Benezet and Barb�-Marbois

Abstract

2 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION The annual meeting of Friends' Historical Association was held on Second-day evening, Eleventh Month 25, 1929, at 8 o'clock. It was a notable meeting, the largest in the history of the Association, and therefore deserves special mention. By the generosity of our President, Charles F. Jenkins, the rooms of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania were secured for the occasion. After the program a bountiful collation was served through the kindness of our fellow member and Director, Edward Woolman. By a careful count there were 551 people present to enjoy the above program, made possible largely by the historical knowledge of Albert Cook Myers and by the management of the Entertainment Committee, of which Henry V. Gummere was Chairman. BENEZET AND BARBE-MARBOIS By Henry J. Cadbury The account of Barbé-Marbois from which some extracts were printed with comment in this Bulletin, 17 (1928) : 58 fï., has now been published in full as Our Revolutionary Forefathers, translated and edited with an introduction by Eugene Parker Chase. (New York: Duffield and Co. 1929.) The translation is a decided improvement * over that issued in the Atlantic Monthly from which we formerly quoted with some misgivings. The notes are not very extensive or very illuminating, as, for example, the statement (p. 225) that the Shakers were an offshoot of the English Quakers. The introduction, however, contains some valuable data about the author. The publication of the whole document gives us a better idea of its scope, and particularly of its literary character. As we suspected (see loc. cit., note 6), it is not the unedited journal of the date to which it refers (1779-1780). It was perhaps so written in the first place, or at least it was written in the form of a journal sent at that time in instalments to Mademoiselle de Montry 1 For example, the mistranslation noted in the Bulletin, " Lorery and Mr. Rittenhouse " is now correctly given as " Mr. Rittenhouse's orrery." This object was known to other French writers, as Chastellux, Travels, London , 1787, I. 229 ff.; Crèvecoeur, Paris, 1784, II. 230 f. Amelia Mott GummereHannah Clothier Hull impersonating Lucretia Mottimpersonating Hannah Penn Albert Cook MyersJohn W. Cadbury, Jr. impersonating Joseph Besseimpersonating Isaac T. Hopper Albert J. EdmundsSydney L. Wright, Jr. impersonating James Naylerimpersonating James Logan EARLY FRIENDS IN PERIOD DRESS As Impersonated at the Annual Meeting of Friends' Historical Association Eleventh Month 25, 1929. BENEZET AND BARBÉ-MARBOIS3 d'Alleray. But it professes to be an arrangement of such materials sent later to his wife, the Philadelphian, Elizabeth Moore,2 when Marbois himself was in exile (1797-1799). The publication of the whole account calls our attention again to the interest in Quakerism expressed in the class of literature to which this book belongs. It is another sample of a favorite romantic interest in America by French men of letters. Their work took the form of travellers' letters 3 and in several of them the Quakers are mentioned. Indeed, the Philadelphia Quakers, Benezet, Bartram 4 and Edward Drinker,5 were all made familiar to the French readers by the end of the eighteenth century, and Barbé-Marbois need not depend exclusively on his own acquaintance and interest about them. A spirited defense of the Quakers had been called forth by the strictures upon them in the Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782 by the Marquis de Chastellux. J. P. Brissot de Warville had twice replied in support of the Quakers.6 It has been supposed that the Letters of an American Farmer by St. John de Crèvecoeur were altered in the French edition to include a much fuller and very favorable ac2 On Elizabeth Barbé-Marbois (née Moore) see Recollections of John Jay Smith, Phila., 1892, pp. 120 ff. The translator of Chastellux speaks of a Miss Rutledge of Philadelphia as having married M. de Marbois, but I think that is a mistake. 3 These letters were not always published. Some of those by Crèvecoeur waited nearly as long as the Journal of Barbé-Marbois to see the light, being first published in 1925. 4 On Bartram in...