gat

on the Monongahela blamed their trouble on rich Philadelphia Quakers controlling the legislature
who had prevented levies for frontier defense.
An unauthorized Presbyterian militia hastily assembled, the notorious Paxton Boys, whose
columns proceeded to march on Philadelphia! I can hardly do justice here to that lively time,
except to remind you that Pennsylvania to this day is divided East/West. The net upshot of
Braddock’s fatal hauteur was to send Scots-Irish Presbyterians on the warpath against Quakers
and to drive important Quaker interests into Tory arms for protection from their fellow
Pennsylvanians.
Thus at the very moment British authority and rigid class attitudes came into question for many
Americans, conservative Quakers, conspicuously wealthy and in control of the mainstream press,
became its quiet proponents. "I could wish," said Thomas Wharton (for whose Quaker family the
business school is named at Penn), "to see that Religion [Anglicanism] bear the Reins of
Government throughout the Continent." In the exact decade when Americans were growing most
fearful of the rise of an American civil episcopate, these Friends "cheered the news of the growth
of Anglicanism," according to Jack Marietta, the Quaker historian. So the dormant seeds for a
delayed Anglican revival were buried in Pennsylvania/New Jersey/Delaware soil right from our
national beginnings. And Philadelphia
Soldiers For Their Class
These buried seeds sent up no more than stunted shoots until the late nineteenth century, when
skillfully induced mass immigration—cheap Catholic labor by the boatload—triggered a perceived
need for emergency social action on an Anglican model. At that moment, casting about for a
blueprint of order in the disturbing period of mass immigration, the new industrial and commercial
elites discarded existing American models: the tentative intellectual meritocracy of the Unitarians,
the rude nepotism of the Presbyterians, the libertarian democracy of the General Baptists, the
proud communitarianism of Congregationalists and Quakers, the religiously centered communities
of the pietists; all had to give way since all were both local and particular forms. None could
accommodate a general habit of rule from afar very well. None was able to maintain tight enough
class discipline. Congregationalists were closest to this ideal, but even they had radically
weakened their own theological discipline with the Half-Way Covenant and then thoroughly
liberalized themselves in the Second Great Awakening after 1795. None of these forms would do
as a universal blueprint of stable government.
Only one acceptable discipline had for centuries proven itself under fire, able to bend diverse,
distant, and hostile peoples to its organization, and that was the Anglican Communion. In India,
Africa, Asia, Canada, wherever the British flag flew, it had been capable of the hard decisions
necessary to maintain a subordinated order and protect the privileges which accrue to those who
manage the subordinate classes.
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