'I was a stranger, and ye took me in': Charity, moral economy, and the children of peace

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 80, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 624-641

  Schrauwers, Albert ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33847600067     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/CHR.80.4.624     Document Type: Note

References (59)

1. Douglas McCalla, Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784-1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 9
2. See the large anthropological literature cited in works such as S. Gudeman, Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986)
3. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press 1944)
4. William M. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987)
5. From an untitled pamphlet by David Willson, quoted in full in Patrick Sheriff, A Tour through North America (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd 1835), 108-14, handed to outsiders who visited the temple. Also available in manuscript, Ontario Archives (OA), Ms 188, 24 June 1831. The pamphlet begins by quoting Matthew 25: 34, 'I was a stranger ...'
6. McInnis's analysis of net agricultural production of Ontario farms as revealed in the 1852 census shows East Gwillimbury to be one of the most productive regions in the province, with larger farms and greater output per acre. R.M. McInnis, 'Perspectives on Ontario Agriculture, 1815-1930,' Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol. 8 (Gananoque, Ont.: Langdale Press 1992), 64
7. Janette Diceman, in turn, has shown that the Children of Peace were above average in the production of all crops within the township. 'The Occupational, Agricultural and Demographic Circumstances of the Children of Peace in East Gwillimbury Township, 1851 to 1889' (MA thesis, University of Western Ontario 1984)
8. Albert Schrauwers, Awaiting the Millennium: The Children of Peace and the Village of Hope, 1812-1889 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993)
9. See 'A Plea for the Poor' in Phillips P. Moulton, ed., The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman (Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press 1971), 241
10. This discussion of moral economies as an economic system is derived from the anthropological literature best exemplified by James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press 1976)
11. For more recent work, see the reviews of the literature presented in E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press 1993), 259-351
12. and Roger Wells, 'E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common and Moral Economy,' Journal of Peasant Studies 21, 2 (1994): 263-307
13. See Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748-1783 (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press 1984)
14. Wells, 'E.P. Thompson,' 297
15. Allan Kulikoff,'The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,' William and Mary Quarterly 46 (1989): 141
16. The term yeoman should be seen within the broader theoretical framework of peasant studies as developed in anthropological literature. Canadian historians have shown some reluctance to accept the term in reference to North American farmers (see, for example, William Westfall, review of Awaiting the Millennium by A. Schrauwers, in American Historical Review 99, 2 (1994): 1003), thereby homogenizing a historically differentiated group of cultivators. Within this literature, peasants are not characterized by the larger feudal society of which they are a part, but by their direct production and consumption of agricultural products. A peasant in this sense 'does not operate an enterprise in the economic sense; he runs a household, not a business concern.'
17. Eric Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1966), 8. The implicit comparison is thus between peasant agriculture and simple commodity production
18. See Gavin Smith, 'Reflections on the Social Relations of Simple Commodity Production,' Journal of Peasant Studies 13, 1 (1985): 99-108
19. Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1970), 232
20. David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1981), 42
21. See Schrauwers, Awaiting the Millennium, chaps. 5 and 6, for a detailed description of these disputes, their causes, and their resolution
22. Jonathan Parry, 'The Gift, the Indian Gift and the "Indian Gift,"' Man, new series 21 (1986): 453-73
23. For a review of the pertinent literature, see Kulikoff, 'Transition to Capitalism'
24. Christopher Clark, 'Economics and Culture: Opening Up the Rural History of the Early American Northeast,' American Quarterly 43, 2 (1991): 279-301
25. and Charles Post, 'The Agrarian Origins of US Capitalism: The Transformation of the Northern Countryside before the Civil War,' Journal of Peasant Studies 22, 3 (1995): 389-445
26. McCalla, Planting the Province, 8
27. Post, 'Agrarian Origins,' 403
28. Kulikoff, 'Transition to Capitalism,' 127
29. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985)
30. Clark, 'Economics and Culture,' 292
31. Thompson, Customs in Common
32. for his reading of Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press 1985)
33. Winifred B. Rothenberg, 'The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750-1855,' Journal of Economic History 41 (1981): 283-314
34. and 'The Emergence of Farm Labor Markets and the Transformation of the Rural Economy,' Journal of Economic History 48 (1988): 537-66
35. Andrew H. Baker and Holly Izard Paterson, "Farmers"' Adaptations to Markets in Early Nineteenth Century Massachusetts,' in Peter Benes, ed., The Farm, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife 1986 (Boston: Annual Proceedings 1988), 95-108
36. Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 230-52
37. Compare Matthew Cooper, 'Relations of Modes of Production in Nineteenth Century America: The Shakers and Oneida,' Ethnology 26, 1 (1987): 1-16
38. George Henry Hume, Canada as It Is (New York: Stodart 1832), 124-5
39. Hume, Canada as It Is, 122
40. See also Shirreff, Tour through North America, 108
41. James Henretta, 'Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,' William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 35 (1978): 21, refers to the same process as the 'linear family.'
42. Kathleen Neils Conzen, 'Peasant Pioneers: Generational Succession among German Farmers in Frontier Minnesota,' in Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1985), 265
43. Matthew Cooper, 'From Egalitarianism to Inequality,' Ethnology 25, 1 (1986): 40
44. Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815-60 (Cambridge: Polity Press 1987)
45. Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815-60 Ibid. xviii
46. David Willson, Impressions of the Mind (Toronto: J.H. Lawrence 1835), 288
47. See Russell C. Smandych, Upper Canadian Considerations about Rejecting the English Poor Law, 1817-1837: A Comparative Study of the Reception of Law, Canadian Legal History Project (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba 1991), for an explanation of this abdication of responsibility. Smandych notes that the Constitution Act of 1791 was to provide Upper Canada with 'the very image and transcript of the British constitution,' but that it specifically excluded the English Poor Laws
48. The building is first mentioned as the House of Affliction in the records of the 'Yearly Meeting of Committees' of the Children of Peace, formed in 1832 (OA, 733, Series A, vol. 2). It was already in use by that time. It is also mentioned in the probated will of Amos Hughes (York Region Registry Office, Instrument No. EG 10998, 5 Aug. 1834), on whose property the house lay. He refers to it as the house currently occupied by sect-member Joseph Terry, 'for the sole benefit of the poor belonging amongst the Children of Peace.'
49. See Smandych, Upper Canadian Considerations
50. See Rainer Baehre, 'Paupers and Poor Relief in Upper Canada' Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers (1981): 57-80
51. Judith Fingard, 'The Winter's Tale: The Seasonal Contours of Pre-Industrial Poverty in British North America, 1815-1860,' Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, (1974): 65-94
52. Allan Irving, '"The Master Principle of Administering Relief": Jeremy Bentham, Sir Francis Bond Head and the Establishment of the Principle of Less Eligibility in Upper Canada,' Canadian Review of Social Policy, no. 23 (1989): 13-18
53. Smandych, Upper Canadian Considerations, and 'Rethinking "The Master Principle of Administering Relief" in Upper Canada: A Response to Allan Irving,' Canadian Review of Social Policy, no. 27 (1991): 81-6
54. Smandych, 'Rethinking,' 81
55. D. Wilkie, Sketches of a Summer Trip to New York and the Canadas (Edinburgh: J. Anderson Jr and A. Hill 1837), 203
56. Matthew Cooper, 'Living Together: How Communal Were the Children of Peace?' Ontario History 79, 1 (1987): 13
57. Edward Deming Andrews, The People Called Shakers (New York: Dover Publications 1963), 49
58. Herbert A. Wisbey, Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1964), 12
59. Peter Toews, cited in Royden K. Loewen, Family, Church and Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and the New Worlds, 1850-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 54