King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700-1763 (review)

112Bulletin of Friends Historical Association about two "eminent Friends" in Britain, a Mrs. Miller and a Mrs. Drummond. In the first place, women in the Society of Friends are referred to by their first and last names, and secondly, the least that an author can do is to identify persons mentioned; but they are not properly identified, and no reference is given concerning them. Page after page consists of items lifted from the Mercury and set down without being placed in a proper context. The book is magnificently documented (there are ten footnotes for one sentence on page 85), but almost every footnote refers to the Mercury. The bibliography is without organization. All items are thrown together in one alphabetical list. Manuscript collections are printed in italics rather than in roman letters as is customary. The evidence pointing toward a lack of adequate background is apparent in the bibliography as well as the text. There is no Quaker history listed, aside from Friends' Miscellany, although the Friends were paramount in the colony at the time. Many things of interest are culled from the Mercury, such as the long-drawn-out fight between the newspaper and Andrew Hamilton, in which the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin's organ, defended the eminent lawyer. In the heat of the struggle, even Hamilton's defense of Peter Zenger in the famous libel trial in New York City was attacked in the Bradford publication. The chapter entitled "The Mercury as a Mirror of the Times" includes many interesting quotations and jottings concerning the contemporary scene. The author tends to emphasize the importance of Bradford to the detriment of Franklin, but that is undoubtedly natural when one has chosen a man as the subject of one's study. In conclusion, it should be added that, in the opinion of the reviewer, the author was faced with an almost impossible situation; namely, to take all the issues of a weekly newspaper for nearly twentyfive years, and make sense out of that chaotic mass. It would have been far wiser to have selected a particular topic or time-span in the Mercury, and then to have developed it in a fully rounded colonial setting. Temple UniversityEdwin B. Bronner King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700-1763. By Anthony F. C. Wallace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1949. xiii, 305 pages. $3.50. npEEDYUSCUNG, soi-disant "King of the Delawares," was a New Jersey-born Indian whose career was curiously interwoven with the lives of those eighteenth-century Quakers who formed the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Book Reviews113 Pacific Measures. This first biography is the product of a fruitful marriage between the two disciplines which have traditionally concerned themselves, albeit from differing viewpoints, with the American Indian— history and anthropology. It is a fine book, in which anthropological knowledge illuminates history and history in turn provides a framework for significant anthropological insights. One could wish that more historians and biographers were as thorough masters of a second field of knowledge as Wallace, an anthropologist by professional training, shows himself to be of history. Using the "culture and personality" approach of recent anthropologists , but couching his story in clear and vivid English (unlike some of his fellow scientists), he develops a thesis with respect to Teedyuscung which must command the attention of historians who ask the question why? as well as when? and what? His thesis, simply stated, is that Teedyuscung's personality and consequently his actions can be explained by the fact that the culture of his people was disintegrating before the ineluctable advance of the white man's civilization. As a result, he alternated between moods of hatred towards the white settler and admiration for him, and these moods found expression in acts of aggression on the one hand and efforts at emulation on the other. Thus he was flattered, and responded with ingratiating conduct, when the Friendly Association began to show solicitude for him, but he continued to take out his resentment by acts of violence or to cover it up by bouts of heavy drinking. Teedyuscung, posturing and orating floridly at the council fire in his gold-laced coat, is not an...