Book Reviews and Book Notes
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BOOK REVIEWS AND BOOK NOTES EDITED By NORMAN B. WILKINSON William Penn: Quaker Hero. By Hildegarde Dolson. (New York: Ranti wn House, 1961. Pp. 186. $1.95.) Most biographies of the great and good man who founded Pennsylvar 'a tend to leave him a remote and somewhat unreal figure, but this enjoyc. ce life of William Penu for young readers is remarkably successful in p -- senting him as a real and human person. The author has been thorough in her research within the limitations imposed on a work in the juvenile field, where a story must be told simply and directly, without discussion of controversial points. Although there is no documentation, the informed reader will occasionally catch a glimpse of the adroit use of such sources as the diaries of Samuel Pepys for details of Pe-n's youth, or the writinvs of Penn himself for descriptions of Pennsylvania in his day. The method, of course, is partly that of the novelist in imagining what Penn and others thought, but this is not uncommon in some biographical writing at the present time. There are a few minor errors, which it may be assumed will be cor- rected in a second edition. Thus, the manor house at Peunsbury was not completed during Penn's first visit to his colony, and he could not have thought of his wife Gulielma walking up to its "wide-columned porch." In- deed, it never did have a "columned porch." But it would be misleading to lay much stress on such errors. The essential point is that Miss Dolson has written an entertaining and swiftly-paced narrative of William Penn's life, which gives a convincing and realistic impression of Penn as a living man. The brief bibliography offers excellent suggestions for further read- ing, and the book is attractively illustrated by Leonard Everett Fisher. It is a good introduction to William Penn and his times. Pcnnsylvania Historical and Museumn Commission. DONALD H. KENT Williamn Shirley, King's Governor of Illassachusetts. By John A. Schutz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., 1961. Pp. 292. $6.00.) Professor Schutz has written the first complete biography of William Shirley, governor of Massachusetts from 1741 to 1756. Shirley was born into an aristocratic family and was educated at Pembroke College, Cam- bridge, and at the Inner Temple. He lost most of his inheritance through unwise financial speculation and was obliged to make his own way during most of his adult life. He decided to leave England in order to better his lot 342 BOOK REVIEWS AND BOOK NOTES 343 a an attorney and public official in Massachusetts. He succeeded in obtain- a letter of recommendation from the Duke of Newcastle, and he lost i time in presenting the letter to Jonathan Belcher, governor of Massa- c setts, after disembarking in Boston in the fall of 1731. sovernor Belcher, who was eager to please the duke, appointed Shirley 1,3 a post in the admiralty ccurt at Boston. Shirley soon left the bench, ii \xxever, to become advocate-general of the court. He used patronage and 1 -suasion to form alliances with the leading merchants and politicians of I- ston and London, and he exploited his influence with Newcastle to under- ine Beleler's London support. The governor was a tough warrior, but ' ,irley was such a shrewd and ruthless politician that he succeeded in c3wing Belcher from office in 1741. Moreover, Shirley's political maneuvers x*Sore so skillful that he succeeded in making himself the leading candidate rfj-governor while he was engaged in leading the opposition's assault upon IBelcher's administration. Shirley made haste to distribute the spoils of office among his friends, rlatives, and political allies as soon as he had received his appointment as governor. The means by which he had become governor and by which he maintained himself in office were probably not particularly reprehensible by the standards of eighteenth-century British politics. They were quite othiless, in any case, and they were as effective as they were ruthless. It must be said, however, that Shirley was something more than a spoils- mnan. He proved himself to be an able administrator and a patriotic defender of the British Empire against its enemies. He organized frontier defenses against the French and their Indian allies during King George's War, and lie aroused the people of the New England colonies by his urgent calls for an attack upon the fortified French naval base at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. The New Englanders, and especially the people of Massachusetts, raised a strong force of militia for the Louisbourg expedition. Shirley worked tire- lessly to raise the men, money, and supplies needed to insure success, and he obtained the support of a naval squadron commanded by Commodore Peter Warren (who agreed with some reluctance to sail northward from his regular station in the West Indies). The attack upon Louisbourg was then made in the spring of 1745, and the garrison of the beleaguered fort- ress was forced to surrender shortly after the middle of June. The fall of Louisbourg marked the apogee of Shirley's career. Unfor- tunately, Louisbourg was returned to France in 1748 as the price which Britain had to pay for evacuation of European territory which had been overrun by French armies. The return of Louisbourg was a severe setback to Shirley's hopes and plans, and it was followed in 1754 by another reverse xNhen the plan of intercolonial union drawn up by the delegates to the Albany Congress was rejected (or ignored) by the several colonies. Shirley was, as Professor Schutz has pointed out: "the only American governor to induce his legislature to consider the matter, and he was the only leader to press the idea upon the home government." Additional setbacks befell Shirley shortly after the Albany Congress. He 344 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY attempted to organize attacks upon the French strongholds at Crown Poa t and Fort Niagara in 1755 and 1756. The French held their ground, howev. -, and succeeded in inflicting a severe defeat upon Shirley's New Englande S at Oswego in the summer of 1756. Shirley was recalled soon afterward, a Thomas Pownall succeeded him as governor of Massachusetts. Shirley was appointed governor of the Bahama Islands in 1758. T2 Bahamas were but isolated outposts of empire, however, and Shirley's 2- pointment was scarcely more than a graceful way of giving him a pensi- l in his declining years. Professor Schutz has written a fine, scholarly book. It deserves hi praise, but the reviewer wonders if the author is justified in acceptirn- Shirley's estimate of the abilities of Governors James DeLancey (No-,, York) and Benning Wentworth (New Hampshire). Readers of PENNSY-L- VANIA HISTORY may be interested to learn, incidentally, that Shirley was on good terms with Governor Robert Hunter Morris of Pennsylvania. Lehigh University GEORGE W. KYTE Tire Amecrican Tory. By William H. Nelson. (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1961. Pp. 194. $4.80.) In a decade when conservatism is again a subject for sympathetic inquiry, Mr. Nelson moves with the tide in undertaking a reappraisal of that enigma of the Revolution, the American Tory. This work originated in 1958 under a variant title, "The Loyalist View of the American Revolution," as a Columbia University dissertation. That title neatly delineates its province, for it is a study of the thought and reactions of the Tory-Loyalists before and during the American Revolution. It deals with their actions only in so far as they reveal the thought which produced them. As an effort toward rectification the volume proceeds from the premise that "The Loyalists . suffered a most abject kind of political failure losing not only their argu- ment, their war, and their place in American society, but even their proper place in history." Recognizing that the alienation of the Tory, both as an individual and as a group, was a cumulative experience, the author evaluates perceptively the unenviable position of the Tory cause. He believes that this label disguises the extent to which the Tories were themselves critical of the status quo and divided over the solutions which ought to be attempted. The Tory oligarchs supported measures which could prevail only with British assist- ance. Such dependence reveals the inherent weakness of their cause. The conservative leaders failed to counter the intercolonial organization of the revolutionists, thus leaving divisions within the radical movement uni- exploited. A major liability was the Tory failure to "develop and proclaim an agreed alternative to the revolution." Finally, without even a bow to the J. Franklin Jameson position, Mr. Nelson concludes that the departure of the Loyalists did not produce social or narrowly political consequences but rather "philosophical consequences," in that their flight inhibited for the BOOK REVIEWS AND BOOK NOTES 345 fture a sympathetic American comprehension of European social and Dlitical philosophy. Promising or provocative though these judgments may be, the greater irtion of this work disappointingly adds little to our understanding of the evolution or of the Tory mind. The focus of attention is properly on the ory leaders, Thomas Hutchinson, Joseph Galloway, Jonathan Boucher, etc. -- indeed this reader began to wonder whether there were no unknown tories-but the interpretation of their thought is pedestrian. Other works, rich as Leonard W. Labaree's Conservatism in Early American. History which oddly enough is not cited), long ago established the fact that the *conservatives were alarmed by the implications of the Revolution. This olume might profitably have explored the problem of why some conserva- Lives became Tories and ultimately Loyalists, while others who were equally conservative, did not.