Politics loomed over borough life, but the thunderclap that ushered in the great age of change locally was not Jackson’s election or the Barnard fiasco. It began in, of all places, the quiet Quaker meeting north of town. For a century, the Friends had held a solid, deliberate grip on West Chester. The Quakers led the town, and they moved slowly. What they shunned found little light or air in West Chester; their dominance was symbolized by the failure of other churches to take root in the community. Bayard Taylor, describing the Kennett region as it had been in 1796, could as well have been describing West Chester when he wrote:

The Quaker element . . . largely predominated in this part of the country; and even the many families who were not actually members of the sect were strongly colored with its peculiar characteristics. Though not generally using ‘the plain speech’ among themselves, they invariably did so towards Quakers, varied but little from the latter in dress and habits, and with very few exceptions, regularly attended their worship. In, fact, no other religious attendance was possible without a Sabbath journey too long for the well-used farm-horses.

The West Chester Quakers were rural and not overly educated, and they lacked religious enthusiasm. Their calm, measured brand of Christianity often bordered on deism. They eschewed the bigotry and arrogance of more zealous faiths, and provided West Chester with a bland, serene, benevolent oligarchy.

Then, in 1827, the Quakers of the Delaware Valley split apart in a doctrinal schism. Suddenly, the sect cracked in two and it seemed that all the pent-up energies and vices poured through the rift and into the streets of West Chester, transforming it in the space of a decade from a Quaker village to an American town.

The conflicts that broke into the open in November 1827 had been foreshadowed for several years. The sect had acknowledged both the power of scripture and of direct inspiration, and a clash was thus inevitable. When it came, it echoed the Keithian controversy of the early 1700s, which began when literal intellectual readings of the New Testament uncovered ideas at odds with the Society of Friends tenets that had been acquired through the inspirations of generations of Quakers. Keithian Quakers had been influenced by the spirit of Puritanism. In the 1820s, the schismatics were inspired by evangelism. Americans flocked to the altars of evangelical Protestant churches, lured by fire-and-brimstone revival preachers. Many Friends seemed to feel more kinship with this Bible-based evangelism than with traditional Quaker spiritual inspiration, although they called themselves the true Quakers and the others the strayed. The "Orthodox" Quakers tended toward reliance on the letter of scripture and a greater emphasis on the divinity, death, and resurrection of Christ. The Orthodox seem to have forced the crisis, by accusing non-Orthodox Friends of Unitarianism or other deviations, and banishing them from meetings where the Orthodox were the majority (principally in Philadelphia). Such doctrinal expulsions had been rare among the Quakers before this decade.

The rift quickly widened into a full schism. The more liberal Quakers acquired the name Hicksites, after one of their leaders. The Hicksites were the majority in Chester County, and the Orthodox Quakers withdrew from the regular meetings in the West Chester area, rather than casting out their brethren. At first, the two groups continued to share the meeting houses, using them at different times of the day. In about 1828, however, the Orthodox Friends in West Chester started meeting in the east end of the old Samuel Hoopes house on Church Street. The Orthodox set up a parallel religious structure, organizing a monthly meeting from their members in Birmingham and West Chester. Birmingham Monthly Meeting -- comprising the Quakers in West Chester and Birmingham -- had had 419 members in good standing before the schism. On January 7, 1830, the Hicksite remnant reported that thirty-eight men, sixty-three women, and fifty-seven minors (158 total) had withdrawn to the Orthodox meeting, while fifty-five men, sixty-eight women, and ninety-five minors (218 in all) had remained with the Hicksites. Another fourteen men, twelve women, and seventeen minors had apparently left the Society entirely during this time.

Eli K. Price was a son of Westtown Quakers who were prominent elders in Birmingham Friends Meeting. He contributed to Futhey & Cope’s 1881 history of the county, and when he looked back on the schism it still broke his heart. He was thirty years old when it erupted; he was more than eighty when he wrote the following remembrance: "To me, it seemed the rending of the fairest temple in history, the loss of reverence for sacred things and persons, yet both parties thought they were striving for sacred doctrines and religious rights. . . . The controversy was doctrinal, yet there was mixed in it a jealousy of the select bodies, whose members, by weight of influence, had long shaped the proceedings of the meetings." Those select bodies, such as the elders, ministers, and delegates to yearly meetings, included Price’s father. Price put his finger on the true tragedy of the schism in West Chester, the loss of status the Friends suffered as community leaders. "Friends had been a ballast in the social order," Price wrote. Then the schism erupted. "The influence of Friends in the whole community was impaired. They lost prestige and power; they appeared not quite so near perfection as was supposed; they were seen to be yet human. Partisan feeling became strong. Their strength had been in unity; it was wasted now in contest.”

Nor did time ease the rancor of the rift. Ten years after the schism, Eli Price’s father died leaving his mother, Rachel, a widow. "Philip Price was buried on monthly meeting day, Wed.," a prominent West Chester citizen wrote to an out-of-town friend. Both branches of the sect still used the Birmingham house for monthly meetings, so the funeral there of a man who had been active in the lives of many on both sides was an opportunity for a gesture towards reconciliation:

It was the desire of the family that after the body had been deposited in the grave a meeting should be held, and the Orthodox friends were spoken to on the subject. They agreed to it. As soon, therefore, as the grave was covered, the family repaired to the meetinghouse and took their seats. After waiting some time they discovered Orthodox friends driving away. They, it appears, having got together and concluded that it would not do for them to sit with the infidels, had started home. Poor Rachel, heart-stricken as she was with her loss, felt deeply this slight and could not but think that for his sake who had been an elder for 40 years among them they might have indulged her feelings so far without injury to themselves.

The Samuel Hoopes house where the Orthodox began meeting was owned by George Ashbridge, the wealthy Quaker farmer, whose family, the Fairlambs, had gone with the Orthodox. The sudden increase in traffic to the old farmhouse had the indirect effect of opening Church Street north from the Gay Street, where Dr. Ehrenzeller owned the corner property. "Dr. Ehrenzeller has paved along his garden, and he and the others who live in that street have planted cedars along the pavement down to the corner lot," a borough resident noted in a letter from 1828. "It is called Orthodox Lane. Looks very well.” In 1830, as Ashbridge developed his land along Church Street, the breakaway sect leased a lot on the northwest corner of Chestnut and Church streets and built a two-story brick building to use as a meetinghouse. The always thrifty Quakers designed this meetinghouse to be easily converted to a twin residence, should the congregation decide to move to other quarters. The group did so in 1844, when they erected a large meeting house with sheds and fences, at the northeast corner of Church and Chestnut. This was the building that was torn down in the late 1960s, amid much controversy, to make way for a borough parking lot. The Orthodox schoolhouse was built about 1850 across Church Street from the meeting. Although the Orthodox Meeting included many of the most prominent citizens of West Chester, such as Judge Darlington, its numbers did not grow. The Hicksite membership meanwhile, more than doubled between the time of the schism and the end of the century. And the town grew far more than both branches of the Society of Friends combined. Quakers no longer dominated West Chester.

"[S]ocial change was palatable in this country during the second quarter of the 19th century," historian Edward Pessen has written. "Fundamental institutions as well as the surface of life were being dramatically modified." As nationally, so locally. West Chester in 1850 was not just a bigger version of West Chester in 1825. The years between, especially the 1830s, had a tang, a taste, a collective character. Historians have named this zeitgeist for the president who ruled over much of it and seemed to embody it perfectly; it was the Age of Andrew Jackson. The Jacksonian character was ubiquitous in America -- in the big eastern cities and on the wild frontier, in the White House and on Gay Street. Jacksonian qualities -- optimism, individualism, and a faith in the common person’s ability to form his own destiny and achieve the "good life" -- were those common to Americans in all ages, but they were more strongly expressed in these years than in any generation before or since. It is difficult not to see this cock-sure, awkward, arrogant era as a sort of national adolescence, a drifting search for a mature identity. The United States in these years was a proud, busy place, but the dark side of the decade revealed itself in virulent politics and bigotry, and in violent or astonishingly selfish acts.

The evangelical revolution that followed the Quaker schism was one of the most dramatic events in the borough’s history, and it both shaped the emerging social order and became a model of it. A middle class was growing up and assuming leadership of the town, just as the same men and families were assuming first places in the new Protestant congregations. The new churches emphasized the individual’s choice for salvation, the power of one person to achieve heaven. This agreed well with America’s other emerging religion, capitalism. As the keen-eyed French traveler Alexis DeTocqueville observed in American ministers in 1831, "it is often difficult to be sure when listening to them whether the main object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the next world or prosperity in this."

Change literally transformed West Chester in the few years after the Quaker schism. The huge Everhart development began in 1829, the same year the political structure of the county -- along with that of the state and nation -- melted down and began to polarize America. The year after that, West Chester hitched its future to the national mania for railroads, a technology so new that people groped for images to describe just what it would do. Some likened it to a giant stagecoach line; others, to a great seaway that would make West Chester the equivalent of a port city (which it had always envied in its older namesake). Whatever image they chose, people seemed certain the railway would make their town wealthy and important. By the end of the 1830s West Chester had almost doubled its population in a decade; had an entirely new set of political parties; had three fire companies, instead of one, had a railroad connection to Philadelphia that cut travel time by more than half; and had doubled the number of its religious congregations. Materialism, status, the spirit of evangelism, and individualism were the defining characteristics of this new age.

After decades of slow growth and little capital, the economy suddenly opened wide. The speculation mania of the ’teens had given a hint of what Americans could do with money, but that attempt had been cut short by the crudeness of the banking system. By the 1830s, a slightly more refined and controlled paper money economy had evolved, and the economy lurched forward. Men rushed to invest and speculate and the potential for wealth beckoned anyone who believed he was smart enough to make it. The failures were enormous and tragic, but the possibilities seemed to unleash a passion in the national soul. Call it optimism, individualism, or just plain greed, no trait so well defined the age of Jackson. The pursuit of fortunes became an obsession. It was the immediate thought in the minds of many men who led the town. It churned in their heads during the day and kept them awake into the night. It is astonishing to modern minds how public this process was, but if we pare down modern West Chester to its 1835 dimensions, we can easily see it as a town too small for anything to be kept secret. A marriage proposal, a land transaction, a letter with an out-of-state postmark, would all be noted and gossiped about in the market or on the courthouse steps.

The era was mindful of civic virtues, a relic of the Enlightenment. Americans had not yet formed a Christian dichotomy of self-interest and common weal, the one sacrificed for the sake of the other. Instead, their investment in local property and in local institutions, in stores and shops that thrived on local trade, made them eager to see West Chester become a place where wealth would gather. They wanted a clean town with modern amenities, good schools, an active and intelligent social whirl, and upright churches. They were not trying to steal labor out of the place and pay back as little as possible in wages or taxes. They weren’t trying to dump mass-produced junk on the local market at a gross mark-up and take the profits elsewhere. Not that the capitalists of the 1840s wouldn’t have behaved so; they just never got the chance. In part because of this spirit, it was possible to use terms like "community values" in those years and actually mean something by them, in at least a limited way.

Above all else, it was a political age. DeTocqueville, traveling in the United States in 1831-2, wrote, "It is hard to explain the place filled by political concerns in the life of an American. To take a hand in the government of society and to talk about it is his most important business and, so to say, the only pleasure he knows." But in a reverse of the modern situation, state and local politics inflamed people’s emotions. DeTocqueville asked one of his interviewees, an important American politician, whether a presidential campaign excited "real political passions." "No," the politician replied. "It puts the interested parties into a grand commotion. It makes the newspapers make a lot of noise. But the mass of the people remain indifferent. The President has, in the last analysis, so little influence on their happiness." State politics, on the other hand, absorbed people because they were driven almost exclusively by the topic near to many a voter’s heart -- money. "Whether the issue was business, banking, credit, internal improvements, voting requirements, public welfare, or taxes," one historian has written, "state and local government bore greater and more direct responsibility for them than did national government."

The vote totals in the West Chester election district (which included the Goshens and East Bradford) show a domination by the conservative party, under whatever name it used, at both the beginning and the end of the Jacksonian era. Three-to-one Federalist majorities in the district from 1820 became two-to-one Whig majorities in 1840, yet the numbers belie a destruction and reformation of parties in the years between that was already well underway by the time of the 1828 election. After the dissolution of the Jackson coalition the old Federalists re-formed as the National Republicans, but they were overshadowed at first by the eruption of the bizarre Anti-Masonic Party, which dominated Chester County -- and many other places -- through the first half of the 1830s. Many men stayed to the right throughout the Jacksonian era, walking a straight line from Federal Republican, to National Republican, to Whig, as was the case for William H. Dillingham, Townsend Haines, Matthias Pennypacker, Ziba Pyle (all lawyers), Thomas Sweney the cabinetmaker, and Dr. Isaac Thomas. On the other hand, there were men who held to the Democratic Party and Jackson through enough changes to disillusion all but the hardiest, or most cynical, adherent. On this list were Oliver Alison, William Apple, Thomas S. Bell, Imlah Bennett, Joseph Hemphill Jr., Robert Mercer, Eber Worthington, and Dr. Wilmer Worthington. Fewer lawyers than the first set; more artisans, mechanics, and businessmen.

Still, many men who began this era on one side of the political fence ended it on the other. A handful of old Federalists grew enamored of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and ended up Democrats, among them David Carr, Daniel Buckwalter, and James Tillum. A far greater number of prominent men moved the other way, however. These conservative Democrats in town never took to Jackson, and they never forgave his wars on their favorites, whether it was Clay, Calhoun, or John Quincy Adams. After heading various anti-Jackson factions of the Democratic Party, they ended up Whigs. The town’s leading businessman, William Everhart, and its leading intellectual, Dr. William Darlington, fell into this class, in company with William Williamson, John B. Brinton, and Samuel C. Jefferis. Even some Jackson Democrats went over to the Whig side in reaction to the President’s policies and to the unpopularity of his hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren. This group included John Babb Sr., the tavernkeeper; Justice of the Peace George Meredith; and cabinetmaker Thomas Ogden.

If the voting numbers didn’t change much between 1820 and 1840, the complexion of the political scene certainly did. The shift of congressional districts from large, multi-representative units to smaller ones based on a single representative tended to sharpen the political battles. For Chester County, that change came in 1842. Even before that, however, the patrician class that had run government until the 1820s had started to recoil from the politics of the Jacksonian era. Though the scraps had been just as dirty before Jackson came on the scene and the tactics just as unethical, it had been seen as a gentleman’s sport. By the 1840s, race-baiting and direct appeals to violent emotions had entered the American political language. A more grasping and self-interested class of professional men was muscling into the game.

The spoils system was in full effect, with important offices handed over to party favorites who didn’t even make a pretense of deserving them. Simeon Siegfried had run the American Republican, West Chester’s Democratic Party newspaper, since 1824, and in 1829, Governor John Schulze, a Democrat, appointed Siegfried to the office of clerk of Chester County orphans’ court. The governor had made a purely political appointment, rewarding a man for party service by placing him at the head of an agency he had no qualification to run, an agency that oversaw the fortune (or misfortune) of hundreds of widows and orphans. No one objected; the new clerk would draw his salary and the work of the office would continue to be done by the administrators. But Schulze’s move did provoke an outcry in rival newspapers. The problem with Siegfried wasn’t that he was a local political hack; the problem was that he wasn’t enough of one. The plum, it was suggested, should have gone to a more true-bred son of West Chester; Siegfried was not seen to be sufficiently rooted in Chester County, since he had recently lived outside the state for a time. Siegfried, for his part, pointed out that he had “toiled during the last four years, as we think, pretty faithfully for the cause of” the Democrats, and had spent $600 to $800 “in improving the character and appearances of the paper of the party.” Thus he felt deserving of “an office worth four or five hundred dollars a year.”

Ironically, in light of this attitude, newspapers began to take the lead roles as public watchdogs. The editors took the measure of the town, and called attention to what needed fixing. It took them outside the black-and-white world of politics, though they took their two-dimensional ethics with them, and in calling attention to some unsafe situation or house of vice, always worked hard to lay the blame for it on men or policies of the opposing party. As the municipal power grew, encouraged by the newspapers, so too did the editors’ suspicion that it was being misused. The result is that borough matters, which occupied little space in the early years of the century, came to dominate local news columns by 1845. “When no firm and lasting ties any longer unite men, it is impossible to obtain the cooperation of any great number of them unless you can persuade every man whose help is required that he serves his private interests by voluntarily uniting his efforts to those of all the others,” deTocqueville wrote. “That cannot be done habitually and conveniently without the help of a newspaper. Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers. . . . I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would hardly be any common action at all.” Despite fiascoes like the artesian well and the mania for mulberry trees, the system worked.

Dr. Darlington, in this society, was a sort of relic; an exemplar of Enlightenment rationalism and classical virtues in a freewheeling, materialistic, evangelical season. Of course, Darlington could play Jacksonian politics, too, as he proved when he blocked William Everhart’s attempt to open a horse-drawn streetcar line in West Chester. But Isaac Barnard’s defeat in 1829 had also been Darlington’s, and by 1830 the doctor’s political fortunes were at an end. Jackson was triumphant, Barnard was dying, and Darlington’s entire wing of the Democratic Party was collapsing. James Buchanan, Darlington’s one-time ally, had been sent into exile as minister to Russia. In 1833 when Jackson elevated to the Secretary of the Treasury Darlington’s bitter enemy William J. Duane of Philadelphia—the man who had tried to disgrace him in the War of 1812—Darlington used the pretext to sever his ties with an administration he had never really supported. By the end of Jackson’ term in the White House, Darlington was associated with the Whigs, writing songs and toasts for Henry Clay, chief opponent of Jackson’s policies. The doctor remained the most formidable man in West Chester, but in a community suspicious of intellectual pretensions, merited or not, he was hardly revered. For one thing, he derived his income from salaried posts as corporate president of the railroad, bank, and similar institutions. The age regarded these as cushy jobs reserved for members of the moneyed class who had fallen on hard times. It must have been mortifying to Darlington when he was unceremoniously dumped from the board of directors of the railroad in 1844 by shareholders who thought they could make more money without him. His rival, Charles Miner, also seemed lost and adrift in this new political landscape. Wasted by disease, he soon gave up his newspaper and retired from West Chester. He would always be a Federalist, and he seemed to recognize little of the old party in the new ones that claimed to be its heirs. Except for his daughters who had married into West Chester, he asked for, and received, little news of the place after he left it.

All of these changes—the Quaker schism, the rise of evangelical Protestant churches, the collapse of the old political structure, the emergence of new fringe politics and a spirit of capitalist speculation that spurred large-scale real estate development—happened in less than a decade. The shift left contemporary observers with the sense that the town had somehow gone through an explosive phase, and that cast the stigma of stagnation over the preceding decades. This was an unfair reading of the 1820s in West Chester, but history works by hindsight, and by hindsight the period from 1800 to 1828 was somnambulant. It wasn’t mere physical change that made it seem so. With the rapidly evolving religious and political fabric of the town, the Enlightenment agrarian values that had characterized West Chester in the 1820s were also stigmatized as heathen and backwards by the succeeding decade. All three areas of change wove together. Politics and financial “speculation” (often carried out under the banner of “improvements”) took on a religious fervor, increasingly buttressed by evangelical dogma. Political bigotry and Christian capitalism climbed into the pulpits of many new churches, which had been built on lots in neighborhoods opened for development by the speculators. William Work, active in founding the West Chester Baptist Church, was the real estate agent who sold the Wollerton farm, and he was a leader in the local Anti-Masonic Party. Everhart, in addition to being the major land developer in West Chester history, was one of the most politically active men in town, and he was a devout Presbyterian who helped several new churches get underway.

The Quaker schism was a purely regional development, but it followed a national trend. In other places and other contexts, long-time civic leaders like the Prices found themselves confronted by a bubbling up of spirit from the common people, and from younger, more impetuous minds. Something that had taken root in the American mind years before on the frontier had rippled back east, and it ushered in an era that not only fragmented old religious denominations, but also spawned entire new ones, usually of an evangelical character. In its secular aspect, it began to overthrow the old Enlightenment ideas. The educated and the professional class was mistrusted; the new spirit believed in the power of the common man to do far more good than all the learned institutions in the land. What makes this decade of the 1830s so remarkable is that, for a time, the two forces hung in the balance; the revival preachers reaped saved souls and the Cabinet of Natural Sciences cataloged every living thing in Chester County. The evangelists erected new churches to the glory of Christ and Darlington and his friends brought in first-rate architects, expert in pagan philosophy and styles, to design them.