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Book Reviews69 Lucretia Mott. By Otelia Cromwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1958. xiv, 241 pages. $5.75. Here at last is a scholarly biography of Lucretia Mott. Of those which have come before, Friends know best the biography of James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters, which was edited by their granddaughter Anna Davis Hallowell and published in 1884, only four years after Lucretia's death. This standard volume, full of family letters and family reminiscences , gave us the well-known portrait of the Nantucket and Philadelphia Quakeress and reformer whom an admirer of her own generation declared to be "the greatest American woman." In 1937 a popular biography took this characterization as its title, and in 1951 a fictionalized children's life of Lucretia Mott appeared, based largely, as was the 1937 volume, on the Hallowell material. This new, carefully documented life adds immeasurably to the detailed information previously available about Lucretia Mott's multitudinous activities. For Dr. Cromwell has examined every available public and private collection — Quaker, abolitionist, peace, women's rights, etc. — and culled from them a great variety of new material about Lucretia Mott's relations with the great reforms and reformers of the midnineteenth century. Documentary evidence for the earlier Nantucket, Boston, and Nine-Partners days remains quite scanty. But for the antislavery years and after, Miss Cromwell has found much to enrich if not to modify the picture we have had of Lucretia Mott. We learn, for instance, of her interest in and connection with many of the fringe movements of the great age of reform. Her thoroughgoing liberalism took her into such extraordinary groups as the "Anti-Sabbath Convention" of 1848, which her associates in Garrisonian abolitionism organized to combat the tendency toward legally imposed sabbath observance then advocated by conservative evangelical churchmen. After the Civil War she joined in organizing the Free Religious Association and journeyed to Boston to be the only woman speaker on a platform with such religious radicals as Emerson, Robert Dale Owen, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Blanchard, and Rabbi Isaac M. Wise. Her main interest, besides her family and her Quaker ministry and service, lay, of course, in freedom — freedom from slavery and from intemperance, freedom for women, and freedom from all self-constituted authorities which would fetter the human mind and spirit. Many of the battles which Lucretia Mott fought have been won, and their story seems less dramatic now than perhaps it once did. But the problem of segregation recalls the problem of slavery, peace seems as far away as it did a hundred years ago, and we feel less certain of Lucretia Mott's confident assurance that if people were only allowed to think and act freely, they would therefore act righteously. The question too as to how far and how fast a reform idea may be pushed without itself causing violence found an answer but not a solution in the radical abolitionist agitation, which seems to have had some responsibility for bringing on the Civil War. 70Bulletin of Friends Historical Association If it was true, as is said of Lucretia Mott and the John Brown affair (p. 169) that "any type of war was abhorrent to her, but she heartily accepted the principle that had led to the bloodshed," then our generation can admire her for her courage and for her devotion to what she felt to be right, but we must test by our own severest standards the means we choose to achieve good ends. Haverford College LibraryThomas E. Drake Make Free: The Story of the Underground Railroad. By William Breyfogle. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company. 1958. 287 pages. $4.50. This is a popular book, not a scholarly monograph. A highly readable account of the Underground Railroad and some of its "heroes," it also includes a discussion of the background of the Civil War. Those who are interested in accurate history must ask the question: is this book going to enlighten its readers or simply offer them a number of oversimplified answers to the very complicated questions with which it purports to deal? Like many accounts of the Underground Railroad, this one was written largely from abolition sources, and...

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