Quakers on the American Frontier. A History of the Westward Migrations, Settlements, and Developments of Friends on the American Continent (review)

120QUAKER HISTORY Crusadefor Freedom is readable and well researched, with many of its findings based on manuscript source material. It is stronger on facts than interpretation. Footnotes are placed at the back of the book with a bibliography added. It is a book more useful to the general reader than the specialized scholar and as such it fills a timely need. Wilmington CollegeLarry Gaea Quakers on tL· American Frontier. A History of tL· Westward Migrations, Settlements , and Developments of Friends on tL· American Continent. By Errol T. Elliott. Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press. [cl969] 434 pages. $6.50. Edwin Bronner, in his preface to this work, has shown its place in the literature and the way the author's involvement in Western Quakerism gives him the advantage of the insider's perspective. Bronner, embarked with others upon the first history of American Friends since 1894, is grateful for this contribution to understanding among different kinds of Friends and non-Friends. The foreword by Lorton Heusel, general secretary of Friends United Meeting, shows that it is an officially commissioned history with none of the censorship once exercised by committees of publication. The author is a lifelong pastor, preacher, and editor who accepts the obligation to "distinguish fact from truth" (p. 23) and let history be religion teaching by example. In the tone of the New England pastor's centennial sermon justifying the ways of God in his dealings with the flock, Elliott feels that the migrant elect were caught in "irresistible forces" (p. 63) whose course "was all but inevitable" (p. 259). Turner's frontier tone-poem explains American history for Errol Elliott, although there is a difficulty in reconciling Turner's environmental determinism with activist evangelism as source of Western difference. The outsider sees this difference as a return to a tradition older than Quakerism, rather than anything new, which the frontier thesis assumes. How Western evangelical Quaker characteristics came into being is explained in three ways. The first generation pioneer hardships of 1800-1860 were not conducive to "extended contemplation" (p. 24), so the ordering of pastoral-missionary work during the 1880's led to the present arrangements in Friends churches. Another theme common to migrations is that migrants outran their Guide: "Western Friends had not caught up with themselves in a spiritual sense. It required time to get beyond the sheer material circumstances and settle into a fellowship that makes a community out of a neighborhood ..." (p. 84). This is the theme which F. B. Tolles, in Meetinghouse and Countinghouse, applied to colonial Pennsylvania. A third explanation agrees with the interpretations of Rufus Jones and Elbert Russell: "The pastoral system came into existence primarily through the evangelical door" (p. 255, also p. 40). BOOK REVIEWS121 On other big questions the author is modestly suggestive, but feels that many volumes are needed to tell the whole story. Why was the migration predominantly Southern? From discomfort in a slave-supported society. To include the Carolinas as part of the Quaker West is a valuable insight, for in colonial times Quakers went west from the ChesapeakeDelaware and other "carrying" or "Eastern" provinces to the Carolinas. Quakers north of Virginia otherwise faced the sea and England, or moved into the northern New England, upstate New York, and Canadian backcountry. One way of putting it is that when the West, from Virginia to Georgia, became Southern, Quakers left it, except for a "heroic remnant" (p. 24). The Separation of 1827 was the result of "damaging influence . . . from the East" (p. 68)—a polarization over the relative authority of the Inner Light and the Bible. Errol Elliott says that George Fox did not consider the Scriptures secondary. Why did the Hicksites and Wilburites attract only splinters from Ohio to Iowa, and then dwindle or die? Their "museum-like isolation" (p. 75) was too fossilized to meet new conditions (p. 25), and they lacked the support of London Yearly Meeting. This work is the most comprehensive of a dozen new books about Western Friends. University of VermontT. D. Seymour Bassett Edward Hicks, Primitive Quaker. His Religion in Relation to His Art. By Eleanore Price Mather. Pendle Hill Pamphlet 170. March, 1970. 35 pp. 55jS. Once...