The Eye of Faith: A History of Ohio Yearly Meeting, Conservative (review)

68Quaker History resulted in over 680 slaves being sent to Haiti, and 490 to Liberia, the colony of the American Colonization Society. Five hundred and twenty-five went to the free states of the north and west. Other American yearly meetings as well as London helped with the costs which ran up into scores of thousands of dollars. It is no wonder that many Carolina Friends accompanied their freed slaves westward as Southerners reacted violently to the radical anti-slavery movement which sprang up in the North in the 183Os. Some individual Friends worked openly or secretly in the Underground Railroad. Others who stayed on in North Carolina retreated into quietism or became Baptists, Methodists or Presbyterians. Quakers had almost disappeared in North Carolina by the time of the Civil War but a post-war revival movement brought many new members into the Society until now North Carolina Yearly Meeting is one of the largest in the world. Professor Hilty, long on the faculty of Guilford College, has told this story well. It will not have to be done again. One could only wish that his editors had taken the trouble to number his chapters and included a list of his maps in the table of contents. New York CityThomas E. Drake The Eye ofFaith: A History ofOhio Yearly Meeting, Conservative. By William P. Taber, Jr. Barnesville, Ohio: Representative Meeting of Ohio Yearly Meeting, Religious Society of Friends, 1985. 279 pp. $12.00. William Taber has written an honest and thoughtful history of that branch of the Society of Friends which eventually became known as Ohio Yearly Meeting, Conservative. He does not address the issues raised by scholars about the Quaker separations, nor does he use sociological or statistical methods. Instead he has chosen to look at the soul of a religious group — told in its own terms. And he does this very well. Taber chronicles the movement of Quakers, especially from North Carolina, into western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, beginning in 1775. The flood of individuals, families, and occasionally whole meetings, was carefully channeled by the Quaker procedures of certificates of removal, and the establishment of worship groups, then preparative, monthly, and quarterly meetings, all under the protective wing of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Eventually it was possible to set off Ohio Yearly Meeting as an independent organization in 1813. The overseeing bodies took very seriously their responsibilities of nurturing the new groups through the vicissitudes of frontier conditions. Taber provides a fascinating view of an institutionalized structure without apparent hierarchy or bureaucracy. With great care diverse levels of this structure oversaw the establishment of well-organized Quaker groupings throughout the area. By the 1820s there were about 8,800 Quakers constituting a thriving "subculture" centered in Mt. Pleasant. This Quaker community was shattered in 1828 by the Hicksite-Orthodox separation. The details of the split are vividly recorded, including "one Hicksite...bitten in the shoulder by a venerable Friend." (p. 38) But Taber brushes over the causes in two sentences of brief theological description. Perhaps this brevity is an accurate, if unconscious, reflection that Ohio reacted to the events of 1827 in Philadelphia without understanding or caring about the complex social, political, and economic, as well as theological, causes which divided that Yearly Meeting. Book Reviews69 Taber describes with much greater detail the second separation, between Wilburites and Gurneyites, which took nearly thirty years of wrangling and dissension. This detail is helpful since scholars have written less on this schism. Taber describes it in narrative, biographical, and theological terms, using data derived from Quaker sources. It is how the Friends themselves viewed the division , not how a sociologist might try to analyze it. Perhaps the most valuable part of the book is its examination of the Wilburite culture which flowered from 1874 to 1917 and the distinctive ministry rising from it and nourishing it. The remaining chapters cover how Ohio Yearly Meeting slowly lost some of its isolation and began reaching out toward other Friends' groups and into the twentieth century world. Taber writes as both an historian and an insider. It is a combination which has potential pitfalls which he avoids as he writes with honesty and care...