I came here from /r/Quakers and while I'm not a historian, I do have a minor degree in Quaker Studies and am hoping that counts for something. I've read the sidebar and the post about what it means to post in this sub, and I aim to be mindful of that. Mods, If I am still out of line in my comment, please remove it (and maybe let me know how I could improve it?). It's been a few years since I've studied/spoken on this topic, but I can pull books off my shelves and brush up my own memory to share if this garners any attention.

There are two core issues at hand in what caused the hatred/persecution of Quakers: 1) their disruption of authority (both religious and governmental), and 2) their beliefs were considered heretical. The second seems self-explanatory to me, as it's a pretty standard story of religions clashing, but some examples of the first issue are below.

• Quakers believe that all people have direct communion with God/Jesus, and do not need a person (clergy) to act as an intermediary. This disrupted the power held by clergy/government (since the Church of England was the state religion). They also didn't pay tithes, and drew a substantial following of people who also stopped paying tithes.
• Quakers believe that all people are equal, and therefore eschewed common practice of doffing their hat or bowing to their "superiors." They used the singular "thee/thou/thy" rather than the plural "ye/you/your" that was expected to be used with the rich or nobles, and didn't use honorific titles.
• Quakers refuse to swear oaths, and as such would not take the oath of allegiance to the Crown or swear in court.
• Some early Quakers attended church services and essentially heckled the clergy, getting new followers in the process (embarrassing and reducing the authority of the church in one move!).
• All attempts to stifle Quakerism (laws against their congregations, jailing of leaders, etc.) just flared the flame of Quakerism further, as they were extremely self-righteous in their convictions. George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers), even managed to convince more than one of his jailers to follow Quakerism.

Hey, I can see I am late to the party, but I still want to answer anyway (my thesis, which I defend in 5 weeks, is literally on Quaker history in Maryland during the American Revolution, and I never see questions about them on here).

So there are several reasons why Quakers were despised in early Colonial and early American history. This mostly can be traced back to two different issues: non-conformity of Colonial laws and practices (such as refusing to enter militias) and rejection of basic Christian dogma (such rejecting the idea of having ministers as the head of a church body) that sent shockwaves throughout European and American cultures. As /u/Reyali stated, their core beliefs were also viewed as heretical, making them easy targets for overzealous colonists who were looking to stamp out dissent even within their own ranks. But there's a few key examples that we can look at as to what happened to early Quakers and why it happened.

Early Quaker History

The earliest Quakers arrived in the New World in three different locations. New England in 1656 and Maryland and the isle of Nevis in 1658. Quakers were immediately met with hostility. The General Court banned Quakers from entering the colony in 1656, and in May Massachusetts passes a law that forbade practicing the 'diabolical doctrines' of the Quaker faith.(1) Specifically, many of the tenants of the Quaker faith (as outlined by the person I cited earlier) were seen as highly offensive and people of New England thought that the only way to reject them was to do so with physical resistance. The violence against Quakers peaked in Boston between 1659 and 1661 when William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, Mary Dyer, and William Leddra of Barbados all returned to the colony after being exiled and then were in fact executed.(2) King Charles the II in 1661 banned the practice of executing people based off of their religion in 1661, but it did not stop other forms of punishment, like imprisonemnt that continued throughout the the 1660s.(3)General Court barred Quakers from even entering the colony in 1656, and physical persecution soon followed.​

Quakers were persecuted in other colonies as well, but for other reasons. The persecution that early Quakers experienced in Maryland during the late 1650s were actually not directly done because of their faith When a Maryland militia law was passed, ordering all men of military age to report for local militias to be trained, Maryland Quakers refused to do so. Quakers have long-helped practices of pacifism, so they believed that training for a militia was against their beliefs.(4) The price of failing to muster was to pay a fine, a fine Quakers also refused in the state since they saw it as funding war efforts. As a result, sherifs and other agents of the colonial government started seizing and stealing their animals and goods as punishment. There are several accounts of people being beaten, jailed and one account of a Quaker being stabbed by the local sherif because of their refusal to to go to the militia musters or pay the fines.(5) But it is important to realize that this sets them apart from the persecution experienced in other states, since it was a refusal to support the military, not necessarily them just practicing their faith like in Boston, that made them enemies of the government. Things did change in 1661, when a colonial law was passed exempting people whose religious convictions barred them from supporting the military.(6)

Things got slowly better for Quakers for the rest of the 18th century when the English government recognized a need for a save haven for Quakers and minority religions. This led to the creation of the Pennsylvania charter under the leadership of Quaker William Penn. Penn a wealthy Quaker theologian secured the colony from King Charles II in 1681 and settling the colony took force in 1688. Pennsylvania was envisioned as a save haven from oppressive religious and guaranteed “freedom of religious convictions,” for all of its inhabitants.(7) This is why Quaker populations were so much higher here than in any other state. by the even of the American Revolution, at least 100,000 Pennsylvanians (1/3rd of their population) were Quakers, versus states like Maryland which had about 3,000 Quakers, or 2% of their white population.

Quaker Conflict in Revolutionary America

The first real problems that modern Quakers experienced in the American colonies came during the build up to the French and Indian War. Pennsylvania Quakers, who had held majority control of the state legislature for 74 years, lost power in the 1750s due to their refusal to organize state militias. Real problems however happened in the 1770s, when the prelude to the American Revolutionary War caused extreme conflicts between groups. Simply put, American Quakers largely help fast to their pacifistic beliefs. They were fined for not supporting local militias and many experienced persecution in many states for failing to pay taxes to the state governments, failing to take oath of allegiances, and failing to show up for muster calls.(8) Apart from their declared pacifism, some Quakers, like a few living on Maryland's Eastern Shore were rumored to be assisting the British Army throughout the war.(9) Some of these reports were exaggerated, but what's important to note is that Quakers were largely seen as 'the enemy' during this period and Quakers in pretty much every state experienced harassment of some kind. The severity from state to state, with some states, like Virginia, experiencing relatively less forms of oppression verses states like Maryland where Quakers experienced extremely hostile forms of persecution. I will not expand on this further since this is the subject of my thesis and it will not be defended for another 5 weeks and won't be published until this summer.

Ultimately, Quakers were

1. Michael Gandy. Sufferings for Early Quakers Vol. 2 The Ebor Press. 2001. pp. 179

2. Francis J. Breme & Tom Webber. Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America, Volume 1. ABC-CLIO. 2005. pp xl

3. Ibid

4. Michael Gandy. Sufferings for Early Quakers Vol. 2 The Ebor Press. 2001. pp. 380

5. Michael Gandy. Sufferings for Early Quakers Vol. 2 The Ebor Press. 2001. pp. 378.

6. Arthur Meekel The Quakers and the American Revolution. 1996 pp 258

7. Rufus Jones. Quakers in the American Colonies. Russell & Russell Publishing. New York. 1911 & 1961. pp 420

8. Meekel pp 8

9. M. Christopher New. Maryland Loyalists in the American Revolution. Tidewater Publishers. 1996.​

Early Quakers were troublemakers. My favorite peice on the New England controversy is written by a Quaker, George Bishop titled New England judged, not by man's, but the spirit of the Lord: and the summe sealed up of New-England's persecutions being a brief relation of the sufferings of the people called Quakers in those parts of America from the beginning of the fifth moneth 1656 You can find it on Early English Books online: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:11699789 Bishop claims Mary Fisher and Anne Austin were stripped naked and 'misused' for simply sharing the 'movings of the Lord'. (New England Judged,12-13). At this point though Quakers had been active for roughly 7 years if you date the beginning of the movement to 1649-1650.

Quakers did the following things that bothered people.

• The disrupted church service to speak

• They didn't pay tithes

• They didn't observe English formalities in greetings (hat honor status challenge)

• They used personal pronouns thou/thee rather than you (status challenge)

• They didn't practise baptism

• They 'railed' against ministers (sometimes shouting them down)

• Women stood up and spoke authoritatively

• They dismissed creeds making them not Christian

• They believed in Christian perfection and their own sinlessness

• The government after the restoration didn't like them because many of the early Quakers were involved in the revolutionary activies of the 1640's against the government

• They greeted each other with a holy kiss (scandalous)

• They tried to raise someone from the dead

• They wondered the streets naked as a sign of the times.

Now imagine rumors of all of this from England in a very Puritan Massachusetts society which is what New England was in the 1650's and 1660's. Most of these examples are from England but Mary Fisher, Anne Austin, and Mary Dyer were all missionaries to the colonies. (Mary Fisher is a remarkable woman who allegedly traveled all the way to the sultan in Ottoman empire). Now if you want more information about early Quakerism the best book covering 1650's - 1666 history is Rosemary Moore's the Light in their conscience. She did a study on the pamphlet wars as her area of emphasis in Quaker Studies and covers a lot of the language and controversy of that time. The best Quaker story of the 1650's is that of James Naylor - The history of it that I find the most useful is Leo Damrasch's The Sorrows of Quaker Jesus. James Naylor basically showed that if you act like Jesus in a Puritan society you will be treated like Jesus. It's a fascinating story and Naylor is probably the interesting character in Quakerism in the 1650's as his scandal in Bristol, England was eventually brought before Whitehall and literally branded a heretic.

If you want to do a study of Quakerism I'd suggest 4 books for this period.

• The Light in their conscience by Rosemary Moore

• Introduction to Quakerism by Ben Dandelion

• The Quakers in America by Thom Hamm (Hamm is probably the most impactful Quaker scholar on American Quakerism imo)

• Early Quaker Writings - Hugh Barbour and Arthur O. Roberts

My favorite non-Quakers who cover this period are the Marxist historians Christopher Hill and Barry Reay.

• Quakers and the Puritan Revolution - Barry Reay

• The World Turned Upside Down - Christopher Hill

If you asked Richard Bellingham, the on-again, off-again governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he would tell you that the Quakers were in his colony to spread a religion which spoke “rebellion and sedition in the presence and to the face of authority.” Bellingham had seen during the Antinomian Controversy what uncomfortable positions New England’s ministerial elite could find themselves in when a movement countervailing to religious and social conventions gained traction. In 1637, he had been one of the magistrates to vote for Anne Hutchinson’s expulsion from the colony as a result of her very significant role in advancing the Free Grace theology of John Cotton. Hutchinson and Cotton had levied charges against the religious teachings of the colony’s ministry. In meetings over the course of about a year and a half they had begun to accuse these ministers of preaching a covenant of works among other things. No outward behavior, Hutchinson made clear, can reveal God’s favor. The idea of justification by sanctification as preached by the majority of ministers was incorrect. Needless to say, when preachers caught wind of the idea that some of their parishioners were beginning to advocate for Hutchinson and Cotton, they were not pleased. Alerted to disruption, John Winthrop issued a warning made note of Hutchinson’s two dangerous errors in 1636: “1. That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. 2. That no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification.”

By the time thirty-three or so Quakers made their way to Massachusetts, between 1656 and 1659, it was abundantly clear that authorities in the colony had little patience for challenges to their positions. First among the Quakers to arrive were Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, both of whom were stripped, searched for evidence (upon their bodies as well as among their goods) of witchcraft, and sent to Barbados. All subsequent arrivals were treated similarly. Before being banished Quakers were often beaten or branded. Contributing to their ostracization, Quakers exhibited what the Puritan governance of Massachusetts (likewise, across the Atlantic) saw as deviant behavior, such as returning to the colony after being subjected to such punishments. In 1659, the legal response for this particular deviance would be codified. If a Quaker returned to Massachusetts Bay Colony after being expelled twice, they were subject to death by hanging. Such a measure was arguably a result of the inadequacy of the colony’s administration to deal with the Quakers’ defiance. Imprisoning each Quaker who returned was not practical, and given the fact that disobedience was a well-established Quaker tactic, announcement of a death penalty was perhaps intended to serve as a scare tactic. This did not mean colonial authorities would not actually use it. Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson, William Leddra, and Mary Dyer were all executed under the law.

Let’s go back to the Antinomian Controversy for a moment and discuss Mary Dyer and an aspect of Quaker persecution that I haven’t seen addressed here yet: the role of Quaker women. Twenty years before her trial and execution, Mary Dyer had been banished as a follower of Anne Hutchinson. A key component of Hutchinson’s trial had been her challenge to Winthrop, Bellingham, and others’ interpretation of women’s role in advancing religious knowledge. The Puritans embraced a strict interpretation of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, which issued instructions to “Let your women keep silence in the Churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak: but they ought to be subject, as also the Law saith. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for a woman to speak in the Church.” This would be a key piece of “evidence” against Hutchinson, but it was one she rejected, as another Pauline Epistle, this time to Titus made it clear that women were to be “teachers of honest things” and to “instruct the young women to be sober minded, that they love their husbands, that they love their children.” Hutchinson reasoned that since her meetings took place in her home, they were in private. She insisted that she was well within Paul’s rules and within her bounds as a Christian woman. The magistrates of the Bay Colony did not/could not agree.

Hutchinson and Dyer did not only have the Pauline Epistles to contend with, of course. In October 1637, Mary Dyer gave birth to a child who, in addition to suffering some type of physical deformity, was stillborn. John Cotton helped Dyer bury the child in secret. Hutchinson suffered a near identical tragedy. Believing that it strained credulity for two outspoken women to be struck by the same misfortune, John Winthrop ordered Dyer’s child exhumed for examination and sent for information about Hutchinson’s. These stillborn children served for Winthrop as the most damning evidence of wrongdoing.

Counter to the Puritan adherence to Scripture with regards to the role of women in church, was the relative support Quaker women received from their spiritual leadership. Among lay ministries were women. This difference is rooted in theology that was cause for a number of the Quakers’ troubles. A principle of the Quaker belief system was (I’m saying “was” because I have no familiarity with contemporary Quaker thinking) the idea of direct inspiration and constant revelation through the Divine Light. Even the eternal curse placed upon Eve was lifted, according to George Fox. The prelapsarian equality enjoyed between men and women had returned after restoration by Christ: “For man and woman were helpsmeet, in the image of God and in Righteousness and holiness, in the dominion before they fell; but, after the Fall, in the transgression, the man was to rule over his wife. But in the restoration by Christ into the image of God and His righteousness and holiness again, in that they are helpsmeet, man and woman, as they were before the Fall.” This is reinforced by Margaret Fell’s position within the Quaker movement as a founding member and important leader.

Women among the Quaker ministry was far from uncommon. Twenty-six of the first fifty-nine Quaker “publishers of the truth” to come to the colonies were women. In addition to a proselytizing laity, Massachusetts Puritans were facing a cadre of women undermining well-established doctrine.

Finally, there were the disruptive, to say the least, methods of protest employed by the Quakers. Perhaps most offensive of these from a Puritan standpoint, was the practice of going “naked for a sign.” Quaker women would often appear at meeting houses, or simply walk down the street, nude or partially nude. In one instance, this was done by two women to imitate Isaiah. This methodolgy was used in the 1650s, by men, rather than women and was employed as a method of demonstrating nakedness before God.

I won’t touch on the aspect of pacifism and some other points that have already been hit on in this thread by /u/uncovered-history and /u/reyali, but overall, the Quakers demonstrated a clear defiant streak, both doctrinal and by protest. I can provide sources if needed. Just give me a bit to gather them.

Sources:

Dunn, Mary Maples. "Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period." American Quarterly 30, no. 5 (1978): 582-601.

Hamm, Thomas D. The Quakers in America. Columbia University Press, 2006.

Frost, Jerry William. The Quaker Family in Colonial America. Macmillan, 1973.

Pestana, Carla Gardina. Quakers and Baptists in colonial Massachusetts. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

For more on Quaker women, this is an interesting read on Quaker persecution outside of the colonies by Catholics:

Gill, Catie. "Evans and Cheevers's A Short Relation in Context: Flesh, Spirit, and Authority in Quaker Prison Writings, 1650–1662." Huntington Library Quarterly 72, no. 2 (2009): 257-72.