Kontextmaschine

26th December 2016

Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 35 notes

So Quakers consider themselves prohibited from doing evil (like going to war) but not compelled to prevent others from doing evil (as pacifists, how would they?) and the legislative result, in colonial Pennsylvania, was a long tradition of pragmatically backing nonbelievers’ violent initiatives ON THE CONDITION that they were worded so they could have been nonviolent if they wanted and their failure to so be was no knock on the Quakers.
Like during the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin got them to make appropriations for “fire engines”, and “corn” (which at the time just meant “fine discrete grains”, cf. “peppercorn”) and used it to buy cannons and gunpowder, which everyone understood would be the result

maybe crossed a wire on the “corn” thing, here’s the man in his Autobiography

My being many years in the Assembly, the majority of which were constantly Quakers, gave me frequent opportunities of seeing the embarrassment given them by their principle against war, whenever application was made to them, by order of the crown, to grant aids for military purposes. They were unwilling to offend government, on the one hand, by a direct refusal, and their friends, the body of the Quakers, on the other, by a compliance contrary to their principles; hence a variety of evasions to avoid complying, and modes of disguising the compliance when it became unavoidable. The common mode at last was to grant money under the phrase of its being “for
the king’s use,” never to inquie how it was applied.

But if the demand was not directly from crown, that phrase was found not so proper, and some other was to be invented. As, when powder was wanting (I think it was for the garrison at Louisburg), and the government of New England, solicited a grant of some from Pennsylvania, which was much urged on the House by Governor Thomas, they could not grant money to buy powder, because that was an ingredient of war; but they voted an aid to New England of three thousand pounds, to be put into the hands of the governor, and appropriated it for the purchasing of bread, flour, wheat, or other grain. Some of the council, desirous of giving the House still further embarrassment, advised the governor not to accept provision, as not being the thing he had demanded; but he replied, “I shall take the money, for I understand very well their meaning; other grain is gunpowder,” which he accordingly bought, and they never objected to it.1

It was in allusion to this fact that, when in our fire company we feared the success of our proposal in favor of the lottery, and I had said to my friend Mr. Syng, one of our members, “If we fail, let us move the purchase of a fire-engine with the money; the Quakers can have no objection to that; and then, if you nominate me and I you as a committee for that purpose, we will buy a great gun, which is certainly a fire-engine” “I see,” says he, “you have improved by being so long in the Assembly; your equivocal project would be just a match for their wheat or other grain.”