“All bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny” – so pronounced a small band of the first English Quakers in 1660, renouncing wars, fighting, and weapons and enunciating principles of peace called the “peace testimony.” The deceptively simple words of the peace testimony conceal the complexity of the task facing each Quaker as he worked out their precise meaning and the restraints and the actions they required in his own life. Quakers in early New England had to translate peace principles into practice during King Philip's War between settlers and Indians in 1675–76. In a time of terror, individual Quakers had to decide whether the peace testimony allowed service in militias, standing watch, seeking safety in garrison houses, and paying taxes. Their decisions covered a broad range and resulted in a pacifist continuum of interpretation and behavior. During this war, Quakers who dominated the government of Rhode Island were faced with reconciling the peace testimony with their duties as governors to protect their colony, to punish “evil‐doers,” and to reward “those who do good.” Their dilemma stimulated both imaginative legislation and corrosive compromises, illuminating the ambiguities of principles when applied to public policy. Before the war a Quaker government had enacted legislation, the Exemption of 1673, exempting conscientious objectors from all military duties including alternative civil service. But some Quakers chastised their Quaker rulers in a document called the Rhode Island Testimony for putting their faith in “carnal weapons” when they took warlike measures of offense and defense, such as transporting soldiers to battle. The struggle of early Quakers in England and America illuminates the intricate complications of pacifist belief, suggesting the kind of nuanced questions any pacifist must address.

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Each Quaker, during wartime, had the moral task to determine his own stance in relation to peace principles and to translate belief into action, although it is difficult to identify any particular Quaker from the haphazard records that remain. His decisions were made in a cultural context including the military requirements of his colony and the penalties for noncompliance, social pressures, and his awareness of his effect upon the wider community. Some Quakers were noncombatants as in Rhode Island and in Sandwich, Plymouth Colony. Other Quakers were combatants as in Rhode Island and in Plymouth, where Sandwich, Yarmouth, and Barnstable yield examples of Quaker combatants. Geographical clustering north of Boston suggests the influence of local leadership upon this decision: Hampton and Kittery supplied many Quaker combatants.