The Trail of the Black Walnut (review)

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 was temperamentally vindictive and, upon occasion, unethical in forcing his favorite measures through the legislature. But Lokken demonstrates clearly what Logan admitted only grudgingly: that Lloyd was a master both of the law and of the art of politics. In his unrelenting struggle against the Proprietary prerogative he forged his Quaker following into an effective instrument of domestic political control and, by virtue of his legal knowledge, was a creative shaper of American institutions . We no longer have to say, as Isaac Sharpless said, forty years ago, that Lloyd has not "received the attention which his undoubtedly great public services demand." F. B. T. The Trail of the Black Walnut. By G. Elmore Reaman. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press. 1957. 256 pp. $5.00. The trail of the black walnut was the trail that led migrating Pennsylvanians to Ontario in the post-Revolutionary period. Both Quakers and Pennsylvania Dutch farmers were involved in this northward migration, and both left their impress upon Ontario and Canada. George Elmore Reaman , Dean of Men at Waterloo College, University of Western Ontario, is a descendant of families who made this trek a century and a half ago, and his book is a pioneer attempt at viewing the emigration from Pennsylvania as a unity. The migration which took Pennsylvanians northward to Canada was a fringe thrust of the great Westward Movement of early American history, the movement which Rufus Jones referred to, dealing with its Quaker phase, as the "Quaker hegira." The migration had economic, religious, and political motivation, although only part of the emigrants can be considered "United Empire Loyalists" in the strict sense of the term. 54Bulletin of Friends Historical Association Ontario represented something new and different, culturally speaking, in the British Empire of post-Revolutionary times. When British emigrants arrived in Ontario directly from Britain in the early nineteenth century, they found some areas already settled by groups and dominated by farming patterns which had been shaped by life in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. The settlement of whole counties of Ontario was, in fact, marked with this Pennsylvania influence. Reaman deals with these influences in Chapter IV, "Contributions to Canadian Agriculture," and Chapter V, "Contributions to Canadian Cultural Life." He is at his best in describing the Pennsylvania elements in Ontarian agriculture — the bank barn, the Conestoga horse, crop-rotation — which made Ontarian agriculture different from British agriculture. Chapter V is concerned with religion. Here Reaman deals with Quaker patterns, normative and aberrant (including the "Children of Peace," a picture of whose curious foursquare temple is included among the illustrations). He attributes the gradual decline of Ontarian Quakerism to intermarriage with non-Quakers and more especially to conversion to Methodism — a parallel case to what happened to many of the Friends settlements in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The principal value of Reaman's book is his study of the transplantation of eighteenth-century Pennsylvanian farming culture patterns to nineteenth -century Ontario. His descriptions of pioneer...