BOOK REVIEWS Quakers and the Atlantic Culture. By FREDERICK B. TOLLES. (New York: The Macmillan Company, i960, xvi, 160 p. Index. $3.95.) The publication of occasional essays is a notoriously dangerous enter- prise, only successful, even where the author is well-established, if the collection has an inner unity which transforms miscellany into book. Dr. Tolles's success, and it is a brilliant success, is due not only to the fact that all the essays genuinely relate to Quakerism in Atlantic culture, but to the informing spirit which the author's mind and talent as a writer impart to the whole. Dr. Tolles is steeped, one might say marinated, in Quaker history and culture, both American and English; but, to change the metaphor, he wears his learning lightly and indeed were it not an un- Friendly adjective, elegantly. He has the gift, all too rare these days when reputations are rated by avoirdupois book weight, of economy of means. Pound for pound, you are likely to learn more about the Society of Friends and about broader issues from this book than from many others. It is a model of how to treat a limited theme in a way which opens up imaginative vistas, in this case into the entire panorama of Anglo-American Protestant- ism. Though largely concerned with origins in seventeenth-century "enthu- siasm" and consolidation in eighteenth-century quietism, it helps to restore one's bearings amid the confusions of the later twentieth century. Dr. Tolles is sure in his judgment when he is describing both the essential homogeneity of Anglo-American Quakerism and the diversity of the Quaker experience in the two countries. By describing the ubiquitous communities of Friends in Britain, the West Indies, and North America (as distinct from the Continent where the Quaker seed was less fertile) and the re- markable seventeenth-century organization which sent hundreds of travel- ing ministers voyaging to and fro across the hazardous Atlantic, he re- minds us that in these early days there was a genuine "Atlantic commu- nity" of Friends drawn together by that peculiar discipline of corporate worship which at the same time has set them, in a measure, apart from society and has kept them a single community across half the world. He reminds us, also, of the special ethical problems posed by Quaker doctrine in relation to the State, of the failure of the Society, even in Pennsylvania where it had a free hand, to solve the problem of political participation, and of the withdrawal of Friends in different degrees on both sides of the Atlantic into quietist attitudes from which they only emerged in the twentieth century. He illuminates the degree to which colonial Quakerism had achieved a settled maturity, doctrinally and socially, by mid-eighteenth 210 1961 BOOK REVIEWS 211 century by analyzing the sophisticated response of impervious Philadelphia Quakers to the enthusiasm of Whitefield in 1740. He isolates for us con- vincingly the Quaker mind, the special qualities of which derive from the synchronous development of Quakerism with Newtonian science and modern entrepreneurial capitalism. Experimental, pragmatic, concerned with fact, with the natural world, not with abstractions, ideas, dogmas, the developing Quaker mind, which has made so disproportionate a contribu- tion to natural science, is shown to be modern, avant garde, in relation to western culture as a whole. He has new and important things to say about Quakerism and capitalism. It is refreshing that at the present moment when historians are beginning to blow cold upon the Weberian thesis which links capitalism to the Protestant ethic, Professor Tolles should analyze for us so convincingly the precise ways in which the Quaker way of life at any rate encouraged business enterprise and capital accumulation. This was not because Quakers were denied other outlets for their energies, at least in the professions, so much as that Quaker discipline, always Puritan in its view of the world, emphasized not merely the simple, and the frugal, but the practical, the ordered, and the rational. In these and other ways, Dr. Tolles reveals himself to be much more than a religious or social historian. Within the limited compass of these essays he handles major historical themes with mastery. St. John's College, Cambridge FRANK THISTLETHWAITE The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Volumes 7-15. JULIAN P. BOYD, Editor. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953-1958. Illustrations. Each, $10.00.) The reader of Volumes 7 through 15 of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson finds in them if anything an expansion of the superb scholarship that distinguished the editing of the earlier volumes. The notes following the letters, while often long, are always compact and illuminating. The far- ranging, accurate learning needed to produce notes of this quality is staggering. It testifies to a day-in, day-out assiduity, along with imagina- tion, on the part of the editor and his small band of associates that is worthy of the ingenious labors of Jefferson himself. Volume 13 introduces an innovation. Instead of being included in a chronological table of contents, letters are henceforth placed in an alpha- betical list of writers and recipients. By this means, readers, knowing in a general way what subjects were discussed with given correspondents, may readily follow a particular theme throughout the volume. In addition, page numbers are supplied for a few special subjects, and for documents so important as to need a prefatory editorial note in large type. These two 212, BOOK REVIEWS April deceptively slight changes make each volume more convenient to read. If a foolish consistency be the hobgoblin of little minds, it is surely the mark of an enlightened editorial policy to dare to give up such consistency, even after work is well along, in favor of greatly helping a reader. The virtues that characterize the notes have also been devoted to the search for and the final choice of illustrations. As one example, Volume 10 shows Trumbull's miniatures of Jefferson painted for Maria Cosway and Angelica Schuyler Church. Whereas Mrs. Church's painting had been willed by a descendant of hers to the Metropolitan Museum, the location of Mrs. Cosway's remained unknown until 1952 when it was rediscovered by Miss Elizabeth Cometti at the Collegio di Maria SS. Bambina, at Lodi, Italy. Both portraits show Jefferson with a heavy-boned, fair-skinned, Celtic type of physique, and both lay claim on us for the possible answers they give to the one constant question that recurs throughout the immense diversity of these thousands of pages. We cannot help ourselves, we are bound to contrast and compare him with the men of our own time, as we keep asking—What manner of man was he? Volume 7 opens with Jefferson at Annapolis in the month of March, 1784, attending a Continental Congress that was enfeebled by the desultory representation of but nine of the thirteen states. To Washington he wrote on March 15 about the advantages of the Potomac River through which channel Nature "offers to pour into our lap the whole commerce of the Western world" (p. 26). He later appeared no more than politely interested in Madison's long consideration, dated August 20, of the navigation of the Mississippi and the opening of New Orleans as a free port. In this same spring of 1784, probably, Jefferson drew up his Thoughts on a Coinage (here published for the first time) and his Notes on Coinage. The latter paper exemplified his power to reduce a complex matter to such brilliant clarity as eventually induced Congress to apply to coinage the decimal system of reckoning, for the first time in history. This suggestion formed only a part of a larger plan of Jefferson's to extend the decimal system to weights and measures—an excellent idea that to this day has remained abortive. Coinage questions were still on his mind when he received his appoint- ment as a commissioner in Europe to execute treaties of &mity and com- merce. While waiting for a passage, he visited New York and four New England states, subsequently writing out the answers to his minute in- quiries into their commerce. He had no sooner met with his fellow com- missioners Franklin and Adams than he set about reforming the principles, as well as the language, style, and structure, that ought to prevail in treaties. As the editor makes clear, throughout his foreign tour of duty it was Jefferson's policy to see that treaties should "strengthen the band of Union" between the several states. Volume 7, covering the time from March 2, 1784, through February 25, 1785, ends one phase of Jefferson's public career and starts the next. It shows the last of his activity as a lawmaker in the United States and the 1961 BOOK REVIEWS 213 beginning of his life as a diplomat in Europe. Volumes 8 through 15, for which the materials are extraordinarily plentiful, include the period from February 25, 1785, through November 30, 1789. All the time, until October 23, 1789, he was in Europe, and the main part of the fifteenth volume ends with his arrival in Norfolk, Virginia. At the last, it is true, we are awarded some premiums of great interest in the shape of supplementary documents, dated 1772—1790, discovered too late to be inserted chronologically in their proper places. It was no slackening of his habitual conscientiousness that caused the commissioner, later the minister plenipotentiary, to accomplish relatively little in his official capacity. Among Jefferson's positive achievements may be counted the treaty with Prussia, in which all three American com- missioners had a hand during the summer of 1785, an act of the king's council of state to encourage commerce between France and the United States, passed December 29, 1787, and the treaty with Morocco negotiated by Thomas Barclay on behalf of the commissioners, and signed by them in January, 1787.