Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies (review)

114Bulletin of Friends Historical Association The book has a certain imbalance which Henry Cadbury notes in his Foreword. This is not the fault of the author but is inherent in the imbalance of her sources. These are persecution writings, "controversial and partisan" in nature. Henry Cadbury adds, "The conflicting parties had from our present perspective much in common with each other — more than with ourselves." He is referring to the fact that both sides regarded sickness, calamity, death as "judgments" marking the divine displeasure with the opposition. He concludes, "The present day has its own instances of fanaticism , intolerance, and mutual misunderstanding. The ancient story should call our attention to these contemporary parallels rather than arouse partisan animosity or an uneasy conscience directed only to a remoter past." One could wish that the sources shed more light on the issues raised in this study of the beginnings. To what extent, if any, were these early Friends extreme individualists, subversive of all government ? Was there any justification for the Puritan charge that the Quakers minimized, if they did not negate, the historic basis of the Christian faith ? Some modern historians with an inadequate grasp of the radical Quaker concept of Unity and the inward roads to its achievement tend to repeat in modern terms the ancient charges. Our author is aware of these issues, but the limitations of her approach do not permit a full discussion of them. It is unfortunate that the printing is not worthy of the matter printed. While there are few typographical errors, the type is often poorly spaced, and this reviewer's copy lacks pages 151, 152. Buck Hill Falls,Alexander C. Purdy Pennsylvania Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies. By Babette M. Levy. (Reprinted from the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society for April I960 [LXX, 69-348]). Worcester, Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society. I960. $2.50. An article of 280 pages with preface, table of contents (but no separate index), and bibliography deserves to be reviewed as a book. Such is Babette M. Levy's "Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies." We have anticipated diis publication for a dozen years, (cf. this Bulletin, XXXVIII, 110). So far as Quaker interest is concerned, we are not disappointed , though it carries the story down only to the end of the seventeenth century. Its central chapters are on Virginia, Bermuda, Maryland, the Carolinas, and the West Indies and Bahamas. Though Quakerism was later on the scene than some other forms of Puritanism, Miss Levy recognizes its claim to mat name and, except in the Bahamas, it forms everywhere one of the best-documented branches. That is not saying much, however, since her sources everywhere are necessarily very fragmentary and almost accidental. The Quaker historian will find her data on the mainland Southern colonies independent of and supplementary to James Bowden, Stephen Weeks, and Rufus Jones. But she brings together for the first time a large Book Reviews115 quantity of data on the early Quakers in the West Indies. By dealing with Friends as parallel to the other dissenting groups she gives them a useful environmental perspective. In her last chapter she compares Southern with New England Puritanism, especially in its radical social position, political or economic, and shows how Quakerism largely took over in these areas and then prepared the way for Methodism. Haverford, PennsylvaniaHenry J. Cadbury Two Early Political Associations: The Quakers and the Dissenting Deputies in the Age of Sir Robert Walpole. By N. C. Hunt. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1961. xvi, 231 pages. 30 s. It was the wary course that Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745) had to tread among the sectarian loyalties of the English voters, from 1721 to 1742, which first drew the author, a Fellow of Exeter College in Oxford, to the study of his Age. The material which he unearthed led him back, however, to study the political association that took shape among the Quakers late in the 1600's, and which was copied by the Dissenting Deputies — Baptist, Presbyterian, and Independent. He discovered that these associations were precedents for those of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notably the Anti-Corn Law League, which are better...