Notes

NOTES97 by William Southeby, who has, of course, long been recognized as the leading antislavery Friend of the day. Morgan's paper was not a detailed treatise on slavery, nor was it reënforced as was Southeby's with a copy of Fox's tract on slavery, "Gospel Family-Order. It was merely the plain testimony of a conscientious Friend. In it Morgan said that he had contemplated buying some slaves, but that it had been revealed to him that he "should not be Concerned with them." And he urged Friends to "Consider this thing before the Lord to know his will therein." Simple as it was, this sincere testimony doubtless had an important influence in bringing the Yearly Meeting to take its first official stand against slavery, by adopting a minute discouraging the importation of Negroes. I shall append a copy of the manuscript to my Northern Quakers and Slavery when it is ready for publication. NOTES In connection with the centennial of the first Norwegian immigration to America a few years ago, reference was made in the Bulletin (15:21-25; cf. 16:78; 18:33-37) to the part played by Friends. This part, as disclosed in all the recent researches, receives its proper background and interpretation in the new and complete retelling of the story, Norwegian Migration to America, 1825-1860, by Theodore C. Biegen (The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1931). The author is a trained historian, who after general study of the subject, spent a year in Norway studying records of the movement at its source, including "the rich treasures of manuscript materials in the possession of the Society of Friends" in Stavanger. The new volume seems likely to remain for some time the definitive record of a movement with which the little Norwegian Quaker group of such romantic early history had so close a connection. It was the persecution of the Quakers that was a main cause of the movement to emigrate. The migration conversely influenced greatly the group that started it, for it took away a full third of the members of the Society from Norway in the first half century of the existence of the meeting. In Jesse Macy: an Autobiography there is a most interesting and clear account of the. experience of a young man who, born a Friend in North Carolina of the old Nantucket Quaker stock, lived as a child among the Quaker pioneers of Indiana and Iowa and served as a Quaker noncombatant in the Civil War, participating in Sherman's famous march through Georgia. Jesse Macy (1842-1919) is known to 98 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION the educational world as an outstanding teacher and writer on government and as long-time professor of political science at Grinnell College; but this book presents him in a new and most interesting light. The earlier chapters, telling of pioneer life in Henry County, Indiana, and Poweshiek County, Iowa, of Quakerism as it was seen then at first hand, and of its adjustment in the mind of an intelligent lad to the discoveries of science, of the outward vicissitudes and inner difficulties of the same intelligent and conscientious mind drafted in the Tenth Iowa regiment , are hardly to be matched in the vivid autobiographies of midwestern Quakerism. The volume is edited by his daughter, Katharine Macy Noyes, and was published by Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois, in 1933. A Request for Cooperation The Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture is compiling a history of its activities since its founding in 1785. The Secretary will be glad to hear from any person having records of interest to the Society. George F. Curwen, Secretary, Villa iNova, Pa. BOOK REVIEWS Willem Sewel of Amsterdam, 1653-1720. The first Quaker Historian of Quakerism. By William I. Hull. Swarthmore College Monographs on Quaker History, 'Number one, 1933. 225 pp.1 Most of what has been achieved in the field of the history of Quakerism has been written by Quakers, very much to the advantage of scholarly completeness in the subject and of interpretative accuracy and sympathy . Considering all the various advantages of this, it still has to be stated that the Quaker historian usually has been...