New England Yearly Meeting of Friends Records

Background on New England Yearly Meeting of Friends

In 1661, less than a decade after the first Friends arrived in British North America, the precursor to the New England Yearly Meeting was organized as the Rhode Island Yearly Meeting. As the oldest of approximately two dozen yearly meetings in the United States, the NEYM I currently organized into eight quarterly meetings and approximately 85 monthlies, which are the basic unit of organization for the Society.

With roots in northern England, the Society of Friends was one of the most successful of the radical sects that arose during the religious ferment of the English Civil War. Spreading rapidly under the visionary leaders George Fox, Margaret Fell, and James Nayler, among others, Friends were widely regarded as a threat to the established social order for their insistence on the possibility of a direct experience of the divine without the intermediary of an ordained clergy, and for their radical egalitarianism rooted in the concept of an Inward Light, a divine spark within all humanity.

Intensely evangelical during the first decades of their existence, Friends spread their teachings throughout Britain and overseas, first arriving in New England in 1656. Greeted with considerable hostility by the Puritan authorities in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colonies. Their anticlericalism and egalitarianism were no less controversial in the New England theocracies than they had been in England, and the authorities responded with systematic repression, including banishment, corporal punishment, and in four cases, capital punishment: between 1659 and 1661, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, Mary Dyer, and William Leddra were all executed in Boston.

Despite the response, Friends found root in the more tolerant environs of Rhode Island, forming at least seven local meetings within a decade and organizing the first General Meeting of Friends in America in Newport, R.I., in 1661. The process of establishing governing structures for Quakerism in the colonies took on a new energy following the evangelical visit of George Fox in 1672, after which the General Meeting was formally constituted as the New England Yearly Meeting for Business, with Monthly Meetings constituted at the same time. New York Yearly Meeting was set off from New England in 1695. Three quarterly meetings were established between 1699 and 1705, which served as the official bodies for authorizing representatives to the Yearly Meeting.

The NEYM continued to formalize and strengthen church structures during the eighteenth century, emphasizing the distinctiveness of Quaker identity through insistence on adherence to basic tenets such as the peace testimony, opposition to slavery, and the enforcement of endogamy, though not without struggle. In 1784, the Yearly Meeting made its first attempt to establish a Friends school in Portsmouth, R.I., and although that school lasted only four years, it is regarded as a direct recursor to the Friends Boarding School in Providence, established in 1819 and known today at the Moses Brown School. The Oak Grove School in Vassalboro, Maine was established in 1849.

From early in their history, New England Quakers have been diverse in spiritual practice, leading to a legacy of sometimes profound doctrinal conflict. Although the Hicksite-Orthodox schism that shook Philadelphia and other Yearly Meetings had little impact in New England, outside of Nantucket, the NEYM suffered its own deep divisions. Beginning in 1817, several monthly meetings in New England underwent a brief, but intense period of conflict between "New Light" Friends, who questioned the divinity of Christ and emphasized the power of direct revelation, and their more conservative peers. Deeper splits, however, ensued in the 1840s between factions known as Gurneyites and Wilburites, named after their most vocal spokespersons, and each claiming to pursue the spirit of original Quakerism. Following the writings and preaching of the English Quaker, Joseph John Gurney, the more numerous Gurneyites were swept up in the evangelical tendencies shaping American Protestantism more generally, pursuing a Bible-centered, pastoral form of worship.

Responding to the Gurneyite surge, the Wilburites, named after John Wilbur of Hopkinton, R.I., grew concerned that evangelically-minded Quakers were tending to rely too much on the outward forms of Christianity and too little on the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit. Wilburites (also known as Conservative Friends) retained simpler, unprogrammed meetings for worship. Throughout New England, but especially in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts, monthly meetings divided between Gurneyites and Wilburites, organizing themselves into separate yearly meetings, the Gurneyite Yearly Meeting of Friends for New England and the Wilburite New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.

In the latter years of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, the Gurneyites pursued evangelical priorities including domestic and foreign missions that led to the formation of larger administrative structures to coordinate more effectively between Yearly Meetings, culminating in the establishment of the Five Years Meeting of Friends in 1902. The Wilburites did not prosper, and by the mid-twentieth century, only three monthly meetings remained. In 1945, the Gurneyites and Wilburites agreed to merge, bringing in independent meetings in the Connecticut Valley, Cambridge and Providence to form the modern New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.

The following meetings are listed as "occasional meetings for worship" or "other meetings for worship" in the Yearly Meeting minutes from 1947 onward. They are presumably under the loose jurisdiction of the Yearly Meeting, without specific monthly or quarterly meeting ties. None of these meetings have records at the NEYM Archives; it is uncertain whether many of them ever created any records at all. Some, as indicated, were later joined to other formal meetings.