“A Colony of Aliens”: The Impact of Naturalizing Immigrants in Colonial Pennsylvania

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES61 that Friends in New Jersey, like those in eighteenth-century Rhode Island and North Carolina, had little political significance. When scholars begin to examine in detail the role of Quakers in New Jersey, they will need to consult frequently Pomfret's well-balanced survey of the colonial and revolutionary periods. Swarthmore CollegeJ. William Frost Colonial Pennsylvania—A History. By Joseph E. Illick. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976. xix, 359 pages. $15.00. A treatise on colonial Pennsylvania always has to pass judgment on controversies that defy resolution and keep enlisting partisans long after the event. Like a tongue going to a sore tooth, the historians' pen will not stay away from die series of contentions from the squabbles between William Penn and his colonists to the complex of antagonisms on die questions of the day from 1763 to 1776. In all the classical episodes Friends figured prominently (often as the donkey on which somebody was trying to pin the tail) and have kept public attention ever since. Joseph E. Illick had to deliberate on the whole familiar procession when he undertook to write a comprehensive volume on colonial Pennsylvania for that elusive beast the general reader. Perforce, he relied heavily on the labors of others who had mined the sources, so his book reflects what historians over the years have chosen to investigate. As he points out, intriguing topics await inquiry. Still, he might have done more with the structure of commerce, the stratification of society, and the process of populating the province. Illick's task was to rise above the well-rehearsed arguments, select the choicest fruits of scholarship, and blend them with some fresh ideas. This he did most successfully in two long segments of die book, one revolving around William Penn and one on the political battles from the entry of Benjamin Franklin to the Declaration of Independence. Illick's previous work on Penn gave him a sure touch in handling the early period; the first few chapters are judicious and balanced. Though less masterful, the synthesis of new research on late colonial politics provides original insights and brings to this intricate subject as much clarity as reasonably may be expected. (Some may be disturbed by the undigested tidbits of psychohistory .) The middle of the book, lacking a focus on an eminent personage, often seems to ramble from one sub-topic to another. Readers of Colonial Pennsylvania may be troubled by a less than finished quality. There are too few connective passages linking one part with another , too many opaque or muddled paragraphs, clumsy sentences, and illchosen words. The followers of George Keith change occupations oddly; the celebrated schism in the Presbyterians is mentioned first in a passing remark on its resolution; implausibly, "plutocrats" dwelt in the colony before 1702. Such flaws, however, detract little from the value of the book, which offers a predominantly thoughtful, impartial, reliable, and readable survey of its subject. University of IowaSydney V. James ...

Although popular culture has awarded Massachusetts the distinction of being recognized as America's "witchcraft capital," it was Pennsylvania's earliest practitioners of the mystical arts who quietly fostered the archetype of the American "cunning man." Much like their European brethren, these hybrid practitioners of the occult arts often paired the esoteric worldview of the Renaissance magus with the practicality of the traditional sorcerer.

This chapter provides a summary of treason law in Pennsylvania from the founding of the colony by William Penn in 1682 through the outbreak of the War for Independence. After several halting starts, Pennsylvania formally adopted English treason law in 1718. This law was rooted in the 1351 English Statute of Treasons and the chapter explains the broad contours of that law as it was developed in the succeeding centuries. Treason law, however, was rarely employed in colonial Pennsylvania, even though the Seven Years’ War, the march of the Paxton Boys, and the disputes with Virginia and Connecticut over land claims (hostilities that amounted to low-level open warfare) provided possible opportunities for its employment. The chapter also addresses whether members of American Indian tribes were subject to Pennsylvania treason law.

Reviewed by: Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution Patrick Spero Nicole Eustace . Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2008. Pp. x, 613, illustrations, tables, notes, index. Cloth, $45.00.) Nicole Eustace's Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution offers fresh insight into colonial Pennsylvania society and will likely influence future interpretations of early American studies. Eustace uses emotion—or, as the title states, "passion"—as her frame of analysis. Eustace does not claim to uncover individual experiences of emotional feeling. Instead, she traces the meaning of emotional expressions through language and displays intended to reify a hierarchical social order. Nevertheless, emotions became hotly contested in colonial Pennsylvania, a colony of great social and economic mobility. Eustace emphasizes the tension between self and society and demonstrates how expressions of emotion captured a contest between those who embraced communal values and those who supported more individualistic ones. She dubs the mid-eighteenth century the "era of the passion question" (21) and casts the period as a transition from "communal visions of the self" to "modern individualized notions of the self as autonomous and independent" (12). She concludes that the American Revolution ushered in an era that emphasized the universality of emotional feeling, which symbolized the rise of individualism. "Emotion," she writes, "contributed [End Page 251] as much as reason to the structure of eighteenth-century British-American power and politics" (3). Eustace begins her study with a chapter on Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man. Pope's poem had a particularly wide readership in colonial Pennsylvania, perhaps more so than anywhere else in the Atlantic World. Pope's Essay was imported, reprinted in the colony, and portions also appeared in almanacs and newspapers. So widespread was the poem that Eustace finds lines from it popping up in commonplace books and letters without any attribution. The poem may have been popular, but it was not without controversy and criticism. As Eustace demonstrates, Pope's attempt to "reconcile civic virtue and personal passion" exposed the conflict between self and society. Where those who embraced Pope's creed believed that embracing passions—or "self-love"—could lead to "social good," critics, often Quakers, countered that "selfish passions could fatally undermine communal bonds" (24). Eustace then explores the contestation of emotion in public and private settings in chapters focusing on a specific set of passions. She demonstrates clearly that public expressions and performances of emotion carried significant social weight and that people used contests over expressions of emotion to negotiate the boundaries of legitimate authority and status. Higher ranked members of Pennsylvania society tried to demonstrate refinement and control over their emotions. For example, individual elites expressed resentment rather than anger. The elite believed that the lower sorts, on the other hand, lacked the same social refinement and were thus thought to be prone to show extremes of passion. But when the lower orders showed emotional control, elites viewed their behavior as submissive. Cheerfulness provides an example of how uses of emotions maintained social control. "Cheerfulness" Eustace shows, "signaled contentment with one's rank" (68). Thus, political officials deployed the language of cheerfulness to describe how subordinates should work, turning demands for their labor into "benevolent dictates of . . . superiors whose task it was to protect the common interest" (68). The construction of such an idea "helped to soften the sharp edges of hierarchy even as it strengthened them" (69). The use of emotions to establish relations of power also played into cross-cultural interactions and conceptions of racial others. The language of love, for instance, often dominated treaties between Indians and Pennsylvanians, but, as Eustace points out, "the veil of love" often elided "the ensuing naked struggle for power" (141). Many whites believed that African-Americans did not have the potential for refined emotions that whites possessed, [End Page 252] which essentially dehumanized African-Americans and thus justified their enslavement. But because emotions were so central to reaffirming social order and establishing relations of power, they could...

In its early years, William Penn's Peaceable Kingdom was anything but. Pennsylvania's governing institutions were faced with daunting challenges: Native Americans proved far less docile than Penn had hoped, the colony's non-English settlers were loath to accept Quaker authority, and Friends themselves were divided by grievous factional struggles. Yet out of this chaos emerged a colony hailed by contemporary and modern observers alike as the most liberal, tolerant, and harmonious in British America. In Friends and Strangers, John Smolenski argues that Pennsylvania's early history can best be understood through the lens of creolization-the process by which Old World habits, values, and practices were transformed in a New World setting. Unable simply to transplant English political and legal traditions across the Atlantic, Quaker leaders gradually forged a creole civic culture that secured Quaker authority in an increasingly diverse colony. By mythologizing the colony's early settlement and casting Friends as the ideal guardians of its uniquely free and peaceful society, they succeeded in establishing a shared civic culture in which Quaker dominance seemed natural and just. The first history of Pennsylvania's founding in more than forty years, Friends and Strangers offers a provocative new look at the transfer of English culture to North America. Setting Pennsylvania in the context of the broader Atlantic phenomenon of creolization, Smolenski's account of the Quaker colony's origins reveals the vital role this process played in creating early American society.

Articles and Publications by Christopher Densmore and Barbara Addison Two articles in Quaker Studies reflect on the career of James Nayler: David Neelon, "James Nayler in the English Civil Wars," 6: 1 (Sept. 2001), p. 8-36, and Carole Spencer, "JamesNayler: Antinomian orPerfectionist?," 6:1 (Sept. 2001) 106-117. An essay by C. John Somerville, "Interpreting Seventeenth-Century English Religion as Movements," Church History 69:4 (2000), 749-769, argues for an expansion ofthe church-sect typology when considering Quakers and other dissenting religions of the English Civil War period. Larry Gragg, "A Heavenly Visitation," History Today 52:2 (February 2002), 46-5 1 , briefly recounts George Fox's visit to Barbados in 1671, the toleration of Quakers on Barbados and the attitude of Quakers toward slaves. Richard L. Greaves, "Seditious Sectaries or 'Sober and Useful Inhabitants'?: Changing Conceptions of the Quakers in Early Modern Britain," Albion 33:1 (2001), 24-50, examines the change in the public perception of Quakers in Britain during the reign of Charles II. Flavel, the Quaker and the Crown: John Flavel, Clement Lake, and Religious Liberty in 17th Century England (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Rhwymbooks, 2000), includes a modernized transcription oíSomethingBy Way ofTestimony Concerning ClementLake. . . . (1 692) that includes a 1 687 exchange ofviews between English Presbyterian John Flavel (16307—1 691) and Quaker Clement Lake (d. 1689). Jon Parmenter, "Rethinking William Penn 's Treaty with the Indians: Benjamin West, Thomas Penn, and the Legacy of Native-Newcomer Relations in Colonial Pennsylvania," Proteus: A Journal ofIdeas, 19:1 (Spring 2002), 38-44, considers landpurchases fromthe Delaware (Lenape) by William Penn and his son Thomas. Whose Land? An Introduction to the Iroquois Land Claims in New York State written by Phillip Harnden (Syracuse: American Friends Service Committee, Upper New York State Area Office, 2000), provides background on land tenure issues dating from the 1700s to the present. The experience ofQuaker women, particularly acknowledged ministers, in the colonial period continues to draw scholarly attention. Two ofthe most recent contributions are Michele Lise Tarter, "Quaking in the Light: The Politics of Quaker Women's Corporeal Prophecy in the SeventeenthCentury Transatlantic World," in Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter, eds., A Centre of Wonders: the Body in Early America (Cornell University Press, 2001) and "Voices Within and Voices Without: Quaker Women's Autobiography" by Barbara BoIz, in Strangers at Home: Amish and Mennonite Women in History, edited by Kimberly D. Schmidt, Diane Articles and Publications43 Zimmerman Umble and Stephen D. Reschly (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 283-311, which considers the journals of eighteenth century women Friends and draws distinctions between the public ministry ofQuaker women and the silence in religious affairs ofMennonite women. "The World ofElizabeth Drinker" is the theme ofa special issue of Pennsylvania History 68:4 (Autumn 2001), with articles by Sarah Blank Dine, "Diaries and Doctors: Elizabeth Drinker and Philadelphia Medical Practice, 1760- 1 8 1 0", DebraM. O'Neal, "Elizabeth DrinkerandHer 'Lone' Women: Domestic Service, Debilities, and (In)Dependence through the Eyes ofa Philadelphia Gentlewoman," Susan Branson, "Elizabeth Drinker: Quaker Values and Federalist Support in the 1790s," and Alison Duncan Hirsch, "Uncovering 'the Hidden History ofMestizo America' inElizabeth Drinker'sDiary: InterracialRelationships inLateEighteenth-CenturyPhiladelphia ." The experience ofrural Quakers ofthe same period is the subject of Kenneth L. Cook, "Gaius & Mary Dickinson: a Quaker Couple in the AmericanRevolution," HistoricalReview ofBerks County [Pennsylvania], 67:1 (Winter 2001-2002), 35-38. Several recent articles examine Quakers in seventeenth century New England. Johan Winsser, "Ann Burden: From Dissenting Puritan to Quaker 'Troubler'" in the New EnglandHistorical and Genealogical Register 155 (January 2001), 91-104, concerns a former resident of Massachusetts who returned with Mary Dyer in 1657; the same journal also includes an article by Marya C. Myers and Donald W. James Jr., "William James of Scituate and Boston, Shipwright and Quaker" (p. 36-68). James E. McWilliams, "Work, Family, and Economic Improvement in Late-Seventeenth Century Massachusetts Bay: the Case ofJoshuaBuffum," inNewEnglandQuarterly 74:3 (2001), 355-384, examines the rise of a Friend from day laborer to entrepreneur. The study of the involvement of Quakers in reform, particularly antislavery and woman's rights will be aided by the publication ofTheSelected Letters ofLucretia Coffin Mott, edited by Beverly...

Reviewed by: Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson J. William Frost Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson. By Jane E. Calvert. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xiv + 382 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $99. Insisting that Quakers and Pennsylvania have been marginalized by obtuse secular-minded historians, Calvert maintains that Friends' distinctive ideas and practices in civil disobedience and constitutional ideas were of fundamental importance in American political history and, primarily through the thought of John Dickinson, influenced the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution. She argues that Pennsylvania Friends were not just Whigs engaged like other colonists in a quest for power, but created a religio-political view of a fundamental written constitution that should be preserved but could be amended by the people for the common good. Quakers, in short, pioneered the American tradition of civil disobedience as a tactic designed to influence governments to change laws while preserving the legitimacy of the God-given fundamental order. In raising a challenge to previous scholars, Calvert discusses Quaker political theory and practices in seventeenth-century Britain and in colonial Pennsylvania from its founding until after the ratification of the Constitution. In order to support her theses, Calvert has read widely in sources on political theory and [End Page 51] colonial politics but she candidly acknowledges that there are gaps in sources partially because of the way Quakers and the Pennsylvania Assembly structured their affairs. The Quakers' innovations rested upon defiance of those laws of England that they saw as infringing upon religious freedom while disdaining revolution and accepting the legitimacy of royal government. In creating a system of local, monthly, and yearly meetings operating under a written discipline ("Christian and Brotherly Advices") beginning in 1669, Friends created a system of church government resting upon the democratic consent of all but with authority in an oligarchy of the spiritual elite. The religious and political writings of Isaac Penington, William Penn, and Robert Barclay on religious liberty and the peace testimony provided an intellectual underpinning for Friends' religious and political actions that was carried over into early Pennsylvania. The New Jersey Concessions and Agreements of William Billings and Penn's first plans for government, that would have allowed the Assembly the power to initiate laws, exemplified Quaker religio-political ideas. When Penn withdrew this power from the Assembly, Friends in Pennsylvania engaged in selective civil disobedience until they received in 1701 a more Quakerly constitution. Calvert argued that the Assembly under Thomas Lloyd and David Lloyd kept their dissent within limits, because as Friends they did not wish to destroy the colony's foundation. The result was that Pennsylvania became a Quaker "theocracy" and the "largest missionizing effort in American history" in which religious liberty and the peace testimony were used to persuade outsiders to follow Friendly procedures and endorse Quaker goals, even though they did not become members of the meeting. It did not matter whether the colonists converted because the boundaries between the meeting and the outsiders were flexible. The Assembly, in short, was a political version of the Quaker meeting, resting upon the consent of the people who could reform the laws as needed while preserving the God-given liberties confirmed by the 1701 Frame of Government. After 1755, Franklin and Galloway repudiated the Quaker consensus and sought to make Pennsylvania a royal colony, but John Dickinson became the defender of the traditionalists, a role that he would occupy until 1776. Calvert insists that Dickinson's behavior during the disturbances after the Stamp and Townshend Acts and Continental Congresses by endorsing boycotts while seeking redress of grievances within the context of the British constitution and even opposing independence exemplified Quaker practices. Even Dickinson's support of a just war could be linked through a Quaker tradition exemplified by Penn's charter and support for a militia, and the endorsing of just wars by Robert Barclay, James Logan, and Isaac Norris II. Calvert states that Pennsylvania had more freedoms under the 1701 Frame than in the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution that disfranchised Friends and brought persecution. So she does not see the revolution in Pennsylvania as a democratic movement. [End...

This chapter explores the intersection of sports, religious tradition, legal authority, and morality from Puritan New England through colonial Pennsylvania and Virginia. Puritans viewed games with suspicion due to their perceived connection to sin, yet at the same time recognized their social benefits. Community leaders grappled with distinguishing between “lawful” and “unlawful” sports, while the public often engaged in sports contrary to legal standards. A similar dynamic unfolded in Pennsylvania, as leading figures like William Penn expressed hesitation at the passions associated with “amusements.” And yet Enlightenment ideals in Philadelphia fostered a broader acceptance of sports, to include horse racing. In Virginia, meanwhile, horse racing became intertwined with the honor code of planters, viewed as promoting societal order. In all these places, sporting interpretations of the time reflected moral and legal judgments influenced by Protestant Christianity, often privileging wealthy White perspectives above all else.

In early Pennsylvania, translation served as a utopian tool creating harmony across linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences. This book challenges the long-standing historical myth—first promulgated by Benjamin Franklin—that language diversity posed a threat to communal coherence. It deftly traces the pansophist and Neoplatonist philosophies of European reformers that informed the radical English and German Protestants who founded the “holy experiment.” Their belief in hidden yet persistent links between human language and the word of God impelled their vision of a common spiritual idiom. Translation became the search for underlying correspondences between diverse human expressions of the divine and served as a model for reconciliation and inclusiveness. Drawing on German and English archival sources, the author examines iconic translations that engendered community in colonial Pennsylvania, including William Penn's translingual promotional literature, Francis Daniel Pastorius's multilingual poetics, Ephrata's “angelic” singing and transcendent calligraphy, the Moravians' polyglot missions, and the common language of suffering for peace among Quakers, Pietists, and Mennonites. By revealing a mystical quest for unity, he presents a compelling counternarrative to monolingualism and Enlightenment empiricism in eighteenth-century America.

too often, when we think of William Penn’s colonial project, we think of it in terms that disavow the very colonialism that underpinned it. Part of the problem lies in the persistent mythology surrounding Pennsylvania’s founding, a tradition inherited as much from scholars as it was from the founding generation. Writing more than a century ago, isaac sharpless, professor and dean at haverford college, helped to naturalize the myth that colonial Pennsylvania was from its start a social and political democracy. For sharpless, it just made good sense. after all, the colony had been born that way; a liberty-loving people like the Quakers, sharpless concluded, could not help but produce a society that was democratic. Yet, despite the powerful images of tolerance and pluralism that thoughts of the Quaker colony evoke, the history of Pennsylvania—and early america—needs to be interpreted in a fashion similar to other imperial endeavors: as a site of contestation and negotiation not only between indigenous and settler societies, but between the acrimonious admixture of colonists as well. to tell Pennsylvania’s history in this fashion is to discard a triumphant narrative of democratization and replace it with a story of creolization and hybridity. each and together, John smolenski’s Friends and Strangers and Judith Ridner’s A Town In-Between help to trouble the democratic narrative with more complex investigations of culture creation. Read together, smolenski’s focus on the decades after Pennsylvania’s founding and Ridner’s close study of carlisle, Pennsylvania, give important attention to the generative and adaptive processes of creolization and the resistant, sometimes subversive, responses of hybridity.

In 1971 the Honorable Thomas M. Rees of California observed that "very little has been written of what the Welsh have contributed in all walks of life to the shaping of American history." In 1979 historian David Galenson maintained that "the issue of the composition of America's early immigrants is an impor-tant one and will continue to receive considerable attention from historians who seek to understand the social and economic history of colonial America." However, Douglas Greenburg's examination of the historiography of the middle colonies revealed that Pennsylvania, which witnessed the immigration of many early modern Welsh Quaker migrants, has not attracted as much attention from researchers as has its neighboring states.

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES Edited by Edwin B. Bronner Power, Authority, and the Origins of American Denominational Order, The English Churches in the Delaware Valley, 1680-1730. By Jon Butler. Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society . . . , Vol. 68, Part 2, 1978. 85 pp. ?8.00. William Penn's Legacy, Politics and Social Structure in Provincial Pennsylvania , 1726-1755. By Alan Tully. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. 255 pp. $14.00. Each of these authors has written what might be called a revisionist study of one aspect of colonial Pennsylvania history. Jon Butler suggests that the early churches were not seedbeds of democratic ideas, as many historians have written over the years, but instead stresses the authority wielded by the ministers in the churches. Alan Tully, who has challenged the conventional wisdom which finds much conflict and discord in colonial politics, emphasizes the peaceful nature of Pennsylvania politics during die thirty years covered by his volume. Butler has examined the structure and authority of the Anglicans, Baptists , Presbyterians and Quakers during the first half century of Pennsylvania 's history, after summarizing the evolution of denominational order from the Elizabethan period up to 1720. He concludes that the English patterns were imported by the various denominations, and that they were maintained on this side of the Atlantic, at least during the period of his study. Thus he challenges the idea first proposed by Frederick Jackson Turner, that the frontier modified institutions imported from Britain, and made them more democratic. His examination of the Quakers during this period confirms his thesis. He found that Friends in the Delaware Valley established institutions and patterns very much like those found among British Friends, and having decided that power was held in the hands of a few in London, he concludes that the same was true in Philadelphia. While he recognizes the concept of the Atlantic Quaker Community, enunciated by Frederick B. Tolles and others, he does not fully comprehend that there was a conscious effort to maintain close ties between Friends in the different yearly meetings, and to learn from one another about the best way in which to carry on the work of the Society. Butler does not seem to fully understand the nature of the ministry among Friends; he does not seem to realize that persons from various walks of life were recognized as having a gift in the ministry. For example, John Woolman was recognized as a minister during this period, and one would not label him an aristocratic, power hungry person. In Britain, the elder John Fothergill, a minister who travelled in America, was very different from his two sons who were powerful figures in a later era; he was known for his humility, his lack of any desire for power. There were many other ministers, bodi men and women, who had little inclination to hold the reins of authority. 48 BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES49 Furthermore, it is difficult to measure just how much power any single body had in the Society of Friends during this period. Each local meeting had a great deal of autonomy; quarterly meetings had little authority over monthly meetings; and the yearly meeting, which met for only a few days each year, had no mechanism for exercising any authority over the so-called subordinate groups. Friends in the Delaware Valley did not have a Recording Clerk, or executive secretary, as was the case in England, nor did they have an administrative body like the Second Day Morning Meeting or Meeting for Sufferings. Having said all that, it must be added that Butler is correct in suggesting that relatively few Quakers participated in the various business meetings, and that persons in Philadelphia were more likely to make decisions than those in the rural meetings. It is also correct to say that Friends were not nearly as democratic as many scholars have supposed, nor as egalitarian as many today. Butler, who has been studying George Keith and the Keithian controversy for some time, stresses his challenge to the authority of the ministers, and places less emphasis upon his effort to create a creedal statement for Friends than some other scholars. Tully's volume goes over familiar...

Reviewed by: Conceived in Crisis: The Revolutionary Creation of an American State by Christopher R. Pearl Terry Bouton (bio) Keywords American Revolution, Pennsylvania, Government Conceived in Crisis: The Revolutionary Creation of an American State. By Christopher R. Pearl. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 320. Cloth $49.50.) This important book breaks new ground on an old topic: the origins of the American Revolution. Using eighteenth-century Pennsylvania as a case study, Christopher R. Pearl argues that one of the main causes of the American Revolution was how poorly the British administered the colony, creating widespread antipathy toward British rule even before Parliament enacted infamous policies like the Stamp, Townshend, and Coercive Acts. In what amounts to a new entry in the “Imperial School” of interpretation, Pearl shows how the imperial government in colonial Pennsylvania failed to meet the basic needs of its inhabitants. Those failures came on multiple fronts, mostly through a lack of government institutions: law enforcement, judges, courts, and land offices. Even when the institutions were present, they tended to operate in ways that benefited the local elite at the expense of ordinary citizens. The result was a population primed for revolution and ready to embrace a stronger government that protected their communities, which, as Pearl demonstrates, is exactly what the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution gave them—not just because it was more democratic, but because it created a bigger, stronger, and more locally active government. The strength of this book is Pearl’s extensive local-level, archival research. Pearl digs deep in court records and petition files to show how many ordinary Pennsylvanians were dissatisfied with their government prior to start of the imperial showdown. During most of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvanians complained that there weren’t enough courts, judges, sheriffs, or constables in most counties and that the ones that existed were concentrated in county seats and long-settled townships, many miles away from where many of the county’s inhabitants lived. William Penn’s ideas of governance relied on non-governmental institutions, like churches, picking up the slack by acting as agents of social control. But there weren’t enough of those either. The result left large numbers of people without any kind of meaningful government presence, leading to long and expensive trips to courthouses, where few citizens could expect justice in a legal system overwhelmed with a backlog of cases. This meager government presence produced rampant crime, with roving gangs [End Page 655] and powerful families terrorizing communities with wanton lawbreaking. Time and again, Pennsylvanians petitioned for redress only to have requests for more courts, judges, and constables rejected by colonial governors, the king’s ministers, and the king himself. These difficulties form a crucial backdrop to the rise of the revolutionary movement in Pennsylvania, which, according to Pearl, was more about ineffective local governance than it was about new imperial policies enacted after the Seven Years’ War. As Pearl puts it, “The coming of the revolution was the result of a cataclysmic breakdown after a long period of crisis encapsulating local grievances and struggles, which was exacerbated by imperial measures that gave oppositional focus to a large swath of the colonial population” (129). With independence, the leaders of Pennsylvania’s revolution made improving local governance a central part of their efforts. Pearl shifts our attention away from the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution’s democratic provisions to examine how that document beefed up county and township administration, local law enforcement, courts, and judges. He then shows how state assemblies under the new charter further increased the reach of government, bringing it closer to “the people” by creating new counties and increasing the number of state officials at the township level. In all these ways, the revolutionary government made exactly the kinds of changes that many Pennsylvanians had been demanding for the better part of a century. As strong a case as Pearl makes, his argument has some big holes in it that are largely a product of ignoring interpretations and evidence that don’t fit his thesis. The biggest problem is that the Revolution was often strongest in the parts of Pennsylvania where the institutions of colonial government were concentrated. The county seats (which...

Cet article vise à réévaluer l’importance et les implications, dans le domaine des études transatlantiques, des dix-neuf propositions de constitution élaborées par William Penn pour sa colonie de Pennsylvanie (1681-82). Une telle approche a un double avantage. Elle propose de reconsidérer la chronologie de leur composition, offrant de nouvelles perspectives sur le processus d’élaboration de cette constitution coloniale spécifique, et envisage les implications de cette nouvelle chronologie pour notre compréhension de ce que Penn et ses collaborateurs essayaient de construire. Ensuite, en soulignant la créativité mise en œuvre dans cette série de propositions, librement inspirées des divers modèles constitutionnels ayant émergé au cours du XVIIe siècle en Angleterre, cet article espère donner un nouvel exemple du constitutionnalisme dynamique en action à cette époque.

68BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL SOCIETY. ing houses, and addresses at 3 p.m. on William Penn, by Governor Sproul, of Pennsylvania, and at 3.45 by Dr. Jesse H. Holmes, of Swarthmore College , on " The New Social Order." At 8 p.m. in the Homewood house Dr. Rufus M. Jones addressed a large meeting on " The Message of Christ to the World Today." The visitors came away with vivid impressions of the importance of the occasion, the warmth and extent of the abounding hospitality shown them throughout the entire period, and most of all, the vast possibilities, in the light of the past, which open out in the future before the really devout and dedicated " Children of the Light." Amelia Mott Gummere. A GEORGE FOX MANUSCRIPT. By the kindness of Anna S. D. Hall, of Frankford, Pa., an interesting and valuable manuscript written by George Fox has been placed in the library of Haverford College. It is subscribed, " gff. his paper to the king 1660." It is a scriptural defense of Friends for refusing to take oaths, and a denial of " all plotes, murderes & tumoltus meetings against the king or any of his subjects." Norman Penney connects the paper with the Fifth Monarchy outburst and the fact that the government classed Friends with that movement. See Journal of George Fox (Camb. ed.) 1 : 388 and note I. Anna S. D. Hall received the manuscript in the papers of her grandfather , Thomas Scattergood (1802-1883). There is a facsimile of the manuscript (which omits a few unimportant, inter-lined words) subscribed, "' S. L. Smedley, Philada. 1868." A copy of this facsimile is in the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. R. W. K. THE CRIMINAL CODES AND PENAL INSTITUTIONS OF COLONIAL PENNSYLVANIA. By Professor Harry E. Barnes Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. II. The Penal Institutions. I. The Origins of the Colonial Penal Institutions. In a manner very similar to the development of the criminal codes in the colonial period, the evolution of penal institutions in provincial Pennsylvania passed through three main stages of evolution. The typical detention jail of contemporary England was provided for in the Duke's laws of 1676. This institution was replaced by the Quaker workhouse, or house of ...