Tom Hamm and the Public Ministers: Joseph Hoag and the Uncomfortable Gift

Joseph Hoag (1762–1846) was a remarkable Quaker minister whose life was filled with faith, courage, and a deep sense of divine calling. Born in Dutchess County, New York, to devoted Quaker parents, he grew up during the turbulent years of the American Revolution. As a young man, he married Huldah Case, who shared his spiritual gifts, and together they raised a family deeply rooted in ministry. Joseph was recorded as a minister in his twenties and spent much of his life traveling to share the message of truth and peace, visiting meetings across New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and as far west as Ohio and Indiana.

Friends often described him as a prophetic figure with a rare gift for insight, courage in offering reproof, and an uncanny sense of foresight. His most famous vision, experienced in 1803, foretold both the Civil War and the end of slavery, events he saw as painful but necessary for the renewal of God’s people.

Though firm in his convictions (as an Orthodox Quaker) during the later divisions among Friends, he was remembered as a man of deep spiritual authority and compassion. His Journal, published after his death, continues to inspire readers with its honest and vivid account of a life lived in faithful service. When Tom Hamm and I first talked about Joseph, I felt the familiar tug I have had with several early Friends: admiration braided with unease. Hoag is not the warm companion of conscience I meet in John Woolman, nor the fierce and public eloquence of Lucretia Mott. He is not the generative movement builder of George Fox, and he does not carry quite the same story of embodied courage I associate with Priscilla Hunt Cadwallader’s long rides and plainspoken tenderness. Joseph’s center of gravity is different. He stands in the doorway with a lantern and says, “You cannot bring that inside.”

Tom describes him as “a stern moralist” and also “a model of the prophetic quietest minister of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” That pairing helps.

In Hoag I hear a ministry trained on the condition of the people, disciplined by a life of prayer, and unafraid to name what corrodes our life together. He could travel a great deal; Tom notes “he undertook the last of these journeys… when he was 80 years old,” but the heart of his traveling was the same as the heart of his stopping: tell the truth as given, uphold the wall that keeps the community sound, and trust God with the fallout.

The three edges of Hoag’s gift

Tom lays out Joseph Hoag’s ministry as three interwoven gifts: spiritual insight into people’s condition, a calling to reproof, and a disputed but persistent foresight. Read this way, Joseph is less a personality than a function in the Body, a necessary immune response when the body has tolerated too much.

Insight, for Joseph, is not intuition for its own sake; it is the costly inner attention that lets a minister see what a meeting would rather not see. Reproof is the public act that follows, sometimes in the room, sometimes at the door, sometimes in the street. And foresight is not parlor prediction; it is a spiritual reading of the times that invites repentance and steadiness.

Tom’s portrait keeps us honest about this mix. He sketches the famous 1803 vision, kept quiet for years and published on the eve of war, which foresaw church division and a national reckoning that would end slavery. Tom also keeps Joseph on the ground: the long circuits across yearly meetings, the moment in North Carolina confronting a slaveholder’s violence, the grief when elders excused drunkenness as a “trifling affair.” These are not museum stories. They are the daily weather of ministry: fatigue, obedience, backlash, and the occasional moment when someone hears the truth and changes course.

Where Hoag meets Fox, Cadwallader, Mott, and Woolman

I have been writing in this series about ministers whose gifts form a kind of living ecosystem. Fox breaks open a movement and teaches us to expect God now; Cadwallader shows the dignity of the road and the steadying power of companionship; Mott places the same Light squarely in the public square and refuses to leave the oppressed alone; Woolman lives a life that makes the testimony believable.

Hoag belongs here, not as balance, but as opposition in the best sense. If Fox throws open windows, Hoag checks the foundation. If Cadwallader gathers and encourages, Hoag tests and warns. If Mott looks outward to the republic and its sins, Hoag insists the meeting itself cannot be a hiding place for those same sins. If Woolman’s tenderness melts resistance, Hoag’s clarity burns it away. We need all of these. Movements that only open and never test collapse; movements that only test and never open grow small and brittle. The Body requires circulation and a sturdy spine.

The family and the field

Tom reminds us that Joseph’s ministry rose within a household that produced many ministers, “eight of whom would become public friends or recorded ministers,” and that “most of them first spoke in meeting when they were still children… which was very unusual at the time.”

I hear two things there. First, a home culture where ministry was not an exception but an atmosphere. Second, a meeting life that recognized gifts early and wrestled with what it meant to shepherd them. The public stories—visions, debates, separations—sit on top of the quieter work: raising children in a community where truth-telling is normal, keeping a farm in Vermont, getting back on a horse when your leading says go again.

The hard work of reproof

I do not romanticize reproof. I have received it (badly and well), needed it, rejected it, given it badly, and watched it save people I love. What Joseph Hoag models is a reproof that is not about victory but about repair.

When Tom recounts Joseph’s grief over lax discipline, leaders calling vice “trifling,” it is not a call for cruelty; it is a plea for integrity. The “wall about the church” is not a fence to keep out the unworthy; it is a trellis that lets a living vine climb toward light. Remove it, and the vine sprawls where it will, beautiful in places and strangled in others.

That helps me read Joseph Hoag alongside John Woolman. Woolman’s way often softens the soil so the word can be sown; Hoag’s way pulls stones from the field so the seed has a chance. Lucretia Mott teaches me to carry the testimony into the world’s courts; Hoag demands I carry it into committee rooms and kitchens at home. Pricilla Cadwallader’s travel expands the map of care; Hoag’s travel checks the beams in the house. George Fox declares that Christ has come to teach the people himself; Hoag asks whether we will bear the cost of being taught.

Reading the times

I am wary of those who are too confident about the future, but I am grateful for Friends who hear the shape of a season and help us live faithfully in it. Tom’s account of Joseph’s 1803 vision is sober and specific. It does not license us to go hunting for new monarchies under every bed; it does ask whether we have let pride, refinement, and an appetite for the world’s approval blunt our discipline and our tenderness.

I hear that query not as nostalgia for a vanished past, but as a reminder that Friends have already been given what they need: humility, accountability, worship that looks at us carefully before we judge our neighbor, and a willingness to suffer rather than make others suffer.

What I take for our time

From Joseph Hoag I take three working principles for public ministry now.

First, keep the meeting honest. Accountability is not a fad; it is the ordinary maintenance of a spiritual house that many people need and some people will test. If we want to host the world’s grief, we cannot afford a “trifling” attitude toward our own habits.

Second, let tenderness and clarity travel together. Sometimes Woolman must lead; sometimes Hoag must. The test is love. If reproof is not edged with love, it will not heal. If tenderness refuses to name harm, it will not heal either.

Third, read the weather, not the horoscope. When we speak about the times, let it be to call a people back into Light and neighbor, not to congratulate our side. Joseph’s neutrality in revolutionary fervor, as Tom recounts it, aimed at faithfulness, not cleverness.

Joseph Hoag will never be my easy companion. I am grateful for that. We need ministers who open doors and ministers who close them, ministers who stir the pot and ministers who skim it clean, ministers who hold a hand and ministers who steady the plumb line.

Tom’s portrait of Joseph gives me courage to endure the unglamorous parts of a calling: to say “no” when the room wants a “yes,” to keep watch when the party has started, to believe that repair is worth our discomfort.

If Friends are to be trustworthy in public, we must be accountable in private. Joseph Hoag makes that plain, plain enough to travel.

“Someone whom historians have described as a stern moralist, others as a model of the prophetic quietest minister of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”

This reflection from Tom helps me hold Joseph in focus: stern, yes; prophetic, certainly; and steadfast enough to keep at it into old age. May we be as faithful in the particular work given to us and with the people given to us therein.

Tom is Emeritus Professor of History and Quaker Scholar in Residence at Earlham College. He is the presenter in an ongoing series of short lectures for Friends Incubator on his personal favorite public ministers in Quaker history. Later this month he will share about Elias Hicks. Someone I know we have been waiting for as we make our way through the 19th century!

If you enjoyed this lecture and want to support the series and our new work to support public ministry in the Religious Society of Friends, please consider a gift: here.

Audio for this series edited by Martin Oliver (Baltimore Yearly Meeting and Northern Yearly Meeting).

EVENTS!!!!!

We have so much going on at the Friends Incubator. It's a bit of a surprise to us too. You might be aware that this month, in October, we are discerning further with applicants to our two-year fellowship program. Please hold us in the Light! What a gift this time is. We are looking forward to sharing all we are learning from this time as we process it together now.

Please also click on any of these posters to find out more about our online a la carte programming for all ministries! In November, we have a book talk about the lived testimonies with Jay Marshall, a conversation with Lynette Davis on the role of grief in ministry, and time with Deborah Shaw to consider the gift of eldership to ministry. 💡All are free to attend; donations are very welcome and help us keep the Lights on.

Join author Jay Marshall for a lively conversation about Jay’s new book Spice Up Your Life. Together, we'll explore how joy, simplicity, and curiosity can renew Quaker public ministry.

Grief is both a burden and a gift in ministry. Join Lynette Davis for an evening of story, reflection, and hope: on grief, love, and the healing power of lament.

Quaker elder Deborah Shaw explores how eldership grounds, supports, and deepens public ministry today. Join us for an evening of story, reflection, and encouragement.