When Quakers Ran the Sex Trade
There are few groups in North America who have better public relations than the Society of Friends. Most histories of this group emphasize their ethics, wealth and early-adoption of ideas which have become ‘politically correct’ in Western societies. It took me a while to cotton onto the fact that this rosy picture was not equitable; one of my first clues was the following quote from Edwin Burrow’s Gotham: A History of New York to 1898:
The SoHo brothels [of 1840 to 1850], most of them run by entrepreneurial madams, were stylish affairs, noted for attractive women, luxurious furniture, fine liquor and black servants, some of whom doubled as piano players. Different houses had distinctive clienteles (southerners, Germans, Astor House [hotel] visitors) and particular specialties: Mrs. Hathaway’s “fair Quakeresses,” Mrs. Everett’s “Beautiful senoritas [who] are quite accomplished,” Miss Lizzie Wright’s “French Belles.”
I’ve read quite a bit of literature on the 19th century sex trade and this was the first mention I’d ever come across of Quaker involvement. That a Quaker-staffed whorehouse merited mention alongside one selling French women— the crème de la crème of female flesh— suggests that Quakers more than held their own as pimps in NYC, too. It was rare for 19th century pimps not to prey on women/children from their own in-group, therefore if the people being exploited in “Mrs. Hathaway’s” bordello were all actual Quakers and exclusively Quakers, it indicates that her prostitute-suppliers/creditors were probably Quakers too.
I decided to investigate this phenomenon more, and over a year later I came across the following tweet:
The author of the above, Isabella Rosner, describes herself this way:
PhDing @kingshistory, Quaker women's needle/wax/shellwork, 1650-1800 | textile historian + curator | host @sewwhatpodcast | working @witney_antiques | she/her
Covent Garden was/is a well-known theatrical and vice district in London. By 1688 the Quaker phenomenon was still a young one in Britain (about 40 years old) considering the slower rate of dissemination of ideas at that time. Yet, Quaker women had already become sex-symbols in the popular imagination… how could this be?
Note the shadow behind Laroon’s “sex worker” dressed as a Quakeress on the RHS— it’s not her shadow, but a shadow corresponding to a contemporary Quaker men’s outfit. (LHS image courtesy of the University of South Florida.) Was Laroon commenting on control of London’s sex trade in the 1680s? Historically, war profiteers very often invested in bordellos.
The Quaker movement was born from George Fox’s radical protestant proselytizing among Cromwell’s Parliamentarian soldiers. It was a war-time religious movement that originally centered around the charismatic personality of Fox, and was a cult of the soldier, if not for the military. Fox drew on ideas from Islamic refugees (who would “quake” channeling the spirit of Allah); Renaissance Hermeticism; Islamic and Jewish criticisms of the person of Christ; and the Millenarian ideas of German Christian Mysticism to cobble together a trade-friendly religion with flexible rules and opaque leadership. These disparate sources reflected fringe movements in European society that were often associated with sexual promiscuity and exploitation.
I wrote about elite perceptions of Ottoman sexual norms in my post on Lucie Duff Gordon. Sects like the Ranters, embarrassing fellow-travelers from the Quaker’s early days, had by the 1700s been outed as antinomians who used false holiness to justify their orgies. Later radical protestant sects, like Count Zinzendorf’s “Moravian Brethren”, which was an offshoot of Pietism, would devolve into such practices throughout the first half of the 1700s. (It’s possible, even probable that Pietism shared historical roots with Quakerism, but this made apologists for both the Peitists and Fox uncomfortable.) Contemporary Jewish heretics too, such as the influential Sabbateans, stumbled down this well-trod path.
A 1799 portrait— one hundred years after his death— of George Fox from the U.K.’s National Portrait Gallery.
In short, Quakerism sprung from a sullied spring. Wars tend to bring with them an increased tolerance for prostitution, especially prostitution targeting the same audience as Fox. In the early decades of the Society of Friends, the general public was shown time and time again examples of radical Protestant and Jewish sexuality run amok, under the guise of hypocritical religiosity. These public perceptions were absorbed into the popular culture and pornographic materials of the day, as evidenced by Rosner’s observation above.
Perhaps even more surprising is how long-lived public perceptions of Quaker hypersexuality were. In her paper titled Quaker Dress, Sexuality, and the Domestication of Reform in the Victorian Novel, historian Suzanne Keen elucidates the following:
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of costume Quakeresses and their real-world counterparts evoked contradictory meanings simultaneously: silent and yet spirited in speech, chaste and yet inspiring thoughts of sexuality. Throughout the Victorian period, plain Quaker clothing works as a double sign of demureness and passion, containing and covering a figure while clearly revealing its contours. Quakeresses emblematize nubile chastity rather than the perpetual virginity of nuns.
…
To theorists and historians of costume such as Phillipe Perrot, clothing ambivalently draws attention to covered body parts: "It reveals as it veils, and showcases the sexually charged body parts it conceals… The very modesty for which it vouches suggests the fascination of what it covers" (12). This is not merely a twentieth century insight: in Fictions of Modesty, Ruth Yeazell reiterates an observation often made by Victorians such as Westermarck, Darwin, and Spencer, that "one of the paradoxes of modesty is that the clothed body entices more than the naked one" (47). By this logic, practically the entire body of the scrupulously concealed woman inside the Quakeresses' clothing becomes an erogenous zone.
By “costume Quakeress” Keen is referring to a popular fancy-dress trend for 19th century parties: women drew attention to their bodies and sexuality in festive atmospheres by dressing as Quakeresses. To dress as a Quakeress at a fashionable party sent the same signals as dressing as a “french maid” or “school girl” would now. The “lecturing Quakeress” was to generations of Brits what the “scolding nanny” became to later fetishists.
The “costume” of the Quakeress had a double meaning in the criminal underworld of 19th century England. Thanks largely to the “reforming” work of Quakeress Elizabeth Gurney Fry (1780-1845), Quaker clothing became a status symbol among the convicted female felons and prostitutes of contemporary jails. Fry would display her wealth in front of desperate prison inmates:
The image and not the reality matters most here, for although Fry's clothes looked plain, simple, and sober, they were always made out of the best fabrics: the "Quaker shawl of brown silk that she wore as a famous prison reformer was lined with ermine" (Rose 35). More important than her actual clothing was the impact of Fry's bringing Quakerly discipline of dress to unruly members of the troubled society outside the Society of Friends.
Fry used material possessions to mark out “moral” women from “immoral” women inside the the prison system, with her favored convicts receiving higher-quality dresses. While exhorting women to conduct themselves by their own rules, Fry reinforced the culture of materialism which has always permeated the sex industry but with the addition of her own shallow veneer of righteousness:
Clothing also became the most noticeable device by which Fry imposed order on the prisoners. Once tried and untried prisoners were separated from one another, Fry divided the prostitutes from "modest" women. Among the convicts, women who had committed crimes "of no deep moral dye" (Fry 34-37) were marked and rewarded with somewhat better clothing. Although Quaker women do not wear a uniform, the prison-dress regularized by Fry imitates the idealized costume of Quakeresses…
The “reformation” of prostitutes, who were often people who had been groomed for a life of prostitution since childhood, was rarely successful. This fact paired with the expense of contemporary clothing meant that when released, these former convicts likely went right back to turning tricks wearing the sexually suggestive outfits Fry supplied. Was this an accident? Certainly the American experience of Quaker concern for prostitutes has been riddled with exploitation, self-interest and abuse.
The expensively dressed Elizabeth Fry was the wife of a rich Bristol/London medical doctor and publisher named Joseph Fry. Elizabeth was the sister of Joseph Gurney and as a sibling pair they lobbied against the death penalty for currency forgery, a criminal undertaking in which North American Quakers were disproportionately active, particularly around Rhode Island. After 1776 counterfeit currency production for the British Empire was repatriated to cities like Bristol, from which the Fry family came. Both the Fry and Gurney families were Quaker.
Quaker hypersexuality and hypocrisy were so widely attested that they became staple fare in pornographic material of the 19th century:
A contemporary anecdote suggests the salacious Victorian image of Quakeresses: a famous female preacher is "asked by a gentleman if the 'spirit' had ever inspired her with the thoughts of marriage, ‘No, friend,’ says she, 'but the flesh often has'."
The presence of this anecdote in the miscellaneous offerings of late-Victorian pornographic magazines the “Pearl” and the “Boudoir” emphasizes the erotic nature of the Quakeress-- a woman moved by the spirit to speak plainly of the body.10 A second anecdote further emphasizes the flesh of the Quakeress:
“A Papist and a Quaker travelling through a plain where a cross was erected, the Papist very devoutly bowed to it, which so inflamed the zeal of the honest Quaker, that he told the Papist with much indignation, "He might as well bow to the gallows, because they were both made of wood." To which the Papist replied, "Why, then, in way of salute, may not you as well kiss your wife's arse as well as her mouth, seeing that they are both made of the same material."(Boudoir 63)”
But just because public perceptions exist doesn’t necessarily make them fair— was the Quaker reputation for hypersexuality fair?
I think the best way to answer that question is to look to the only territory where Quakers made the rules: pre-1776 Pennsylvania and the “Quaker City” of Philadelphia. King Charles II gave “proprietorship” to the Quaker William Penn in order to settle war loans made by the righteous pacifist’s father. (The Penns were an established military family as well as money-lenders.) In effect, this gave the Quaker minority of the Pennsylvania colony suzerainty over this territory, which had originally been settled by the Swedish and Dutch. Historian Sarah Rebecca Schmidt explains how this new British form of government affected the local sex trade:
Another colonial city that might shed light on sexual indiscretions in the 18th century is the city o f Philadelphia. The area around what would become the first capital of the United States was settled as New Sweden in 1638. The city remained as such until 1655 when it was absorbed into New Netherland, but New Netherland (later renamed Pennsylvania) would not become a British colony until 1682 (Rice 1983). Perhaps the exchange in leadership/governing power allowed for lewd behavior to go unnoticed and in turn allowed it to grow exponentially to the point legislature needed to take steps in 1697/98:
“As to the growth of vice, wee cannot but owne as this place hath growne more populous, & the people increased. Loossness Sc vice Hath also Creept in, which wee Lament... As to Ordinaries, Wee are of the opinion that there are too many in the govemmt, especiallie in Philadelphia, wch is one great cause o f the growth of vice, Sc makes the same more difficult to be supprest Sc kept under.” (Qtd in Rice 1983: 30)
By 1757 Philadelphia was home to 120 taverns (Rice 1983: 31), British Barracks that were notorious for housing lower members of society, runaways and prostitutes (Lyons 2006: 110) and cave-like bawdyhouses along the banks of the Delaware River (Flexner 1982: 449; Lyons 2006: 110). The population would reach over 21,000 by 1776 (Rice 1983: 31), just large enough to hide even male-male intimacy (Benemann 2006: XVI). Documentation of sexual indiscretions is however difficult to uncover; during her research Clare Lyons noticed that the community in question was more concerned over the violence of sailors instead of the prostitutes involved or their business when she researched 1760s articles from The Pennsylvania Gazette (2006: 108). She found that prostitution was only documented if another crime was committed and/or involved (Lyons 2006). Much like the newspapers, court records also give details about sexual indiscretions only when a ‘real crime’ is committed (Lyons 2006: 109).
The sex trade under Quaker “proprietorship” flourished “exponentially”, as long as more visible crime was not associated with it.
Quaker political power changed after the Revolution of 1776, and in turn this affected the sex trade. In Philadelphia, business carried on as usual and I’ll write more on that momentarily. However in New York City, where prostitution was closely associated with British despotism and occupation, the situation was far more interesting.
When the British were driven from New York City on Evacuation Day in 1783, their prostitutes and the Quakers who pimped them were also driven from the city. The story of these unfortunate women became a political football in the 1970s when the corrosive influence of the sex trade on politics got a public airing through works like Edward Bristow’s misleadingly-titled Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery and the highly-publicized obscenity trials of millionaire publisher Larry Claxton Flynt Jr. (Hollywood would lionize Flynt in the 1990s.) The female victims of this 18th century weaponization of the sex-trade were known as “Jackson Whites” and “Jackson Blacks”. Their history is fascinating.
Unfortunately, in the 18th century it wasn’t uncommon for Europeans— both law-abiding and criminally-inclined— to be rounded up (kidnapped) by their respective rulers and forced into military service. Potentates also press-ganged women to sexually service these recruits using similar tactics. The British did this during the American Revolutionary War in an attempt to control the behavior of their troops, who would otherwise abuse the local American population and lose the war ideologically. As the political allies of their patron the British Monarch, Quaker pimps were an important aspect of this public relations strategy.
Americans were wise to the ruse, however, and the negative social consequences of the sprawling British sex-trade lead to riots where these bordellos were placed, Schmidt:
Bawdyhouses in New York City were being attacked in defiance to British soldiers in 1765 and were at the root of riots towards the end of the 18th century. The beginning of the bawdyhouse riots of 1793-1799 began at the house of Mother Carey located between the third and fifth wards on the northern end o f the city. A young woman, seventeen years old, was lured into the house and raped by a rich man who was later acquitted o f any wrongdoing (Gilje 1987: 88). Six days later on October 14th an angry mob began to throw stones at Mother Carey’s bawdyhouse; the rioters striped the roof of shingles, destroyed beds and other furniture, gun shots by police officers could not stop the revolt (Gilje 1987: 88). An article in a local journal dated October 16,1793 has the headline “‘An Airing’ The Night before last Mother Carey’s nest o f CHICKENS ... was sadly interrupted by about 600 enraged citizens” (Qtd in Gilje 1987: 90-91) mentioning that petty coats, smocks, silks, a downy couch, and feather beds had been thrown from the windows of the house; later that night police were called back into the streets near Warren/Murray (Gilje 1987).
A total o f seven individuals were arrested in the aforementioned riots of 1793; the riots of 1799 saw forty-five arrests…
In early America prostitution became associated with the exploitative class of rich British partisans, many of whom were Quakers. London contracted to have women trafficked from all over the empire to staff military bordellos, in this particular conflict the women were the aforementioned “Jackson Whites” and “Jackson Blacks”.
The Jackson prostitutes— so named because a British captain surnamed Jackson was contracted to procure thousands of women from Britain and later the West Indies to service their occupying troops— became famous in the 1930s when a historian named J. C. Storms collected oral histories of the people in and surrounding the Ramapo Mountains in southern New York State/ northern New Jersey. These New Yorkers/New Jerseyites counted themselves or their neighbors as among the descendants of these unfortunate women:
Soldiers of the rough and ready sort that comprised the average British Tommy of that day might easily by careless freeness have turned the entire city against England, and caused it to staunchly support the American cause…
But there was a way out of the difficulty, a way that had long been in vogue by warring European nations, in fact, by England herself. A little judicious questioning and a man was found who would accept the undertaking. The man’s name was Jackson… We do not know whether he was a resident of London or not, though presumably he was, as he was known to the War Office located there.
A contract was entered into that Jackson was to secure thirty-five hundred young women whom England felt it could very well dispense with, and transport them to America to become the intimate property of the army quartered in New York City, thus relieving the tension now felt that at any moment these same soldiers might take to themselves such of the residents as temporarily pleased their fancy.
The government was to furnish transportation for the victims of this plot, and on their arrival at New York could provide for them in its own way. At the close of the war, which would soon end, as other plans for speedily crushing this rebellion were being perfected, some method for caring for the situation would be devised. When Jackson delivered the required number for females his contract would be completed. For his services the man was to be paid in English gold; the best information that is now obtainable is that it was to be 2 pounds for each female.
Jackson set his agents at the task of recruiting from the inmates of the brothels of London, Liverpool, Southampton and other English cities along the sea coast. These men must needs work quietly and quickly; the women were averse to the plan, the people might at any moment be roused to action against it. Not that there was a general feeling of pity that these women were being practically sold into slavery in a foreign country, but Jackson and his men were none too scrupulous as to the character of those whom they captured. If a young woman or matron chanced to be on her way home from her occupation, or on the street on an honest mission she fared the same fate as the inmates of the houses of ill fame, and many a respectable working girl or young housewife was shanghaied, and carried off to a life of shame across the sea.
Jackson loaded his human cargo into vessels in the harbors, forced them below decks and battened down the hatches to prevent escape, even from suicide by leaping overboard. Every available vessel that was sea worthy was in use to transport soldiers and supplies for the army, none could be spared except the merest hulks. Twenty of these Jackson used. All set sail for America, but on the way across the ocean a violent storm arose. Some of the vessels became separated from the others. At last, one by one they reached New York-- nineteen of them…
Payment per head made this loss a serious matter in the eyes of Jackson, with the added possibility that failure to hand over the stipulated number of women might be used as an argument to cancel his contract.
Accordingly, one vessel was dispatched to the West Indies, most accessible British possession, loaded with negresses collected in the same manner as the others had been, and brought to New York.
I’d like to stress that nothing in Storms’ account of these oral histories conflicts with what we know about the British military and its relationship with the sex trade at this time. The Ramapo peoples’ folk-knowledge of their own history accords with academic knowledge.
Naturally, when Evacuation Day came in 1783 these women found themselves in a doubly appalling situation:
Suddenly someone remembered the hundreds of English women imprisoned at Lispenard’s Meadows [the main brothels located near present day Canal Street in NYC]. There was no room to take them along, even if there had been the inclination… A hurried order was given, a messenger rode pell mell to the Meadows, unbarred and threw open the big gate of the stockade, and hurried back to escape from the city with his companions.
Out of the stockade gate poured the motley throng of women, after several years of confinement in their noisome quarters. Soon the party separated; about five hundred of the women decided to go northward, and wandered up along the shore of the Hudson River until they reached open country in the vicinity of the present town of Hoosick Falls, one hundred and fifty miles from their former prison. There they remained, a diminishing group until about forty years ago, when they finally disappeared entirely, the last of the race having died.
By far the larger portion of the human stream that flowed out of Lispenard’s Meadows on that eventful Evacuation Day of 1783, by some now unknown means reached the western shore of the Hudson. Perhaps they were hurriedly ferried across the river in some of the war vessels as a final act of humanity. At any rate, the tatterdemalian crowd reached the New Jersey side and took up its pilgrimage, strangers in a foreign land, with no place to go. The horde has been estimated at about three thousand or slightly more. Although many of the women had died from exposure and sickness, there had been a limited increase by births. To the company was added a few soldiers who preferred to cast in their lot with the refugees, having formed a quasiattachment for some member of it. Tories, too, who had been unable to secure passage to the Canadian ports considered their bodily safety rather than their social standing, for it was certain that Manhattan Island had suddenly become too small for both patriots and Tories to live on…
Then followed another memorable trek. Across the Hackensack Meadows, up the Saddle River valley these derelicts made their way on foot. Women carried infants in their arms, older children clung to their tattered skirts, still older ones ran hither and yon, rejoicing in a new freedom that they were unable to understand. Pillaging of orchards and deliberate raids on fields and gardens provoked the farmers, who drove the wanderers on with hard words and often with harder blows, all of which was retaliated. No one wanted these unfortunates. When they stopped to rest the neighborhood dogs were set on them.
At last, with Oakland past, the crowd entered Ramapo Pass...
In 1974, about the time publisher Larry Flynt started Hustler, a hard-core pornography magazine, and Hugh Hefner’s Playboy sales were peaking, an anthropologist named David Cohen published his book The Ramapo Mountain People, which cast doubt on Storms’ narrative. In the USA in the 1970s, pornography was visibile in a way it had never been before, and the porn industry, a part of the sex trade, had more to lose than ever before. Public backlash was inevitable.
Cohen’s strategy was to explode this then-famous history of sex-trade abuse by casting doubt on the existence of the “Jackson Whites” and “Jackson Blacks”. In a nutshell, Cohen’s arguments were 1) the Ramapo and surrounding peoples can’t be trusted to accurately remember their own history, 2) unnamed sources couldn’t verify Storms’ newspaper references and 3) Cohen spoke to someone who claimed that Storms (then deceased) told her he wrote “flowery”. In fairness, Cohen did admit that Storms’ accounts were accurate reflections of the existing oral histories of the region.
In my opinion, Cohen’s newspaper criticisms are the closest to meaningful criticisms to which the anthropologist comes. If thorough examination of “Rivington’s New York Gazettier” from 1773-83 does not carry the references Storms records, it impoverishes his sources on the Jackson victims, but by no means negates their existence. However, we know nothing about the so-called researchers on whom Cohen’s criticisms depend, nor on their research methods. I’ve done a lot of combing through newspaper archives in my life, and it is very easy to miss information if search parameters are too narrow. It is also not uncommon for archives to be denuded when powerful peoples’ interests are at stake— I’ve seen that myself pertaining to the sex trade.
If Cohen wanted to produce an academically rigorous work, he could have tried to follow up on the splinter group of “Jackson Whites” who went north, ultimately to Hoosick Falls, NY. If he’d done that, he would have found other evidence of their existence— and that they were pimped by Quakers in Hudson, NY.
British-controlled prostitutes fleeing Evacuation Day in 1873 followed the Hudson River north toward friendly Canada. Hudson, NY is a stop on the way to their ultimate destination Hoosick Falls, NY. In the late 1700s these were border areas with some pro-British sentiment. Hoosick borders Vermont; the Vermont/Canada border was the counterfeiting hot-spot for the British war effort against the United States’ Founding Fathers.
In his book Diamond Street: The Story of a Little Town with a Big Red Light District, Bruce Edward Hall documents the history of some of these north-fleeing prostitutes in Hudson, NY:
The names and faces [in the brothels] changed over the years. The titles to the little houses had passed from owner to owner, but their purpose had remained largely the same since the Quakers allowed the first house of ill repute to become established there in the early seafaring days of the community…
The mists in the river valley still hold the whispered legends of women known as the “Jackson Whites.”… Over 3000 women were supposedly delivered by Mr. Jackson to the British army occupying New York… There the “harlots flourished brazenly as these dives prospered.” Flourished, that is, until the British lost the war and the brazen harlots were driven out of town by the victorious Americans in 1783, the same year some New England Quakers were buying land to build a great new city upriver [Hudson]… Others settled in the larger Hudson River towns— Yonkers, Newburgh, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Albany.
…The Quakers would have tolerated a small number. They were good for business and, as everyone knew, occasional sex with a prostitute would keep a man from cheating on his wife…
The mostly Quaker settlers, known to subsequent generations as “the Proprietors”, first came to what is now Hudson in 1783, well-to-do seafarers from Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard looking to establish an inland harbor… The Dutch burghers of nearby Claverack and Kinderhoot mistrusted these English-speakers and tried to hinder the growth of their new commercial center by various devious means. Hudson’s city fathers responded by hiring a Dutch speaking spy who would travel the four miles along the cow path to the county seat at Claverack to find out what those Hollanders were up to.
Typically, non-English speaking New Yorkers were more likely to sympathize with the American Revolution than the heavy-handed government out of London. Hudson, NY became famous for its out-sized sex trade industry until it was wound up in the mid 20th century.
By now I think some readers’ jaws will be on the floor: the popular conception of Quaker ethics is so far from the reality, at least the reality among a significant fraction of Friends. I’m going to write more about this fraction with respect to counterfeiting in the future. Ironically, to the ancestors of my American readers, this knowledge was not foreign at all. Prior to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most widely read book (besides the Bible) in the USA was The Quaker City: Or the Monks of Monk Hall by George Lippard, which was a social critique of Quaker sponsorship of the sex trade and currency counterfeiting out of Philadelphia. Quaker criminality and sex-trade patronage was common knowledge in the 1840s.
The story line of Lippard’s book follows the exploits of a local rake who supplies teen girls to a notorious local bordello that services the Quaker Elite. Prior to my finding Lippard’s book, I had only known of such practices among young men of the Eastern European Jewish diaspora in the latter half of the 19th century. This type of human trafficking is well documented in Charles van Onselen’s The Fox and the Flies, wherein he describes such activities carried out by Jewish traffickers including Joseph Silver, who was probably Jack the Ripper.
It turns out that such grooming was tolerated in the Quaker City as well as the Hapsburg dominions and their satellites. So really, it shouldn’t be any surprise that 1840s NYC hosted Mrs. Hathaway’s establishment, nor that a significant proportion of these prostitutes were children, as is documented in Timothy Gilfoyle’s City of Eros: children are easier to groom.
What does any of this have to do with Monroe, WI? Well, when Quaker political influence suffered after the 1770s, their religious movement suffered from splintering. Many Quakers converted to Episcopalianism in Philadelphia. The Hicksite faction of Quakers (1808 onward) were attracted to Universalism, which was more of a New England phenomenon. Our Monroe, WI founders hailed from Vermont and New York where Universalism represented a prominent sect. Universalists appear to have controlled Monroe’s sex trade too, please see my post on Almira Humes.
Therefore, Quaker control of the sex trade on the East Coast of the USA offers a potent explanation for why the Universalists were so prominent in early railway whoring in our area. I believe that Quaker participation in counterfeiting during the Revolutionary War will play a big role explaining the Ludlows, Youngs and Binghams too. Stay tuned!
