About Friends' Intelligencer

Friends' Intelligencer

Friends' Intelligencer was a Hicksite Quaker weekly newspaper published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1844 as Friends' Weekly Intelligencer, shortened its name to Friends' Intelligencer in 1853, and described itself as a religious and family journal. Edited by an association of Friends rather than by a single proprietor, it served the branch of the Religious Society of Friends associated with Elias Hicks after the great Quaker schism of the 1820s. For 111 years it carried religious essays, meeting news, poetry, reform writing and family intelligence to Quaker households, chiefly in the mid-Atlantic. It absorbed another Quaker journal in 1885 to become Friends Intelligencer and Journal, was reorganized under a subscribing association in 1920, and in 1955 merged with The Friend, the Orthodox Quaker publication in Philadelphia, to form Friends Journal — a union that mirrored the reconciliation of the Hicksite and Orthodox branches themselves.

Founding in 1844 After the Quaker Schism

The Intelligencer was a child of division. In the 1820s, American Friends split over the ministry of Elias Hicks, the Long Island traveling minister who emphasized direct experience of God and the Inward Light over reliance on scripture and adopted Protestant doctrines. His followers, called Hicksites, formed parallel yearly meetings in 1827–28, while those who did not follow him were called Orthodox. Each branch needed its own press. The Orthodox founded The Friend in Philadelphia in 1827. The Hicksite answer came in 1844 with Friends' Weekly Intelligencer, a weekly paper published in Philadelphia and edited by an association of Friends. From the beginning it belonged not to a commercial publisher but to the community it served, a pattern that shaped its entire history.

Name, Form and Publisher

The paper's bibliographic record is well documented in library catalogs. It ran as Friends' Weekly Intelligencer from 1844 to 1852, and the title shortened to Friends' Intelligencer beginning with volume 10, number 1, dated in Quaker style the 26th of Third Month, 1853. It was a weekly throughout. In its early decades it was printed in Philadelphia by William W. Moore, whose name appears as publisher on bound volumes of the 1860s; one surviving volume, the seventeenth, gathers fifty-two issues covering parts of 1860 and 1861 into more than eight hundred quarto pages. Its subtitle, a religious and family journal, announced its intended audience: not theologians alone, but Quaker households, for whom it mixed devotion, news and useful reading.

What the Paper Contained

The contents of the Intelligencer matched its subtitle. Surviving volumes show religious discourse and journals of Quaker lives alongside articles on the great questions before nineteenth-century Friends. The 1860–61 volume, for example, carried pieces on Africans recaptured from slavers at Key West, on the slave trade and slave statistics, on emigration, on the origin and introduction of railroads into America, and on cotton spinning, together with a journal of the life of the early Quaker John Gratton. That range — antislavery reporting, practical and scientific curiosity, biography and devotion — was characteristic. The paper gave Hicksite Friends a weekly mirror of their own concerns: peace, equality, education and social reform, pursued in the plain style their tradition prized, and it printed the letters and editorial exchanges through which a scattered religious community argued with itself.

The Intelligencer and the Founding of Swarthmore

One of the paper's most consequential public roles came in the early 1860s, when the founders of what became Swarthmore College spread their idea through the pages of the Friends Intelligencer and at Quaker meetings throughout the mid-Atlantic. By the summer of 1861 the proposed college was being debated in its columns. Some Friends doubted whether advanced learning was compatible with Quaker plainness; one correspondent asked whether it mattered if Friends produced no chemists, astronomers or poets, so long as they produced honest, useful men and women. The editor answered in print that the Society of Friends had room for chemists and astronomers as well as farmers and shopkeepers, and that it was the duty of Friends to cultivate every faculty given by a benevolent Creator. Swarthmore, founded by Hicksite Friends and chartered in 1864, grew out of that debate, and the Intelligencer's editorial columns preserve the argument as it happened.

Union With the Friends Journal in 1885

In May 1885 the Intelligencer absorbed another Quaker periodical, The Friends Journal, and the combined paper appeared under varying combined titles, most durably as Friends Intelligencer and Journal, until November 1901. The union was recorded in the paper's double numbering, which continued through 1905: each issue carried both the Intelligencer's volume count and the Journal's, two genealogies printed side by side on the masthead. Howard M. Jenkins became editor in 1885, and the five women who had been serving on the paper became associate editors — a change notable in the archival record because, with the union, the editors' names were published for the first time. Before that, the paper had been produced in deliberate anonymity by its association, whose members, several of them traveling ministers, gathered for a full day each week to read aloud the work submitted and communicate with contributors through notes printed in the body of the publication.

The Intelligencer Associates and the 1920 Reorganization

The paper's communal ownership took new legal shape in the twentieth century. In 1920 the Friends Intelligencer Association Ltd. was discontinued, and a group of subscribing associates took over publication under a trust agreement between the Associates, represented by Walter C. Longstreth, and the old association, represented by Charles F. Jenkins. The bylaws named the new group the Intelligencer Associates and invited subscribers to join by sending at least five dollars a year for five years. The association was run by managers and an executive committee, seven of whose members were nominated by their Yearly Meeting; in 1921 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting appointed William C. Biddle as its representative on that committee. The arrangement is a revealing piece of Quaker publishing economics: the paper survived not on advertising or a proprietor's capital, but on readers who formally associated themselves with its support. Its surviving records, covering 1885 to 1944, are preserved among the Friends records at Swarthmore's Friends Historical Library.

Merger With The Friend and the Birth of Friends Journal in 1955

The end of the Intelligencer was a beginning. In 1955, Friends' Intelligencer merged with The Friend, the Orthodox Quaker publication founded in Philadelphia in 1827, to form Friends Journal. The merger of the papers coincided with the reconciliation of the Hicksite and Orthodox branches of Friends in Philadelphia, whose yearly meetings reunited in the same year, healing the separation of 1827–28. The human continuity was direct: William Hubben, editor and manager of Friends Intelligencer, took the same position at the new publication, serving as Friends Journal's first editor-in-chief from 1955 to 1963, and the Intelligencer Associates became the Journal Associates. Friends Journal was at first published weekly, as the Intelligencer had been, then biweekly, and became a monthly in 1988. Published by Friends Publishing Corporation in Philadelphia, it continues today as a monthly Quaker magazine of narrative, reportage, poetry and news.

Why the Paper Matters to Researchers

Because the Intelligencer ran weekly for more than a century, its files are one of the fullest continuous records of liberal Quaker life in America. Genealogists use its family intelligence; historians of education use its Swarthmore debates; historians of reform use its antislavery and peace coverage. Complete volumes survive in research libraries and in digital form through the Internet Archive, where the cataloging itself tells the paper's story: established 1844, double numbering through 1905 from its union with the Friends Journal, and finally merged with The Friend to form Friends Journal. Haverford and Swarthmore, the two colleges closest to the paper's own community, hold the Quaker serials collections in which it sits beside its Orthodox rival and eventual partner.

Legacy

Friends' Intelligencer never sought to be a general newspaper, and its importance lies in the opposite quality: fidelity to one community across 111 years of change. It defended Hicksite identity after a painful schism, opened its columns to the argument that produced Swarthmore College, modeled a cooperative, association-owned form of religious publishing, sustained women in editorial roles from 1885, and finally gave up its separate existence as an act of reconciliation, merging with the Orthodox paper it had been founded to answer. Its successor, Friends Journal, explicitly traces its own beginning to the two foundings of 1827 and 1844. In that genealogy, the Intelligencer is not a footnote but one of two parents — the Hicksite half of a reunited Quaker press.

At a Glance

Friends' Intelligencer was founded in Philadelphia in 1844 as Friends' Weekly Intelligencer, took its shortened name in 1853, absorbed The Friends Journal in 1885 to appear as Friends Intelligencer and Journal until 1901, was published from 1920 by the Intelligencer Associates, and merged with The Friend in 1955 to form Friends Journal, which continues in Philadelphia today.