Elias Hicks

• Elias Hicks
• Born: March 19, 1748
• Died: February 27, 1830

A reform leader in the Quaker Society of Friends, was born in Hempstead Township, Long Island, New York. He was fifth in descent from John Hicks, who came to live in America about 1638. His father, John Hicks, and his mother, Marsha (Smith) Hicks, became members of the Society of Friends immediately before the birth of their son.

Hicks received little formal education. As a boy, living on his father’s farm near the Atlantic shore, Hicks spent his time fishing and hunting. When he was eleven his mother died, and two years later he was placed to live with an older brother. At age seventeen he was apprenticed to a carpenter and joiner. As a youth Hicks studied to avoid temptation and continued his boyhood pursuits of fishing and hunting. Some of his leisure hours were occupied in reading the Scriptures. In 1771, at age twenty-two, he married Jemima Seaman of Jericho, New York. They had four sons and seven daughters. In the spring after their marriage, the Hickses were invited to operate the Seaman farm, since Jemima Hicks was the Seamans’ only child. Hicks managed the farm until his death at age eighty-one.

Elias Hicks experienced “early visitations of divine grace” during childhood that were to direct his whole life. At age twenty-seven he began to offer “religious visits,” at first on Long Island, then in Philadelphia, finally throughout the nation. He was an eloquently persuasive speaker whom Walt Whitman frequently heard and admired. His religious teaching of the sovereignty of “the Inner Light,” and the authority it gives to personal revelation, were to produce a schism among members of the Society of Friends. Extended to the black slave in America, Hicks’s beliefs led to the conviction that slavery was a monstrous sin, tearing apart the souls of Americans. He became a vigorous antislavery reformer.

Hicks’s religious opinions stemmed from his youthful consciousness of “the merciful interposition of divine love” in his life, for him a “clear manifestation of the Lord’s will.” This “one single conviction of the divine light in the secret of the heart” was “clear and self-evident” to him. Hicks believed that such a conviction was available to all. In his sermons, heard by immense audiences of Friends and nonmembers, he advanced this view with great persuasion and by his personal example of honest simplicity.

Hicks elaborated this belief and pointed to it not as a supplement to faith or an aid to prayer but as the paramount condition of both. As a consequence, he diminished the importance of the Bible as a means to salvation and reinterpreted the meaning of the story of Jesus Christ. The immediacy of each individual’s relation to divinity posited by this teaching is, he felt, a surer ministry for salvation than the Bible’s historical revelation; the story of Christ is an example of a man aware of God in himself. Hicks interpreted Christ as essentially human, though a perfect man, and a prophet of the highest order. His conviction of the divine light in the secret of the heart was complete, and he realized its will thoroughly. According to Hicks, the example could be imitated and repeated by all humankind. The revelation within each person of the presence of the divine—when embraced and followed—makes everyone a Christ, and therefore something of his own Savior. Each is his own spiritual guide, independent of the outward authorities represented in the Old and New Testaments’ records of previous personal revelations.

Hicks’s position has been described as “an extreme Quietism.” If Quietism is a form of religious mysticism consisting “in passive devotional contemplation, with extinction of the will and withdrawal from the things of the senses,” then the label is inaccurate, because it ignores Hicks’s career of public testimony, and his antislavery activism. It is more accurate to call Hicks’s beliefs a form of Christian antinomianism, a position that locates moral responsibility exclusively within the self.

Hicks’s recommendation of the primacy of the divine light of love in each individual’s secret heart was the main cause of the Separation of 1828, which divided the Society of Friends into two sects. They were the Hicksite, whose members followed Hicks, and the so-called Ortho-dox, who denied that private revelations were absolute. The Orthodox sect was interested in conserving the traditional structures of the Society for the sake of preserving spiritual unity among a diversity of coreligionists. But they also worried that Hicks’s sense of an inner light might not be felt by everyone, or that it might not be always “clear and self-evident.” They doubted that every individual’s conviction was free from error. Wanting to insure an external reference for moral questions, the Orthodox sect was determined to affirm the importance of the Bible and the doctrine of Christ’s divinity. Their theology sustained these tenets, holding them as reliable and necessary sources of spiritual guidance.

Though never so intense as Hicks made it, the belief in a universal inner light that gave a uniform morality to all who heeded it was traditional among the Society of Friends. Hicks’s emphasis on the presence of the inner light in all humankind, and his insistence that all be at liberty to follow it, enforced his antislavery activity. But like his spiritual doctrines, Hicks’s antislavery position was a development of earlier belief. The doctrine of a universal inner light postulated a universal right to liberty. Consequently, the institution of slavery, in which most Friends participated, had been an issue of debate before the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In 1774 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting adopted rules that threatened disownment for any Friends who bought slaves.

Hicks stressed that all people were free under the law of God and that no one had a moral right to enslave another person. He revived and expanded the idea that Friends could weaken slavery and free themselves from complicity in the sin it caused, and he advocated the boycott of the products of slave labor, such as sugar, cotton, and rice.

In his Observations on the Slavery of Africans and Their Descendants (1811, 1814, 1823), Hicks argued that no one could “plead any necessity for trading in the produce of the labor of slaves, to enrich and aggrandize themselves on the groans and misery of their fellow creatures.” No one ought “to indulge... in the luxuries raised by the labor of slaves.” This “free produce” thesis stimulated a practical effort to protest against slavery. Hicks’s Observations, compiled in three editions over twelve years for the special use of antislavery lecturers and debaters, were intended for public reading.

In February 1830 Elias Hicks calmly expired, in great peace and serenity, shortly before his eighty-second birthday. The Jericho Friends Meeting memorialized him as one who felt “the tenderest sympathy” for “the oppressed condition of the African race. ... We believe that many were convinced through his labors, of the cruelty and injustice of holding them in bondage. He bore for many years a faithful testimony against slavery, by carefully abstaining from the use of articles which he believed to be produced by the labor of slaves.” Before his death, New York City blacks honored Hicks by naming a fraternal society the New York African Hicks Association. Hicks’s contribution to the abolitionist movement was a great achievement. “No one can possibly estimate the extent and moral influence of his labors in this benevolent cause,” a eulogist declared.

Hicks’s career is an epitome of the reform impulse in America during the early decades of the nineteenth century: A private religious conviction becomes the foundation of a group’s change; that change then emerges as a basis for a large socioeconomic vision, one that calls American culture into question. Hicks’s emphasis on private, individual religious experience emboldened many Friends to trust themselves to know truths about right behavior. Self-trust encouraged each individual to find the same capacity in every other, including slaves held in bondage. The religious or theological sources of Hicks’s antislavery activism fitted the pattern of reformist trends in America. Social criticism is a common consequence of a new form of faith; Hicks’s democratic divinity helped him and his followers imagine social democracy for all American races and classes. Much of the anti-slavery energies of such later reformers as William Lloyd Garrison and Frances Wright derive from convictions similar to those described by the simple Quaker farmer Elias Hicks.

In the absence of a full-length biography, the most complete account is still that in the Dictionary of American Biography (1932). J. Bowden, The History of the Society of Friends in America (1950-54; reprinted 1973), is a good contextual account. R. Doherty, The Hicksite Separation (1967), is a sociological analysis of the 1828 schism. T. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (1950), is a solid account of the Friends’ antislavery attitudes.