Response to J.William Frost’s Review of Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson

I appreciate that the editors of Quaker History have allowed me a forum to respond to J. William Frost's review of my book, Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson, in the Fall 2009 issue. It is gratifying that Professor Frost gave such a thorough and largely faithful account of my overall argument. The criticisms he provides, however, are inaccurate, and, even if true, it is unclear how they affect the substance of my broader thesis.

In order to address the disparate ways in which Frost finds my evidence faulty, it is necessary to place his points into some sort of systematic categorization. The categories seem to be, roughly, historiography, historical influence, and religion and politics. Although each point in the review could easily be refuted with a citation from my work—something Frost neglected to provide throughout—for the sake of space, I will take only a few as examples.

First, he misrepresents how I situate my argument in the historiography. Far from claiming historians have ignored Quakers and Pennsylvania, I have extensive footnotes detailing the work on them (esp. p. 4, notes 8-10). He is right that I say some scholars are insensitive to the relationship between religion and politics, but I certainly do not insult my colleagues by intimating that they are "obtuse. "My claim is merely that they have not explored Quaker constitutional theory and its theological underpinnings. Furthermore, some supporting points with which Frost disagrees are those made by respected scholars on whose work I am building—Alan Tully, Frederick Tolles, Richard Bauman, Herman Wellenreuther, James Hutson, Richard Beeman, and others. Long before I did, they demonstrated what Frost claims I can't prove—that there was a Quaker way of politics in Pennsylvania. On a related note, his assertion that the use of the term "peace testimony" in discussing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Quaker pacifism is anachronistic may well be correct, but it is standard among historians, Quaker and non-Quaker; Frost himself uses the term in more than one of his books.

Second, a primary subtext of Frost's critique seems to be that I am trying to prove that there was a monolithic Quakerism with an historical influence flowing from it, when in fact I am only examining the expression of theory through texts and actions. Apparently based on this assumption, he disputes my use of Quaker authors. He claims that Isaac Pennington's works are not relevant to my argument because he wrote during the Interregnum, before he was a Quaker. But that Friends considered them representative is clear, because in 1680 they published his collected writings with profuse praise (p. 45). He suggests I argue that William Penn's thinking was thoroughly representative of Quakers in general, when I demonstrate that in important ways it was not (pp. 71, 117, 133, 141). Also, although Frost implies that I am imputing the views of elite Quaker authors to all Friends, I never stated this to be my aim. Indeed, I acknowledge that Quaker thinking was not monolithic (p. 17), I explain that for the abstract theory I am using only a few leading thinkers (p. 67), and I give numerous examples where there were differences among Friends (pp. 32-34; chpt. 3; pp. 164, 181-84, 231-32, 228-32). But the fact that there was a significant degree of unity in Quaker thought and action is proven here through many instances of little-known Friends behaving in ways that correspond with what Penn and others wrote and did (pp. 90-90 and chpts. 1-2, passim). It is thus irrelevant, and I suspect unknowable, whether Friends in general read Penn's political writings. And it is clearly not the case, as Frost intimates, that Friends read only works that were directed to them. He also finds that I don't prove Quaker influence in eighteenth-century Britain (which I don't even address), New Jersey, or...