening chapter I also read about the first landing on American shores of my own Quaker great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather John Borton. I had known of the name as an abstract fact all my life. Suddenly here he was, family and all. What an exciting discovery!

It had been my intent all along in this series to use Judy’s and my Cherokee and Quaker lineages—weaving into the story what facts I could from our ancestries—as a springboard from which to tell a fictionalized early history of the United States, using the Civil War and the three interwoven races of this continent as backdrop.

Judy and I soon forgot trying to connect our two genealogies. I simply intended to use them independently to tell different aspects of the American story—as I did with hers in the previous volume, Dream of Life, where the focus was the “Old Books” of Cherokee history.

But now we discovered a fact that had escaped us earlier. The Ellis Harlan who married Cata’quin Kingfisher (Judy’s great-great-great-great-grandfather and -grandmother), daughter of Nanye’hi Ward, was the son of a Quaker minister from Pennsylvania—just across and down the Delaware River from the first Borton homestead in New Jersey!

Our two ancestral families had emigrated from England just nine years apart and had landed within thirty miles of each other, both arriving in the formative years of two closely linked Quaker communities.

Our joint Quaker heritage provided the link we had been looking for!

Now obviously these particular names are of interest to Judy and me because they are our ancestors. They will not hold the same interest for you other than as characters in this series. I go into this background, not to bore you with personal anecdotes, but because something larger is at stake. Out of such specifics a more encompassing historical tapestry emerges. The story takes on grander scope, not because of these details, but because these people typify a universal story that has been played out a million times in the lives of millions of other men and women. In a very real sense, our ancestral background which I have woven into this story (an intermingling of different races, from different places and of different religions, traveling and migrating from England to Pennsylvania to North Carolina, then to Oklahoma and Ohio and Illinois, then to Washington and Oregon and California, continuing to marry and spread out and have sons and daughters and grandchildren and great-grandchildren) is a story, in miniature, of this entire wonderful country and how it was explored, peopled, settled, and populated.

All you who are reading have a similar story to tell! Anyone truly can write “the great American novel.” Each of us possesses a heritage that could provide the raw material for a moving tale of brave and interesting men and women and their personal histories.

The names and places and specifics would change. But at root it would be the same story… a story of people who came to this land of many nationalities and from distinct origins, who married and intermarried and sent down roots, and had families… and who gradually made this their homeland.

The drama of the courageous men and women who came before us is a priceless heritage we all share. It underscores a truth woven through the entire fabric of the Old Testament: Genealogy is intrinsic to the history of God’s people. I take it therefore to be something God values—to know whence we came.

That is why American Dreams is a story of genealogies and roots and people—because God values the ongoing life of the generations. As Americans we share a unique bond of a fused and intermingled unity of races that combine to make up our heritage.

There is another reason why focusing on individual men and women is the best way to get at this universal story—individual people can be remarkably courageous. The bravery of the people who came before us is truly remarkable. Can you imagine setting sail on a treacherous journey of two months across a dangerous ocean in a ship the size of a modest yacht of today, accepting the fact that you would not bathe for two months or eat fresh food, knowing that a squall could send you and your family to the bottom of the sea, or that smallpox could break out onboard and you could do nothing about it? The courage of our ancestors is astonishing.

And when they arrived, they would have no homes, no electricity, no running water, no food waiting for them, no shelter, no stores, no towns, no roads, no vehicles, no animals for either food or transportation, no means of contacting the world they had left behind. Isolation does not even begin to describe the aloneness our predecessors experienced. The scope of what it meant to start an entirely new life is beyond our imagination.

Through the years, this courage upon which our nation was founded manifested itself in a thousand ways—the courage to explore, continually to meet new challenges. And what of the courage of the slaves to endure their suffering until the day of their freedom, the courage of those who stood against the times and fought for that freedom.

The history of this land is filled with dark moments and scoundrels and contemptible men who sought their own gain. The unconscionable evil of religious persecutions, of hangings and witch burnings, the horrors of the slave trade and the evil perpetuated by the plantation owners of the South, are grievous sins against humanity for which the collective conscience of America will forever, to some degree, be continuing to atone in new ways.

Yet too, we are a nation of heroes. Bravery takes many forms. Not to be overlooked along with the courage to face physical fear and suffering is courage in eternal matters of spiritual import. It takes courage to face untruth and stand against the prevailing orthodoxies of one’s time—be they social or political or doctrinal. Such heroes in the spiritual realm look to God as the Light of eternal truth. With their example before us, we can draw strength from the brave men and women of the Kingdom who have come before us. With them we can be bold to say to a timid and cautious and small-believing world, “Our God is a higher God. The Light of his truth shines out on a more lofty plane than you can at present perceive. But one day you will see it, for the Light of God’s being will grow stronger and brighter to all eternity.”

All this explains my emphasis on the individual lineages of the characters in the three books of American Dreams. Some of you may find yourselves thinking, “Why is he telling us the names of everyone’s parents and grandparents and great-grandparents? They have nothing to do with the story.” Without a doubt, no series of mine contains a fraction of the names that are mentioned in this series. The reason is simply to convey the importance of a great truth—we are a nation that has emerged out of the lives and stories and bravery of our forebears, millions of ancestors, most of whose names we do not even know, but who transmitted to us their life, their dreams, their love.

We are a nation of people.

Cherity’s search for her familial and ethnic roots, Seth’s search to discover truths long hidden and bring them to the light, Chigua’s search to reconnect with roots severed in childhood, Richmond and Carolyn’s discovery of spiritual roots and their connections to men and women of God who went before… these all contribute to Everyman’s story, a story continually being written in each of our lives. Thus, the Quaker contribution to this universal drama cannot be underestimated, and serves as the climax to the series in this third book. The emphasis of the early Quakers on the Light that lightens every man, the Light of the world, points to an eternal truth. For the history of the universe is the story of the gradual illumination of God’s Light into every human heart.

We are indeed a melting pot of races and creeds and religions and backgrounds. Yet somehow we have become a single nation. This is the story American Dreams tells—how three races became one people.

I truly hope that you are reading this series, fictional though much of it is, as your story too.

I would like to add one final word of acknowledgment and appreciation. This series, by its historical complexity, has required more research than any project I have ever undertaken. That process was made enormously more manageable with the help of my two wonderful research, brainstorming, and all-around assistants, my wife Judy—as always!—along with our friend Josanna Simpson. And also thank you to Rebecca Kraemer for her contribution. Thank you all!

Michael Phillips

Eureka, California

PROLOGUE
From the Old Books
—England—
1603-1861

Crisis in England

1603-1689

The English sailing ship Shield under command of captain Daniel Taws had been at sea for eleven weeks when at long last it entered the wide mouth of Delaware Bay on the eastern coast of the northern of the two continents which for one hundred years had been known to the world as America.

The final leg of its long journey would take the Shield up the Delaware River another ninety miles to its final destination. Excitement among the ship’s families was higher than it had been since the day of their departure.

A bitter cold front had accompanied them to the coast. The blue of a cloudless sky above was thinning and growing pale. After rounding Cape May into the shelter of the bay, for the first time since the coast of England had disappeared from sight behind them, they heard shipmaster Taws give the order to drop anchor.

Slowly the sun continued to set behind the thickly forested hills of the great land their eyes had longed to see for so long. Already the mercury had dipped below freezing. Candles and lanterns came to light throughout the ship as dusk deepened. It would be a cold but happy night on board.

Land ho! had been shouted from the crow’s nest late that same morning some six hours before.

The ship instantly erupted into a beehive of activity… men, women, children all standing at the rails peering at the thin outline on the horizon, watching it grow by degrees larger and more defined. All afternoon women chattered excitedly amongst themselves. Children scurried about pretending to be Indians. Men clustered in groups handing spyglasses around for a closer look at the virgin land suddenly so close.

For two months the toll of the crossing had gradually wearied everyone aboard in both body and soul. The optimism and high hopes of departure had only lasted a week or two. Then the long loneliness had set in… along with the doubts… and the fears whether they would survive the crossing at all. Up and down in an endless succession of troughs and crests, rhythmically rocking from side to side, every creak and groan of the ship’s timbers in the night, every crashing of wave against her hull, every whine of wind through her masts and rigging, reminded the Shield’s passengers of nature’s power, in the midst of which they seemed suddenly so small and helpless. They also reminded the mothers among them that in the sixty years since the Dutch and English had been colonizing the northern portions of the New World, the bottom of the watery passageway between the two continents had become strewn with vessels that had not reached their destinations.

Many unknown graves lay below them. Not all survived the power of these waves and this wind.

They had set sail late in September. The chill of autumn had already begun in England. It was late to begin, but they could not wait another twelvemonth.

As the weeks passed, that chill gradually bit more deeply into their bones. The sky and the sea turned the same dreary gray. Waves whipped higher and higher sending salt spray crashing frighteningly up over the prow. Winds rose with increasing insistence. Two relentless storms battered them for days on end, whipping sails into rags and sending more than half the passengers retching to their beds. Yet the Shield bore bravely forward into winter’s teeth, forward toward an uncertain future.

Yet suddenly today all the pent-up fears had evaporated. Two months of suppressed optimism had broken out in cheers and laughter and back slapping and congratulations at the sight of land stretching as far north and south as they could see in front of them. All afternoon the men spoke of felling trees for homes and about next spring’s planting. The women and mothers were already taking stock of what provisions remained on board and planning what they would feed their families through the cold winter months ahead.

The year was 1678.

Most of the Shield’s passengers were of a growing religious sect in England called Quakers, come to the New World hoping to establish communities free from the persecutions they had suffered at the hands of the ruling authorities and religious establishments in their homeland.

“Captain Taws,” said a nine-year-old boy to the man standing at the ship’s wheel an hour or so after land had been sighted. Taws had made this journey many times before, but the first sighting of land always sent a thrill through him. Like his passengers he was in exuberant spirits. He glanced down on the lad with a kindly smile from his weather-beaten face.

“Yes, Master Borton, what is it?” he said.

“Will we land today, sir?”

“Not today, young John,” replied the captain. “We will be lucky to get inside the bay by nightfall. There we will anchor until daybreak. The remainder of our journey will take us upriver, so we must sail only when we have the light of the sun to navigate by. The stars will do us no good now.”

“Why, Captain?”

“The river is wide, son, but we must stay in the center and not run aground. It takes a man standing at this wheel who can see both shores to do that.”

“When will we go ashore then, Captain?” asked young John Borton.

“We will weigh anchor at morning’s first light tomorrow and sail into the river’s mouth, hoping that the tide and currents are favorable. I do not think we will reach New Castle even tomorrow. But by the next day for certain you will again see the sight of a civilized town.”

“Will we go ashore there, Captain?”

“Perhaps your father. But I think it best if you remain on board with your mother.”

“I want to see Indians, Captain.”

Taws laughed. “No doubt you will see as many as you wish in good time.”

“When will we reach Burlington, Captain?”

“In three or four days, Master Borton. It is a good way upriver. You must be patient a little while longer. But you will see your new home soon enough.”

Twenty or thirty feet away a man and woman stood at the ship’s rail listening. The woman glanced at her husband and smiled.

“Thy son is anxious,” she said.

“No more than thee and all the rest of us, each in our own way,” replied the man.

They stood a moment gazing out at the sea in front of them. It was suddenly not nearly so fearsome now that the horizon was no longer endless.

“So, what think thee, Anne Kinton Borton?” said the man at length.

“That perhaps we shall see thy dream after all… Oh, John, I can scarcely believe it—we have really made it to America!”

“Did thee ever doubt it, Anne?”

“It was a long voyage. There were times I was afraid.”

Borton nodded. He understood. A man with a family is always more or less afraid.

“But our eyes can at last see the New Jersey coast,” he said. “And as the captain said to John, tomorrow we shall sail upriver to our new home.”

The movement of those who called themselves the Society of Friends in England was less than thirty years old when John Borton and his wife Anne, along with their six children, set sail with other families of like mind, including the Bortons’ friend, aging William Woolman, a weaver, and his son John, fiancé to their own fourteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Their number had grown so rapidly and was now so widespread as to be causing major upheaval throughout England in an era of great civil and religious strife. Persecution and imprisonment had been inflicted on many Friends, including one of its newest converts, nobleman William Penn the younger. As the Society had at first drawn primarily from the working classes, Penn’s conversion not only outraged his aristocratic father, it drew increasing national attention to the movement.

England in the seventeenth century found itself in the throes of social, religious, and political crisis. A battle had begun over control of the nation. For the present it was a battle between king and Parliament. But the struggle in the coming centuries would broaden in scope to become a contest between the entire aristocracy and the rising working and middle classes.

At this point, in the early days of the struggle, those involved in England’s conflict came exclusively from the upper echelons of a society which in many respects was still feudal in nature. Outright serfdom was mostly a thing of the past, yet English society continued to be regulated by a strict hierarchy of class. All men may have worshiped the same God. But when they went to church, the nobles sat in their plush boxes, the working classes sat stiff-backed in theirs, and the peasants sat in rows at the back of the church or in the balcony where the nobles did not have to see them, mix with them, or perhaps more important on a hot summer Sunday, smell them. The Christian creed they shared was not a creed of equality.

As religious division was then rife in England, religion became the tool Parliament used to clip the wings of the monarchy. Such a change would have been unthinkable a century before, when Henry VIII’s power was so unchallenged over state and church that he could lop off the head of Anne Boleyn on a whim without fear of reprisal. Now it was the heads of the kings themselves that were in jeopardy!

All wars and conflict between peoples and nations have their roots in contests over power and religion. The desire of one man, one sect, one people, or one nation, to dominate another in rule or belief represents the foundational source of human conflict.

Seventeenth-century England was engaged in a war within itself, a civil war, over religious authority and rule. While masquerading as a contest of true belief, at a more fundamental level it was a battle for power—for supremacy of church structure and allegiance, and therefore also of governmental supremacy. As the government controlled the church, the two could not be separated. The contest between king and Parliament for supremacy was equally a contest of religious sectarian dominance.

Had it been solely a contest over belief, one sect of Christians would not have burned those of another sect of fellow believers in Christ at the stake. But it was a war in which political rule and religious belief were fused into a single driving passion to dominate the nation. It was a battle for authority of ecclesiastical dominance. Which church doctrine and affiliation was supreme? Which church supported the king? Which supported Parliament? All opposing views, governmental and spiritual, must be rooted out and its adherents forced to submit… or pay with their lives. It was truly a Christian jihad. Yet it differed from its Arab counterpart that had dominated the religious struggle in the Middle East for a millennium in this: The English jihad of the seventeenth century was not waged against unbelieving infidels, but against its own fellow Christians of opposing parties and sects. They called themselves Royalists and Parliamentarians. The Royalists who supported the king were primarily made up of Catholics and traditional Anglicans. The Parliamentarians were made up mostly of Puritans, both Anglican and Presbyterian, as well as those from the new Protestant, or “Dissenting,” sects.

Unquestionably those at the forefront of the battle truly believed in the right and truth of their cause. But in taking that belief to the further supposition that they must conquer and subdue by force those, as they saw it, of false and untrue belief, they left altogether the teaching of their Master. Something is dreadfully and eternally wrong when those who may perhaps to some degree possess truth are intent upon forcing and compelling fellow believers to their side, by whatever means possible, including killing them if they do not submit… all for the sake of Christian principle. This terrible evil of Christian rising up against Christian lay at the core of English politics in the seventeenth century, and it was a great evil. It was therefore a ruthless contest fueled by a lust for power, which used the tokens of Christian doctrine as weapons to do evil rather than as principles to bring light into a world darkened by sin.

The Reformation and its aftermath left England a confusing jumble of conflicting interests and church allegiances. The conflict was not only between Catholic and Protestant. The powerful Church of England was being split apart by Puritans, which eventually split into a half dozen or more offshoots. Out of the resulting tumultuous contest for supremacy, influence, and political control, grew what is called the English “civil war” between the years 1643 and 1689. Out of that environment of conflict, uncertainty, and religious strife, emerged a Christian people distinct in outlook from all the rest—the people who formed what they called The Society of Friends, but who came to be known simply as Quakers.

A Vision of Light

1647-1670

A boy named George Fox was born in England in 1624, son of a weaver of the slowly rising working class, neither wealthy nor destitute. The Fox family were religious Puritans grown out of the Calvinist tree of the continental Reformation. Young George was a thoughtful boy, serious about spiritual things, and the desire grew within him to live his beliefs more personally. His discontent with his apprenticeship at shoemaking accompanied a discontent with the Puritanical world of his upbringing. Nothing he heard in the church of his parents satisfied the longing in his heart for a more vibrant and practical Christian faith. The Puritans may have spoken of purifying the church, but to young George Fox it remained strict, dead, lifeless, and legalistic.

Where was a Christianity that practiced and preached and lived by the daily living reality of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Or did such a church exist at all?

When he was nineteen, only a year after the outbreak of civil war between the king and Parliament, Fox left his home and apprenticeship and began traveling about England. His aim was to visit and question priests and ministers of various churches and from many congregations, hoping to find worthy individuals to guide him in his spiritual search. He traveled up and down England, often in great turmoil of mind, visiting churches and meetings and priests, anywhere he heard there was to be a gathering of Christian people.

After three years, Fox came to the conclusion that no church possessed the answers, at least he found them from none of the priests of the High Church of England or preachers of Puritanism or Separatism with whom he had spoken. All he found was the same emphasis on ritual, church structure, inequality in the church boxes and benches, and legalistic adherence to what he considered dead formulas and doctrines and political alliances. Nowhere did he find men speaking of faith and obedience and practical living, only which side of the civil war they supported. Were they on the king’s side or Parliament’s side? The church in England, in all of its manifestations, had become so political at its core that nowhere could he find the principles of Scripture, only doctrines twisted to conform to one political outlook or another.

Nor did he find sympathy with his search. Instead, he was criticized for thinking there might be more to be found outside the church walls, a more that was not political at all, but deeply and personally spiritual. Something was missing.

Over and over again he watched as throngs of people poured into the churches of England from Sunday to Sunday—all its churches—and came out again. But were they any better off? Was their worship making them better people, better Christians? Were they becoming more loving and gracious and tolerant as a result of it? Were the teachings of their pastors and priests changing their lives? Did the people attend church because they loved God, or because church attendance was required by English law?

Throughout England, supposedly the most civilized and progressive country on earth, those claiming to be Christians were at war with one another… and killing one another. Sunday after Sunday, throngs continued to crowd England’s churches, and pray for victory over their enemies… their Christian enemies.

For a time he began to despair of finding the truth. He made his way in great torment of spirit. He realized at length that he had to leave the pastors and priests altogether. He must depend on God alone to show him the light he sought.

And at last answers began to come:

The Church he had been seeking was not to be found in any of England’s churches. The truth he hungered for did not reside in the Parliament or the monarchy, in King Charles I or in Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan commander of the Parliamentary army. The practical reality of gospel Christianity was an individual reality, not affiliation with an organizational entity, be it political or religious. In no one church, in no government, in no king, in no parliament was God to be found.

God dwelt in men and women, not in buildings or structures or priesthoods, not in organizations or hierarchies, not in robes or liturgies or kings or parliaments. God dwelt within human hearts! Within individual human hearts… within his heart.

Suddenly young George Fox realized that the answer had been right in front of him all along. He could go to God alone, in the depths of his own heart, and commune with him, and speak with him and pray to him and worship him, and receive answers and truth and light from him. He needed no king, no priest, no church, no parliament to stand between himself and God. Jesus had revealed God and he needed no other.

The Christian Church of Jesus was no organizational structure at all—it was made up of individual men and women, all equal, all sharing in the same priesthood of believers.

He wrote of his great discovery in his Journal. “As I had forsaken all the priests,” he said, “so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,’ and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.”¹

During the three years while he traveled and prayed and fasted and grew from nineteen to twenty-two, a slow change took place in young George Fox. His uncertainties were gradually transformed into boldness. He began to feel rising up within himself a confidence to speak concerning the truths that were being revealed to him.

Rather than merely asking questions of those he met, he stirred up those with whom he spoke. He challenged his listeners to examine the foundations of their Christian beliefs to see if more and different truth might be present than they realized.

He continued to travel and speak wherever opportunity presented itself, on street corners and in public squares, occasionally even boldly interrupting church services. His message was a simple one: True Christianity is not to be found in church at all. It is found within the human heart. Each one must turn to God within himself, waiting upon him in the silence of his or her own heart, where God will reveal truth.

Gradually George Fox began to call this individually revealed truth the Inner Light.

George Fox sought to live practically the new realities he was discovering. He stopped removing his hat to nobles and priests. If all men and women were equal before God, why should he exalt one above another because of birth and station? In his speech, for the same reason, he discontinued using the more formal you in dialog with the clergy and with aristocrats, in favor of the thee and thou that he used with commoners. He took to simpler, plain dress so as not to seem to exalt himself over those with less than he. And in his times of prayer, he sometimes sat for long periods in silence, waiting for God’s Spirit to speak. The forms and rituals of England’s churches became repellant to him, as distancing rather than aiding people toward an intimate experience with God in the quietness of their own hearts. Such actions quickly began to make the religious and political authorities angry. The fact that he spoke his mind made them angrier still.

George Fox continued to travel about, even though the country was in upheaval. He was energetic and persuasive and forceful, both of appearance and personality. In 1647, though still but twenty-three years of age, he began to attract a following. He also stirred up controversy. Those of the organized church, Puritans and traditionalists, took his convictions as an affront, saying that he denied truths that had been taught by the church for years.

In 1649, two years after the revelation of light had come to George Fox, King Charles I was tried for treason before the lower house of Parliament and executed in London. Oliver Cromwell, in virtual control of England, then took the unprecedented step of declaring an end to the English monarchy. The crown was abolished altogether. Cromwell, who claimed to believe in the equality of all men, had suddenly made himself the most equal of all. Now he ruled England in place of the king.

That same year, Fox was imprisoned in Nottingham for interrupting a sermon with an impassioned appeal to the congregation to be guided by the Holy Spirit alone. A year after that he was imprisoned in Derby as a blasphemer. It was there, after Fox told him to “tremble before the word of God,” that Justice Gervase Bennett called Fox and his followers “Quakers.”

But Fox continued to find a wide response to his unusual perspectives. Within a very few years, his following had become a movement. Meetings began to be held in the northeast of England, and soon others with him took to preaching Fox’s principles up and down England wherever the situation suited it, in barns and homes or at market crosses in the center of towns. Fox himself became more mystical and inward in his spiritual orientation and began writing books and pamphlets to set down the principles of his beliefs. As his following grew, his writings increased his notoriety, and the controversy of his ideas still more.

The most well-known convert to George Fox’s new brand of Christian faith, and the one which would have the most sweeping consequences across the Atlantic on the American continent, came in one of the most respected of all England’s families, that of Admiral Sir William Penn. The conversion of the admiral’s twenty-one-year-old son caused all of London to take note of this rising new sect that had now reached into the highest levels of English society.

Like Fox, William Penn the younger also began to write pamphlets that detailed his beliefs and brought the movement still more into the public eye. In The Sandy Foundation Shaken, his attack on what many considered the orthodox views of Christianity, in particular the trinity, were so strong that, even as the son of a nobleman, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for nine months.

Penn’s writings from the Tower of London were forceful and unpolished. Still relatively new to his Quaker beliefs, Penn used strong language to attack what he considered the loose and unchristian lives of much of England’s clergy, not necessarily the best way to make friends. But he matured and softened in the years that followed, and continued to expand the themes begun in prison. These writings later coalesced into what became the most important of his books, No Cross, No Crown. In it he explained Quaker doctrines and practices—particularly their refusal to remove their hats in respect to the nobility, why they dressed simply, and why they addressed even those higher on the social scale with the informal thee and thou rather than the more formal term of respect you to which they were accustomed. His book provided a thorough exposition of Quaker perspective on the Christian faith. It was truly the first comprehensive book published of Quaker belief, and laid a foundation for Quakerism for generations to come. George Fox’s Journal was in circulation by this time. And in No Cross, No Crown, Penn illuminated Quakerism as an intellectually and doctrinally sound Protestant movement that was here to stay.

While George Fox was a firebrand, William Penn was of gentler temperament, a healer and uniter and conciliator. In spite of ongoing persecutions and more imprisonments, his soft-spoken adherence to his faith, and his education and the reputation of his family, gradually over the years won him the respect and admiration of most of England’s nobility. It became obvious to all that he lived by the principles of his beliefs. No one had complaint against William Penn, and he bore his sufferings with dignity and grace. He became so highly respected, even as a member of a sect that was viewed as radical, that he spoke before Parliament on behalf of religious toleration, not only for Quakers but for all those of minority beliefs. Though the results were not immediate, his influence contributed to the Act of Toleration of 1689, which significantly reduced, though did not entirely eliminate, the religious persecution of earlier times.

William Penn gave Quakerism a gentler face. He spoke with reason, calm, simplicity, and intelligence. He did not stir things up with fiery pronouncements of judgment like Fox, but prevailed upon reason and common sense and goodwill. He tried to bring people together in the midst of spiritual differences. His skill translated this unifying spirit of toleration to the colonial governments he helped establish. William Penn, therefore, was instrumental in launching Quakerism forward into succeeding generations. Though he was twenty years younger, William Penn truly was a cofounder with George Fox of the Quakerism that began to leave England’s shores in the 1660s and 1670s, bound for new worlds where they could put down the roots of their new faith.

When his father died in 1670, William Penn found himself, at twenty-six years of age, the inheritor of what amounted to a fortune—£1,500 in annual income, and, more importantly, a claim upon the king of England for £16,000 which his father had loaned to Charles II during the war against the Dutch. It would be his shrewd request to the crown to repay this loan with land in America that would bring William Penn immortality as one of the most notable founding sons of the rising English colony across the Atlantic.

The persecutions borne by their people caused many Quakers to look toward the New World as a possible avenue whereby they might escape persecutions and live in peace. All through England they were being imprisoned, impoverished by fines, and their property confiscated. But where could such a place be found? Fox and Penn had spoken together about America but there was no free land available.

English King Charles II, on the throne after Oliver Cromwell’s death, had granted to his brother James, Duke of York all the land in America between the Connecticut River and Delaware Bay. In 1664, the duke transferred ownership of these lands to Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, Baron of Stratton as a reward for their defense of the Channel Island Jersey on behalf of his brother, the king. This vast tract of land, loosely defined, had been known as New Amsterdam when under Dutch control. It was now given the name Nova Caesarea, or New Jersey. The new owners, Berkeley and Carteret immediately began making provisions to offer parcels to immigrants by a quit-rent system similar to that which had brought the earliest settlers to Virginia.

Two Quaker men, John Fenwicke and Edward Byllynge, instantly saw in the offer the opportunity to create a community free of oaths of allegiance to king, with no compulsory church and tithes and taxes, and no persecution. They jumped at Berkeley’s offer and purchased his entire portion for the astonishingly small sum of one thousand pounds. Byllynge brought in William Penn as clerk and trustee for his share and gave Penn major administrative control in the future of the province. Penn’s genius and foresight in democratic thinking immediately displayed itself. Under his leadership, an organization was formed to make colonization possible in the new province where Quakers would be free to practice the principles of equality, peace, and simplicity undisturbed. The company drew up a charter of government for the region called the Concessions and Agreements, and divided up the land into smaller parcels available for sale.

Suddenly the Quaker dream of available land in the New World was possible.

The Concessions and Agreements of the New Jersey colony, dated March 3, 1676, a monument to William Penn’s statesmanship and foresight, and a true landmark in democracy, provided that every adult male should be eligible to vote without class or religious restriction, that they should elect representatives annually by ballot to an assembly with full power to make, change, and repeal laws, that trial by jury was to be unrestricted, and that complete freedom of conscience and absolute religious toleration were to be observed and enforced.

A public letter was distributed in England and the colonies with the Concessions and Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders, and Inhabitants of the Province of New Jersey in America. In this letter, foreshadowing the ideals of his great descendents in birthing democracy who would follow a century later, Penn wrote, “In the fear of the Lord and in true sense of his Divine Will we try here to lay foundations for after ages to understand their liberty as Christians and as men, that they may not be brought into bondage but by their own consent; for we put the power in the people.”

In 1677, two hundred and thirty Quakers from London and Yorkshire sailed on the Kent to Salem and New Castle on the banks of the Delaware River. All purchasers of land had been required to sign the Concessions and Agreements before leaving England. Those among them who had purchased land from Byllynge higher up the river continued on by canoe and by Indian trail, where they founded a settlement which would become Burlington.

A year later, the Shield sailed, with the Bortons and Woolmans aboard to join them.