Overview

Elias Hicks (1748-1830) was a travelling Quaker minister from Long Island, New York. A farmer's son, he was a carpenter by trade and in his early 20s became a Quaker like his father. In 1771 he married fellow Quaker Jemima Seaman at the Westbury Meeting House with whom he had 11 children, only five of whom survived to adulthood. Hicks eventually became a farmer too, settling on his wife's parents' farm in Jericho, NY. In 1778 he helped build the Friends meeting house in Jericho and that year he was acknowledged as a recorded minister. He was regarded as a gifted speaker who drew large crowds, sometimes in the thousands. Hicks was one of the early Quaker abolitionists and the Quakers at Westbury Meeting were among the first in New York to free their slaves. He was also the founder of a charity established to give aid to local poor African Americans and provide their children with an education. In 1794 Hicks wrote Observations on the Slavery of Africans and Their Descendents in which he linked the moral issue of emancipation to the Quaker Peace Testimony by stating that slavery was the product of war. This work gave the free produce movement its central argument, promoting an embargo on all goods produced by slave labor, mainly cotton and sugar cane, in favour of produce from the paid labor of free people. Hicks believed obedience to the Inner Light to be the sole rule of faith and the foundational principle of Christianity and his promotion of unorthodix doctrines caused the first major schism within the Religious Society of Friends, with prominent English evangelical Friends travelling to New York in the 1820s to denounce his views. The eventual division between Hicksites and the Orthodox Friends in the US was long-lasting and a full reconciliation took decades to achieve. The final entry in Hicks's journal recording his eventful life was made little more than two months before his death in February 1830 and the memoir was published posthumously in 1832.

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