Philanthropy, Reform, and Reconstruction

The Civil War marked a turning point in Quakers’ broader political participation; according to Nicola Sleapwood Thomas Hamm, “before 1860, a number of Friends, both Hicksite and Orthodox, had reservations about ‘intercourse with the parties and policies of the world’” (Hamm 186). But while the Civil War marked a Quaker entrance into broader national politics, it did not come without some reticincy as Friends “were burdened not only by a traditional hesitancy about political activity but by the thorny question of party loyalty” (Benjamin 75). Many Quakers aligned themselves with the Republican party in the latter half of the nineteenth century as the party of reform.

The Cope and Evans families were similarly proponents of the Republican party, aligning themselves with Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley while writing about their disapproval of Andrew Jackson. Unlike many Quakers, though, they were locally active in reform efforts prior to the war, as they used their vast social and monetary capital to improve infrastructure and contribute to charitable causes. Alfred Cope, Francis Pim Cope, Thomas Pim Cope, Charles Evans, Robert Evans, and William Evans were members of the Prison Society, which was devoted to improving prison conditions. Charles Evans served as the resident physician of Friends Hospital, originally the Asylum for Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason, the first private psychiatric hospital in the United States. On a smaller and solely monetary level, Alfred Cope frequently donated to various soup societies and schools dedicated to Black education, as documented by his financial accounts, and many members of the Cope-Evans family contributed to collections on a more personal level as members of their community suffered personal tragedies. 

While the family usually involved themselves in Philadelphia affairs, they also donated to areas affected by natural disasters, domestically and abroad. An international approach was also documented in an 1851 letter written by Jonathan Pim Cope to Thomas Pim Cope on the condition of his donation of fifty pounds to the Belfast Ladies Relief Association:

I have to thank thee for again making me the medium of thy bounty to the Belfast “Ladies Relief Association for Connaught.” I sent the Fifty pounds on receipt to my friend Mary Murphy, and have the enclosed acknowledgment [sic] from her son. In a few days I hope to receive from her some particulars of the present condition of the Association.

In this way, then, the Cope-Evans family influenced the world around them. Serving on the boards of charitable causes allowed them to use their social status to both effect change and better their status, while monetary contributions are perhaps more representative of closely held personal values. 

While the Cope-Evans family likely would have been considered progressive in their day, and many of their charitable contributions and endeavors remain so, Quaker efforts occasionally resulted in more harm than good as they acted upon nineteenth-century conceptions of race. Quaker-run Indigenous boarding schools forcibly separated Native children from their families and enforced assimilation through violence. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition outlines this history and maintains a list of boarding schools in the United States. In 1864, Alfred Cope donated 75 dollars, or more than 1500 dollars in today’s money, to J. Scattergood toward the “Seneca O’phn Asylum” (Letters and papers of Alfred Cope). More research is needed to understand the full scope of the Cope-Evans family’s association with these schools.  

Quaker education had undergone a transformation from the eighteenth century to the Industrial Age. Benjamin describes the curriculum of early Quaker schools as a “guarded education” as it promoted simplicity in dress and the preservation of “the distinctive culture of Friends.”

The Westtown boarding school in Chester County, founded in 1799, offered such an education while placing an emphasis on subjects such as math, science, grammar, writing, and religious instruction. Students who attended Westtown were expected to respect Quaker traditions of simple dress and plain language. After attending Westtown, male members of the Cope family attended Haverford for their college education (Benjamin 26, 35-37).

When writing to his father Henry in October 1837, Francis Reeve Cope described the curriculum at Haverford. “The Council have introduced a new plan of studying Scripture on the 1st day. The whole school is divided into two classes who recite to D.B. Smith who then delivers a lecture on Ethics.”

The social life of students was another issue that became a source of debate among administrators at Haverford. In 1888, Swarthmore College adopted fraternities. In response Haverford College, stating that “fraternities destroyed the college’s community life and Quaker spirit,” limited the formation of student societies (Benjamin 45).

Prior to the Civil War, members of the Cope-Evans family were most involved in furthering the education of Black people in Philadelphia. As the war continued, however, they and other Orthodox Quakers slowly turned their attention toward the South. The Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief Association was begun by six Orthodox Friends who had traveled to the Southern states and reported on the poor health and living conditions of Black people in the South during the Civil War (Benjamin 128-129). Located on Walnut Street, members of the Freedmen’s Relief Association “appeal[ed] for food, and clothes, and teachers,” the latter proving to be the greatest need as the Association sought to provide freed people with an education. Members of the Cope and Evans families were actively involved in the Association as leaders, members, and teachers.

In March 1866, Francis Reeve Cope traveled southward to evaluate the schools in Virginia funded by the Association. He wrote to his wife Anna that 

We have here [in Lynchburg] a school of about 300 scholars in one of the old hospital buildings situated near the edge of the town. Some of the people of the town wish to take charge of it for us but as they want the management of it we want to be well assured that they will keep it up in the right way before we lose control.

Traveling from Lynchburg to Appomattox, he stopped at the school located across from the Appomattox Courthouse. A few days before his arrival, he learned that twenty men had threatened the teachers and told them to leave town on the next train. But 

the agent of the Freedmen Bureau…& two of the citizens stopped him at the station & brought him back, saying that the solid men [of] the county…wish the school maintained. How far they really wish this or how far they were influenced by the fear of having the military back I cannot say – but I think they were sincere.

This threat of violence was not unique. Schools across the South were burned; students and teachers alike were threatened, beaten, and even killed (McDaniel and Julye 162). Others were ostracized from the community as they fought for educational equality. While Francis’s role within the Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief Association is not made clear in his correspondence or the Association’s records, he appears to have been a key member not only as he visited schools but also as he handled legalities associated with the Association’s property in Washington, D.C.

His support of Black education also extended beyond the Pennsylvania Association. Francis Reeve Cope also contributed extensively to the Penn School on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Founded in 1862 as part of the Port Royal Experiment, the Penn School was the first freedmen’s school in the South (McDaniel and Julye 156). Though not a Quaker school, it received substantial financial support from Philadelphia-area Quakers. Cope and Laura M. Towne, the school’s principal, maintained a close network of correspondence as Towne requested money for teachers’ salaries and relayed hate crimes against Black residents (Penn School Papers). At least some of these financial contributions appear to have come from the Cope Brothers, suggesting that Francis’s involvement with the school was not only personal but also professional as the shipping company supported the people from whose labor they once profited. 

One year earlier, Francis’s cousin Clementine arrived in Baltimore after he helped to secure her a three-month residency as a teacher in combination with the Pennsylvania Association and the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People. In March 1865, she wrote to her sister Annette and gave an account of the school’s curriculum:

One of the first points is to get [them] disciplined. Mr Waterman the principal – drills his class just as you wld. soldiers makes them fold their arms put out one foot & finally stand up just as a general wld. his troops, & when school is dismissed they file out in quite an imposing manner. That is to teach them obedience I suppose, wh. is a great point gained. They also teach them a kind of gymnastic exercises by way of recreation. as they have no place to play & consequently no regular recess or almost none. Mine is the next to the smallest class. & only studys reading & spelling in words of 4 or 5 letters wh. is not very interesting. I have’nt discovered that there are any specially smart or Topsy like ones among them. We dont stop to talk or get acquainted much but just keep them doing something or other the whole time. Upon the whole I enjoy the effect of the work very much. & outside of that it is all very pleasant.

As with Quaker reform efforts in general, the beliefs of white teachers at schools for freed people do not always hold up to modern standards. Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye suggest that the “effectiveness of …freedmen’s schools was arguably limited by a campaign founded on purported evidence of a hierarchy of races that fed what historian Forrest Wood has called the ‘black scare,’” wherein Black people were believed to be less intelligent and more naturally lazy than white people (173). Clementine invokes these tropes as she keeps her students at a distance.

Thirty-five years later, Clementine traveled to South Carolina. In an excerpt from her letter dated December 16, 1900, Clementine wrote to her cousin from the Hobkirk Inn in Camden, South Carolina, regarding the condition of Black people in the town:

It is a land of ease & indolence, & no wonder the slave holders missed their faithful attendants, who seem even yet not to have lost the feeling that they were better cared for than they are now. They look dreadfully poor & degraded, living in miserable cabins without windows (some of them) herded together like animals. It [would] be very depressing if they were not themselves so cheerful.

Like Francis Reeve Cope over sixty years earlier, Clementine here relies on the familiar trope of enslavement and enslaved people: a paternalistic enslaver taking care of uncivilized but devoted enslaved people who benefited from their enslavement. Unlike Francis, though, her views did not significantly evolve. Though undoubtedly progressive in her day, Clementine was influenced by those around her; according to Thomas Hamm, “between 1870 and 1920 most American Friends came to embrace the racial attitudes of the larger American society” (qtd. in McDaniel and Julye 174). White teachers in schools for freed people did not always view their Black pupils as equally capable and deserving of respect as their white students.  Would Clementine have engaged more personally with her Baltimore students if they looked like her? Would she have stayed at the school longer? 

The end of Reconstruction saw a decline in Quaker contributions to schools in the South (McDaniel and Julye 171). Though Clementine quickly left her position in Baltimore, the Cope family’s contributions continued into the twentieth century as the Penn School became a family interest. The annual report for 1902-1903, for example, indicates that Eleanor T. Cope (1879-1973), the estate of Ruth Anna Cope (1834-1879), Francis Reeve Cope (1821-1909), and Elizabeth Stewardson Cope (1848-1937) gave a total of 250 dollars that year. The following annual report indicates that Clementine Cope bequeathed fifty thousand dollars to the school upon her death, while others indicate that Francis Reeve Cope, Jr., (1878-1962) and Thomas Pim Cope (1852-1944) served on the board of trustees for a number of years alongside then-president of Haverford College Isaac Sharpless (Penn School Papers). 

These postbellum monetary contributions call the Cope Brothers’ antebellum participation of the economy of enslavement back into conversation. Were these significant contributions an effort to pay reparations for past actions, or do they simply represent a change in views? How does Clementine Cope’s bequest hold tension with the racism of her correspondence?