Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Spiritual Autobiography in Early America. By Daniel B. Shea, Jr. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1968, 280 pages. $7.50. This book is a valuable, able, and scholarly contribution to an understanding of the spiritual background of colonial America. Most historians deal with outward events but this author penetrates to the hidden sources of the ideals which ultimately emerged to guide the Founding Fathers of the Republic. In dealing with the culture and dominating conceptions in early America historians have given little space to the Quakers, partly, perhaps, because Quakerism is considered an extreme form of Puritanism and needs no separate treatment. But this book shows that Quakerism and Puritanism are different from each other. Without considering Quakerism we cannot explain the emergence of such conceptions as equality, the supreme dignity of every human individual, and a type of democracy which, in theory at least, recognizes no differences in race or creed. Here Quakers and Puritans are given almost equal attention. Five Quaker "Journals" are given careful and judicial treatment and a number of others are mentioned incidentally. Ten Puritan "spiritual autobiographies" are reviewed, some of them briefly. The Quaker journals are those of Churchman, Chalkley, Ferris, Elizabeth Ashbridge, and Woolman. Among the Puritans those given the most attention are by Increase and Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. Two of the Puritan spiritual autobiographies exist only in manuscript. Toward the end of the book considerable attention is given to Walt Whitman (Song of Myself), Thoreau (Waiden), Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams, Emerson, and Franklin, and some quite original, and perhaps even psychoanalytical, comments made on each, Whitman and Emerson being quite properly classified with the Quakers. Interesting similarities are pointed out in Woolman, Whitman, and Thoreau, in particular a common attempt at artlessness which turns out to be the best form of art. Each without efforts at retrospect seeks the principle of life and offers it to the reader. Also there is an effort to teach in a completely non-didactic form, simply by relating experience. Henry Adams and Emily Dickinson, descendants of the Puritans, exhibit their feeling of helplessness and defeat in the presence of an all-powerful God and universe. Churchman as well as all the others faces the difficult task of writing about the self in the context of a religion which teaches the value of self-effacement. Sea-captain Chalkley is busily engaged in trade and at the same time preoccupied as a traveling Quaker minister. He endeavors to reconcile religion and business but clearly religion has first place, for he preaches against slavery to his customers in the West Indies with resulting danger and violence. David Ferris pictures himself as seeking divine guidance in all things, even to the keeping of his store 116 Book Reviews117 and the selection of his wife. His mystical reaction to his early anti-mystical Presbyterianism is emphasized. Elizabeth Ashbridge gives a dramatic account of her relations with a surly and dissolute husband who forced her to dance with him at taverns even after she became a Quaker. Her account of him is objective and sympathetic, even though he represented the "world" from which she was escaping. The review of Woolman's Journal is excellent. Woolman in writing about himself was genuinely selfless and his own revisions of the first two manuscripts of his Journal indicate how consistently he tried to eliminate the self, which appears only as an object to which Truth may be related. Woolman attributes all the ills of the world, poverty, war, slavery, and the rest, to pride and selfishness. He does not do this by preaching sermons but by simply relating facts. The Quaker Journals do not deliberately endeavor to persuade the reader to conform to a moral pattern. Rather the writer describes "the dealings of the Lord with me," leaving the reader to make his own decisions. The Quakers were more group-minded than the Puritans because what they said did not come just from themselves but seemed to come from the group as a whole. In the Puritan autobiographies we enter a different world. The Quaker, when he accepts the Light as his guide, becomes relaxed and at peace with God...