Doan Outlaws

Doan Gang

Abraham Doan, woodcut, "One of the Doans shooting a British officer", from The Pennsylvania New Jersey Delaware Almanac 1849
Founded by	Moses Doan
Founding location	Plumstead, Bucks County, Pennsylvania (British Royal Colony), British North America, British Empire
Years active	1774-1783
Territory	Bucks County, Province of Pennsylvania (British Royal Colony), British North America, British Empire
Ethnicity	American
Membership (est.)	6
Criminal activities	horse theft, highway robbery, spying

The Doan Outlaws were a notorious gang of brothers from a Quaker family most renowned for being British spies during the American Revolution.

The Doans were Loyalists from a Quaker family of good standing. The "Doan boys" reached manhood at the time of the American Revolutionary War. Growing up in Plumstead, Pennsylvania, the Doans excelled athletically. The Doan gang's principal occupation was robbing Whig tax collectors and horse theft. The gang stole over 200 horses from their neighbors in Bucks County that they sold to the Red Coats in Philadelphia and Baltimore. The Friends Meeting House's cemetery in Plumsteadville is protected by a field stone wall that runs around its perimeter. Levi and Abraham Doan were buried just outside this wall because the pacifist Quakers refused to bury militants within their graveyard (a veteran of the Civil War is likewise buried outside the graveyard perimeter). The graves are adorned with their original native brownstone headstones which bear no inscriptions, following the Quaker practice at the time of their death, as well as newer headstones that identify them as outlaws.

Bucks County, an area sympathetic to the Doan Outlaws with a large loyalist population, grew out of William Penn's "holy experiment", and was guided more by Quaker "inner light" than by the traditional "rights of Englishmen". As a result of Penn's effort to create a "nation of nations," almost half of colonial Pennsylvania was non-English. In nearby Philadelphia, the elite Proper Philadelphians were rich, charming, tolerant, but had relinquished the role of governing the city. Philadelphia, by common agreement, was the largest, most cosmopolitan but also the most poorly governed city in the Colonies. Bucks County, when compared to Massachusetts in support for a war with England, was still "The Peaceable Kingdom". No doubt Pennsylvanians were outraged by the actions of the Crown, but they were more likely to express their discontent through resolutions than violent protests. Many Pennsylvanians remained skeptical about cutting ties with England right up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. To illustrate this, the fighting in "Penn's Woods" started seven years after the Boston Massacre. As for the non-English Pennsylvanian, King George III, even at his worst, was better than what they had known in their homeland. Fat Pennsylvania's legendary prosperity helped ease discord. Bucks County could boast rich farmland, a canal to the sheltered port of Philadelphia, large supplies of fresh water, timber, iron, fire clay, game, and their famous fieldstone for building. The common New Englander by contrast had to choose between hard-scrabble farming or dangerous fishing off rock-ribbed coasts.