David Lloyd: Colonial Lawmaker (review)

52Bulletin of Friends Historical Association "abysmal caution" took control, to last until 1914. In the world, this meant the bourgeois life, acquisitiveness, and the use of the Quaker community to further commercial interests. In the realm of the spirit it marked the growth of orthodoxyand evangelism,which the author equateswith authoritarianism and conservatism. He includes a very unflattering account of Stephen Grellet, whereas Elias Hicks is "the great Quaker commoner." Only about the time of the First World War did Friends again come to see that their contact widi God could only be authenticated by action in society. This meant, not the acceptance of violence, but vigorous attempts to change the status quo. The author's comments are fresh and provocative, but not always convincing . For instance, Fox, whom he interprets rather than describes, married Margaret Fell not as a woman but as a "mother image." Again, the Separation of 1827-1828 in America was "well-advised," for it preserved as Friends two irreconcilable parties that later did unite, whereas in England , without a separation, the Society almost disappeared. And, says the author, the adoption of the pastoral system in America was psychologically healthy for Quakerism because it brought into overt expression what had been troubling, suppressed tendencies. Both of these books, representing quite different emphases in Quakerism , are worth reading by students of Quaker history. The Quakers should not be used as a source book but it does have helpful, even though arguable, insights. Between God and History is a more serious book. It, again, is not Quaker history based upon primary sources. But it is a solid piece of theological writing, highly pertinent to any Friend's understanding of his own and his Society's function in the world. University of Pennsylvania LibraryLyman W. Riley David Lloyd: Colonial Lawmaker. By Roy N. Lokken. Seattle: The University of Washington Press. 1959. xiii, 305 pages. $5.00. David Lloyd (1656P-1731), Quaker lawyer, politician, legislator, and Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, is a neglected and misunderstood figure in a neglected and little-understood period of American colonial history. Hitherto, the fullest and most useful account of his career, apart from Burton Alva Konkle's unpublished biography, now deposited at the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, has been Isaac Sharpless 's brief sketch in his Political Leaders of Provincial Pennsylvania (1919), which admittedly raises more questions than it can answer. The neglect and misunderstanding are easily explained. Few personal documents have survived, and most contemporary references are darkly colored by the animus of Lloyd's political enemies, especially James Logan. The facts of his career must be quarried out of the legislative and legal records of early Pennsylvania, and all too few historians have been tempted to venture into that particular quarry. Instead, they have been satisfied to accept Lloyd at his opponents' valuation as an unscrupulous and crafty demagogue or, what is even less justifiable, to see him through the spec- Book Reviews53 tacles of their own preconceptions as a "democrat," a precursor of Jeffersonian liberalism. It is the chief virtue of Roy Lokken's book that, putting aside preconceived ideas, he has ventured into the unexplored and forbidding regions of early Pennsylvania politics in search of the real David Lloyd. The image that emerges is in some respects still blurred and indistinct. The writing lacks literary distinction. The tone of the book is heavily legal and technical, though that may have been inevitable, given the nature and limitations of the sources. Due notice is taken of Lloyd's role in Quaker affairs—he was apparently a solider Friend than Logan—and his activities as a landholder and speculator—he was "one of the wealthiest landowners in Pennsylvania," in fact, "a landed aristocrat" (p. 188)—but there is little effort to explore the implications of these facts. Nevertheless —and this is a genuine contribution—we now have a reliable connected narrative of Lloyd's career as the resourceful organizer and leader of the anti-Proprietary forces in the Pennsylvania Assembly and a skillful lawyer who successfully adapted English common law to colonial jurisprudence. There is no hero-image here, no disposition to exonerate Lloyd from Logan's charges that he...