A friend (or Friend, i.e. a Quaker) pointed me to this story. Yesterday I started a thread here about how far I'd go for my beliefs: suffragettes endured forcefeeding, but could I even cope with much less severe punishments? The Religious Society of Friends knows a thing or two about suffering for one's truth, and gradually getting society to change. Official Quaker version below, but first, my interpretation:
Just after the Civil War, when the country was trying to heal from great division, a young man from a good family fell in among a radical group of people. They offered him a new way of looking at the world, and he found that their "testimonies" (beliefs) either chimed with what he had known all along, or convinced him to change his mind on certain matters. At any rate, he certainly changed his style of clothing and his use of pronouns, in line with what he understood was required of him by the testimony of equality. For example, instead of raising his hat in salutation to his elders and betters, as was expected of him, he kept it on, signalling a belief that all people are of the same worth; likewise, he spoke to everyone with the same plain language, instead of grammatically marking some as more worthy. His father, used to filial respect according to the norms of their time and place, got angry at this. He tried physical chastisement, and locking his son up in his bedroom without any way of talking to these new and dangerous friends, but the young man would not unbend.
Eventually the family split up and young Thomas lived on his own for a bit, visiting his friends in a nearby town who were often in prison for their beliefs. He was harassed by the authorities too, often arrested and sometimes jailed. Once, the lord-lieutenant sent officers on horseback to arrest him, which seems over the top, if not a misuse of public funds. Thomas continued to go every Sunday he was free to sit in collective worship with his Quaker friends/Friends. These meetings are mostly silent affairs (no singing, sometimes no words at all), but the authorities treated them as "riotous assemblies". He protested this until his death, just as he maintained the form of pronoun use that his group had decided was right.
There's an extract from his memoirs in Quaker Faith and Practice, a book central to the denomination. (Sort of like the Bible of Quakerism, only not really, oh dear let's not go there.) As a preamble it says:
Thomas Ellwood committed himself to being a Quaker when he declined to return ‘the vain salutations of the world’. He maintained the testimony against hat honour, and the testimony to plain language.
In his own words:
The sight of my hat upon my head made [my father] presently forget that I was that son of his, whom he had so lately lamented as lost; and his passion of grief turning into anger, he could not contain himself; but running upon me, with both his hands, first violently snatcht off my hat, and threw it away; then giving me some buffets on my head, he said, Sirrah, get you up to your chamber…
But as this hat-honour (as it was accounted) was grown to be a great idol, in those times more especially, so the Lord was pleased to engage his servants in a steady testimony against it, what suffering soever was brought upon them for it. And though some, who have been called into the Lord’s vineyard at latter hours, and since the heat of that day hath been much over, may be apt to account this testimony a small thing to suffer so much upon, as some have done, not only to beating, but to fines, and long and hard imprisonments; yet they who, in those times, were faithfully exercised in and under it, durst not despise the day of small things; as knowing that he who should do so, would not be thought worthy to be concerned in higher testimonies…
But whenever I had occasion to speak to my father, though I had no hat now to offend him, yet my language did as much; for I durst not say ‘You’ to him; but ‘Thou’, or ‘Thee’, as the occasion required, and then would he be sure to fall on me with his fists.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ellwood
Quaker Faith & Practice, chapter 19, verse 40