"[4] The Birdwells' farm, Maple Grove Nursery, was handed down to them by pioneering forebears who came west nearly fifty years before the time period depicted at the outset of the novel.

The Friendly Persuasion has as its common theme linking the fourteen chapters (only two of which, "A Likely Exchange" and "First Day Finish" are otherwise connected) the effects of the Quaker religion on members of a family and their interaction with their neighbors.

[9] Three stories ("Shivaree Before Breakfast," "Lead Her Like a Pigeon,"and "Homer and the Lilies") were based on recollections of West's mother (Grace) from her own girlhood.

[10] Although not connected to her own family or Quakers, "The Pacing Goose" was based on an actual incident chronicled in a compendium of early Indiana court cases.

"[13] Mattie unfortunately picks that moment to play the instrument, but Jess saves his own and Eliza's reputation by an impassioned prayer of contrition that drowns out the music, earning the admiration of the committee.

She stops to pick flowers and encounters the oldest Bent son, Gardiner, home from the Normal School in nearby Vernon, where he is studying to become a teacher.

Although the family tries to dissuade him, they help him prepare, Eliza making him food, Mattie giving him her New Testament, and Labe bringing him their best horse at Jess's insistence that he be well-mounted.

He joins the Home Guard stationed at a bridge south of town, where after a prolonged wait, a solitary rebel scout demands their surrender, which the men refuse with a show of defiance.

Late that night a confrontation in the dark throws the Guard into confusion, and when Josh tries to find his horse, he is struck in the head and knocked unconscious.

Not seriously hurt, Josh returns home to his thankful family, satisfied that he had at least stood up to the challenge, and grateful to God that he is now wiser about war and bravado without actually having to fight.

Little Jess has a dream about finding buried treasure and begins digging in the cellar of the old log cabin, which was erected by Birdwell forebears 50 years before as the first house on the farm but burned down earlier in the summer.

The page has been signed by her great-uncle, Jordan Birdwell, a crippled old man who traveled to the spot by wagon from South Carolina with only his young daughter Mattie to care for him and hunt to keep them fed.

His Red Rover has humiliated both Jess and Eliza (albeit for different reasons) by racing—and losing—to Black Prince, the horse of the Bethel Church's minister, the Reverend Marcus Augustus Godley.

Eliza knows that the big red gelding is a temptation to race because of his looks, while Jess hopes to redeem himself with a horse of less appearance that nevertheless is fast.

He finds the answer in the widow Hudspeth's Lady, a mare so ugly "she looked like she had cow blood in her,"[15] but being half Morgan horse, will not ever allow herself to be passed.

Mrs. Hudspeth fears that a racy horse will scare away potential suitors for her four plain daughters and takes a liking to the beautiful but unspirited Red Rover.

That evening he recovers when Eliza gently forgives him, but chuckles quietly to himself when he thinks of the sermon that may have been preached that morning at the Bethel Church regarding eternal laws.

At suppertime one spring evening eccentric carpenter Old Lafe Millspaugh brings Eliza a gift of eggs—which he will not eat because he considers them nature's perfection—to ingratiate himself into an invitation to supper.

He fears a cyst on his neck is growing as a fatal cancer and tells Eliza that he intends to take a "last look" at the old meeting house in which his parents worshiped.

On the trip, however, he finds his customers likewise afflicted: Jonas Rice has a small child who is dying, old Eli Morningstar is questioning the tenets of his religion for the first time in his life, Dade Devlin has died young and his wife immediately remarried to his hired hand, and the last, Lydia Ann Rivers, is a bedridden young woman whose husband Abel has left her for another woman because she is wasting away with a fever.

He cooks for Lydia Ann and stays up all night giving the lonely woman someone to talk to, realizing in the meantime that the "growth" of his cyst was nothing more than his troubled imagination.

Eliza makes a comment about Steve, the youngest child, that almost implies that he was meant to replace late Sarah's position in the family.

[20] All of the Birdwell children have grown up and left the nest, but her Uncle Stephen returns from California to marry his pretty sweetheart Lidy Cinnamond.

Lidy, aware that she is isolated from the rest of her new family, spends hours by herself but on Christmas Eve secretly sends Elspeth to take a note to her former beau warning him to stay away now that she is a married woman.

The main, though unspoken theme of this short story is a poignant one: the erosion of Quaker values and lifestyle in the younger generation (or at least in Stephen, the favored but spoiled child).

Jess has reached eighty, still vigorous, and while fishing befriends a 12-year-old orphan boy, Homer Denham, taken in by the Perkinses, a childless couple who while good people, have no idea how to converse with a child.