Conflict of Conviction. A Reappraisal of Quaker Involvement in the American Revolution (review)

Books1 1 1 monthly, indulged, particular, independent, united, quarterly, and half-yearly meetings, and gives a rundown of the varied types of records kept by Quaker meetings. It is important to note that the two Philadelphia-area colleges are now also the official depositories for the records of Baltimore Yearly Meeting and Virginia Yearly Meeting. Finally, instruction is given on the policies involved in using the records for research at the two official archives. Hidden at the back of the book (they should perhaps more appropriately have been placed at the front) are the lists of the vast body of records kept officially by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (pp. 246-264). This includes a variety of minute books, committee records, including in the case of the Indian Committee some personal papers and journals of individual members of the committee, and records of Charleston Monthly Meeting, 1719-1786, identified in the index only as Charleston, South Carolina, with no explanation of why these particular records are in Philadelphia. The most complete prior listing of these records, still useful, can be found in the W.P.A. Inventory of Church Archives: Society of Friends in Pennsylvania, published in Philadelphia by the Friends Historical Association in 1941. This 397-page book covers the entire state, including the records of the monthly and quarterly meetings not only of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, but of those meetings that in 1941 belonged to Baltimore Yearly Meeting and Ohio Yearly Meeting. This Inventory contains much more detailed historical sketches of all meetings covered, with bibliographies of many meetings. However, it is more confusing to use since it appeared during the time there were still two rival yearly meetings, Orthodox and Hicksite, centered in Philadelphia, and the same is true for the Baltimore and Ohio yearly meetings. It is good at last to have in our hands an up-to-date finding list for the vast body—literally tons—of record books kept by the various types and levels of meetings that make up Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The list will be useful to scholars of various disciplines, who wish to use these detailed materials for historical, genealogical and sociological research on families, marriage and childrearing patterns, demography, migration history, discipline and morality, social concerns, and other aspects of Quaker life past and present. The Guide concludes with a Bibliography (pp. 265-268), a useful Glossary of Quaker terms and expressions (pp. 269-274), and a section entitled "Location of Original Records of Yearly and Monthly Meetings in the USA and Canada" (pp. 275-280), with a brief note on records available for Great Britain and Ireland (p. 280). University of PennsylvaniaDon Yoder Conflict of Conviction. A Reappraisal of Quaker Involvement in the American Revolution. By William C. Kashatus III. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1990. xiv, 168 pp. Notes, illustrations, and index. Kashatus focuses on the fighting Quakers, at one end of the spectrum of American Quaker behavior during the Revolution. First he argues that Thomas Paine and Nathanael Greene, except for giving up the traditional peace testimony, were to a large degree true to their Quaker upbringing, at least until 1781. Then he describes, with a map and two illustrations, Quaker involvement in the Valley Forge community during Washington's 1777-78 encampment. He shows the range 112Quaker History of attitudes toward the War and toward each group: descendants of the first Welsh Quaker settlers grown more worldly, rich forge owners, Scots-Irish and German non-Quakers, the encamped soldiers and their officers. He concludes with a fresh study of the Monthly Meeting of Free Quakers in Philadelphia. Self-established in 1781, disbanded in 1834, with a peak membership of eighty or ninety families, a discipline, a meeting house, and presumably minutes, not cited, it seems to have been as limited to protest against being expelled for abandoning the peace testimony as an even tinier group in southeastern Massachusetts. Underlying these four essays is a basic misunderstanding of "the Lamb's War," in which Christ (Agnus Dei) overcomes evil in human hearts and history, but not by human war. The author claims that Friends who either took arms or otherwise supported the revolutionary cause were true to the...