Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

arms in any case whatsoever." Therefore, forcing them to fight would constitute
persecution of the Quakers. As for non-Quakers, it would obviously be
unjust to conscript them for war while exempting Quakers; therefore, all militia
service should be voluntary.
Governor Thomas replied with three arguments: (1) the futility of voluntary
defense—that is, presumably people were not as eager to defend themselves
as Thomas and the militarists were to "defend" them; (2) were not the
Quakers interested in righting the "bloody religion of France and Spain"
(Catholicism) ? (3) why would the Quakers not hesitate to kill a burglar, and
yet not defend themselves against an invading army? To the last point, the
Assembly trenchantly replied that the burglar was committing a conscious
wrong, whereas the soldiers in an army probably did not know that they were
acting as criminals. They also properly deprecated any supposed threat of
French invasion, noting that the English colonists overwhelmingly outnumbered
the French. The governor ended the discussion by charging that Quaker
principles were incompatible with government itself, and urged on the proprietary
that Quakers be made ineligible for public office. In this he was, in
effect, joined by James Logan, ever ready to bend Quaker principles to the
proprietary interests. Logan urged the Quakers to resign from the Assembly.
The Assembly cause was led by Speaker John Kinsey, who was also the
attorney general of the province; the Quakers were supported by the Germans,
who agreed with the Quaker policy of peace and fair-dealing with the
Indians. Other Quaker leaders in the Assembly were Isaac Norris and Israel
Pemberton. John Conrad Weiser, the expansionist German-born adviser to
Governor Thomas on Indian affairs, rebuked his fellow Germans for their
propeace policy, but to no avail. The Assembly also effectively used the tactic
of withholding the governor's salary to win their points.
Passions intensified in this conflict between proprietary and Assembly. In
the fall elections of 1742 a riot broke out in Philadelphia, where a goon
squad of anti-Quaker sailors raided the polls. Despite the deliberate failure of
the pro-Thomas magistrates to suppress this criminality, the Quakers won
both at the polls and in the streets, staunchly backed by their German allies.
Unfortunately, the Assembly did not stick completely to its principles.
While consistently refusing to vote funds for a militia or for direct military
purposes during the War of the Austrian Succession (known in America as
King George's War) with France in the 1740s, the Assembly repeatedly
evaded the issue by voting funds "for the King's Use," which funds the Crown
could and did use for war. The Quakers did try to assuage their rather elastic
consciences by rationalizing that they had not explicitly voted funds for war,
and that warlike use was decided by the Crown—the same flimsy argument that
the Logan party had used during Queen Anne's War earlier in the century. At
one point New England asked Pennsylvania for money to buy gunpowder for
an aggressive assault on the French fort of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island
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