The Quaker Doctrine of Antislavery, and: The Keithian Controversy in Early Pennsylvania (review)

Book Reviews55 women in general than she provides, she succeeds in detailing difficulties that women had in attaining equal status within the Yearly Meeting. Milton Ream recounts what Philadelphia Friends did for Indians. Clearly, a great deal more could be done with this topic in relating Quaker activities to those of others, but in fairness one should note that Ream had only a chapter , not a book, to examine his topic. Elizabeth Gray Vining provides a balanced narrative of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and Japan. Mary Hoxie Jones' account of the Yearly Meeting and the American Friends Service Committee is a good introduction to the Committee's founding and recent problems some Friends have had with the Committee's alleged departure from Quaker principles. One unhappy gap in an otherwise informative chapter is the slight attention given the AFSC in the eras of the Second World and Korean wars. Overall the commemorative intent of this volume is well met. While the specialist might want more in many instances, the challenge is there for scholars to provide the basic and necessary monographic work for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Only one caveat remains to John Moore's introduction: if Friends have lost numbers in the past generation as he points out, they are not alone. Most major North American denominations have lost members, in some areas a more drastic loss than Friends have had. Numerical loss is of course especially serious for Friends for it is not the first time that it has happened to the Society. One can take comfort in our day that the decline did not come as a matter of commission as it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather because of the corrosive nature of society for many things spiritual. Colorado State UniversityArthur J. Worrall The Quaker Doctrine of Antislavery. Edited with an introduction by J. William Frost. Norwood, PA, Norwood Editions, 1980. 303 pp. $27.50. The Keithian Controversy in Early Pennsylvania. Edited by J. William Frost. Norwood, PA, Norwood Editions, 1980. xxvii, 378 pp. $27.50. Professor Frost, Director of the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, has assembled and interpreted the manuscripts and the mainly rare printed materials on two key issues in pre-revolutionary Pennsylvania: slavery and Quaker doctrine and discipline. All scholars and thesis writers in these now much discussed fields will be grateful for these materials and for Frost's careful and discriminating analyses. The antislavery volume is more carefully photoprinted than the other and is generally more attractive. In each volume, rare first editions of tracts have been reproduced although some of the Keithian works are illegible. The Anti-slavery introduction, though in a better known field, breaks newer ground, notable in headnotes to four main sections of documents. The Keithian introduction summarizes Frost's outstanding article in Quaker History, 64, #1 (Spring, 1975), and more detailed notes on each tract would have been an asset. Frost's introduction on Antislavery shows the intellectual influences of natural-law rationalism, "sensibility" sympathetic to sufferers, and nonQuaker Evangelicals' rededication upon Quaker thought. He adds special 56Quaker History insights on tensions within the conscientious between their own consciences and their belief that the Light should be evident to all Friends simultaneously . Slavery was also testing the "Peace Testimony" as prisoners of war were sold and violent threats were made to prevent slave revolts. Frost's documents show that Woolman's work to persuade owners to free slaves was only one step in the progression of Quaker concerns: first against importing, then against buying and selling slaves, and finally against owning them. Most Friends always assumed, however, that slaves, like indentured servants or apprentices, must work for masters until adulthood. George Fox's Gospel Family-Order for Barbadoes Friends (1676, perhaps the first of his sermons to survive verbatim) urged paternalism, brotherhood and manumission, and especially the education of slaves, as did William Edmundson's letters that same year. The Germantown Meeting's letter of 1688 was co-signed by one Updegraf who became a Keithian and a second whose descendant led a similar doctrinal dispute in Ohio in 1887. Many early letters show Quakers as slave-traders and owners, but...