THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

Evans agreed to Hicks’s request. After Hicks’s departure, Evans called for an
adjournment of the meeting, suggesting members could finish their business at a later
time. Though some members opposed the move, Evans was successful in adjourning the
meeting. When Hicks returned to the men’s meeting, he was surprised to find the
meeting dismissed. Picking up his coat, Hicks observed that it was kind of the men to
leave his coat for him. The incident, for Hicks’s followers, demonstrated the hostility
Evans and his supporters felt toward Hicks. 32
Throughout the 1820s, the divisions between supporters and opponents of Hicks
deepened culminating in the schism of 1827. In 1827, as Philadelphia prepared for the
yearly meeting, tensions heightened as each side attempted to gain control of the meeting.
John Comly, along with other like-minded Quakers, became convinced that the Yearly
Meeting as well as the Quarterly Meeting were under the control of Orthodox Quakers. 33
In the last session of the meeting, a special committee was appointed to visit each
meeting to test the soundness of the membership. Composed of evangelicals and
appointed without the general approval of the meeting, the establishment of the
committee marked the beginning of separation between the two factions. 34
It was in this atmosphere of theological debate and division that Elizabeth
Margaret Chandler developed as an anti-slavery author. After the schism, Chandler and
her brother Thomas were received back into Green Street Meeting, the center of Hicksite
32 Foster, Authentic Report, I: 354, II: 39-40; Elias Hicks to Valentine Hicks, October 28, 1819,
Elias Hicks Papers, FHL. See also Ingle, Quakers in Conflict, 84-85.
33 Forbush, Elias Hicks, 244.
34 Frost, “Years of Crisis and Separation,” 76; Ingle, Quakers in Conflict, 183-224.
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