Joseph Nichols and the Nicolites Front Matter

JOSEPH NICHOLS AND THE NICHOLITES:

A Look at the "New Quakers" of Maryland,
Delaware, North and South Carolina

Kenneth Lane Carroll

PUBLISHED BY

Easton Publishing Company
Easton, Maryland

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the rise of a number of religious sects native to the United States. Few of them have had as unusual an origin and as interesting a history as did the Nicholites of Maryland, Delaware, North and South Carolina.

The religious pilgrimage by which these people traveled from being an unchurched group of fun seeking persons to becoming a society of "sober and well behaved men and women" closely followed that of their founder and leader, Joseph Nichols. Rather than splitting from an already existing religious body, as did many of the new sects, the Nicholites arose from a group of people with little or no religious connections. The end of the Nicholite Society likewise seems unique. The harmony, love, and cooperation which existed between the segments of the Nicholites when most of them sought membership in the Society of Friends is all too rarely found in other groups under similar circumstances.

My own interest in this movement sprang originally from three sources: connection with the Society of Friends, love of colonial history, and knowledge that two of my great-great-greatgreat-grandfathers, Zorobabel Marine (1736-1821) and Jonathan Willson (d. 1795), were members of the Nicholites or "New Quakers." Upon first running across the unfamiliar name of the Nicholites in late 1949 my curiosity about them was aroused and has continued to grow. In the thirteen years following this date a great amount of time and research have gone into trying to develop a picture of these people and an understanding of their religion and its meaning for them. This brief book is the result of that interest in the Nicholites.

Some of this material, in the form of articles and essays, has appeared earlier in the Maryland Historical Magazine, Delaware History, North Carolina Historical Review, The Bulletin of Friends Historical Association, and in Anna C. Brinton (ed.), Then and Now: Quaker Essays. All of these earlier treatments of the Nicholite movement are found listed in the bibliography.

I should like to express my appreciation to Dr. Henry J. Cadbury for encouraging me to write this book, to Alyene Porter for reading the manuscript, and to Mrs. B. A. Petty for typing the various stages of the manuscript.

Kenneth Lane Carroll

Southern Methodist University March, 1962

FOREWORD

This monograph is a small chapter in the religious history of America, but a chapter worth recording as an example of the recurrent emergence of genuine concern for the purity of firsthand faith and practice. Dr. Kenneth Carroll has for some years diligently pursued the search for historic data about the Nicholites in out-of-the-way places and has succeeded in piecing together an intelligible story. This volume digests eight earlier articles by the same author on the subject. Much remains unknown and is likely to remain so after such thorough gleaning of the field. In fact, the reader may well be surprised that so much can be learned about so obscure a sect. Their name is not listed in the usual books of reference nor their founder, Joseph Nichols, in the biographical dictionaries. Quakerism, to which the Nicholites seem only a footnote, was itself a minority group at the time and area of their parallel existence. Both had the habit of keeping records, in spite of the comparative illiteracy of the smaller unit. To these, to Quaker Journals, and to public archives the following essay is indebted.

What we do know of them bears witness to the unconfined seedbed of fresh social sensitivity. The attitude of the Nicholites to slavery, even if later helped by that of Woolman and other Friends, may well have been independent. Strange as seems to us today the almost universal acceptance of slavery among the churches of the Eighteenth Century, any group which relied more on the inward authority of conscience than on the customs of environment no matter how provincial in horizon might easily take first steps towards emancipation. John Woolman often came upon sensitive individuals and refers to "some of our Society and some of the Society called New Lights" as teaching Negroes to read. This reference is apparently to the Western

Shore of Maryland and Virginia and in 1757, nearly a decade before Woolman's Journal mentions the followers. of Joseph Nichols. New Lights was a widespread nickname in the American colonies, sometimes used, as Joseph Oxley found in New Hampshire in 1771, for people outstripping even the Quakers in austerity of scruple. Perhaps there is confusion; the Nicholites themselves suggest their nickname meant followers of Nichols' Light. There may have been anachronism in Woolman's own recollection. This single passage illustrates how the Nicholites and Quakers represented pari passu an evolving conscience against slavery that was not limited by sectarian boundaries.

At first sight the influence of one group upon the other looks as though it were regularly Quaker influence on the Nicholites. That may be because to us the Quaker principles and practices are well known and labelled. Plainly the Nicholite group was not a secession from Quakerism but independent. Their statement in 1778 to the General Assembly of North Carolina that while their principles were the same as those of the Quakers "for some reasons which we could render if required we hitherto have not thought it best to join membership with them," rouses our curiosity. We should like to know the reasons.

In many ways their resemblance to Quakerism at its best was precisely in the delicacy of feeling with which they first kept themselves separate from Quakerism, though on very good terms, and then deliberately without offending their own hesitant members joined the larger and older Society. It is to be wished that in these days of church mergers equal charity and consideration might always prevail.

To the general reader this story here presented is self explanatory. To the historian it will be a satisfaction to have in brief and clear compass the information which Kenneth Carroll has been able to collect.