The Province of West Jersey, 1609-1702: A History of the Origins of an American Colony (review)

Book Reviews George Fox et les Quakers. By Henry van Etten. Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1956. 192 pages. $2.00. This little book is published in 10,000 copies as the fourth in a series called "Maîtres Spirituels," a series which includes Mohammed, St. Augustine, and John the Baptist, a happily varied company of spiritual leaders. In the direct style known to us through his history of French Quakerism and numerous other writings on Quaker topics, the author presents here a succinct life of George Fox and the history of the Quaker movement. One of the special merits of this book is to show Quakerism in the context of the spiritual history of the period and to give large extracts from George Fox's Journal as well as from English, American, French, and German Quaker writings ranging in time from the early beginnings of Quakerism to the 1952 Friends World Conference. The historical developments of the Yearly Meetings around the world and also phases of Friends relief work are sketched, a fact which makes this 190-page booklet astonishingly comprehensive and thus a microcosm of Quakerdom. An interesting chronology at the end of the book parallels important dates in Quaker history with events in France, bringing suddenly to one's full awareness, for instance, that Fox and Pascal were born only a year apart and that French Quakerism began shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution. A bibliography of early and recent works in French shows that Quakerism has received attention from such minds as Voltaire and Diderot and in our days from some recognized Protestant theologians. With its seventy or more pictures obtained from treasure houses on two continents this is certainly the most profusely illustrated of Quaker books. Because of its attractive format and simple style it should be accessible to the Anglo-Saxon Friend with even a minimum knowledge of French. Quaker colleges and schools will want to own this George Fox in French garb as well as all individual Friends who see Quakerism as a world movement. Pendle HillBlanche W. Shaffer. The Province of West Jersey, 1609-1702: A History of the Origins of an American Colony. By John E. Pomfret. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1956. xii, 298 pages. $5.00. The accident of a wide tidal river and the vagaries of royal grants and politics determined that there should be two Quaker "holy experiments " in the Delaware region rather than one. Here is the story of the 120 Book Reviews121 first one, West Jersey, first to be established and first to collapse. It is, as the title suggests, a study of West Jersey from the point of view of American history rather than Quaker history. But the Quakers so predominated among the proprietors and settlers of West Jersey that their principles, policies, and activities determined the early character of the province, and form the principal subject of this book. The first chapters provide a convenient summary of the Dutch and Swedish period before the English conquest of 1664, and the decade of the Berkeley and Carteret proprietorship. But the story really begins in 1674 with the sale by Sir John Berkeley of his half interest in the whole province to John Fenwick, with whom was associated Edward Byllynge, both Quakers. This is the period on which John Pomfret, long a member of the history faculty at Princeton, sometime President of the College of William and Mary, and now Director of the Huntington Library in California, has done his most original work. In chapters on Fenwick and the founding of Salem, on the Concessions and Agreements of 1676, on early Burlington, on the collapse of the Quaker commonwealth, the disintegration of the proprietary, and the surrender of the colony to the Crown, Dr. Pomfret elucidates clearly and as definitively as it probably can ever be done, the tangled story of Fenwick and Byllynge's difficulties, of the Quaker proprietors and settlers, of the taking over of Byllynge's interest first by the non-Quaker proprietor, Dr. Daniel Coxe, and then by profit-seeking London businessmen of The West New Jersey Society, and of the merging of the colony with East Jersey under royal authority...