“Liberation Is Coming Soon”

This chapter examines the eighteenth-century Quaker reform Joshua Evans. Evans was an important voice in Quaker antislavery, Indian rights advocacy, and American peace history. He was a critic of the developing capitalist economy. He perceived that people were increasingly implicated in the exploitation and oppression of enslaved people, the poor, Indians, even animals, and the land itself. For Evans, war was the fundamental symptom of humans' alienation from God and the most potent catalyst for the ills afflicting eighteenth-century society. He objected to an interconnected market system that perpetuated war: an economy increasingly dependent upon slavery and overreliant on tariffs and foreign trade, the oppression of Indians, the export of grain to import rum, the cultivation of tobacco, and the production and consumption of luxury goods.