Quaker History

Book Reviews117 Friends built a modest fortune during his seventeen years as a New York merchant . Isaac Hicks, a young Friend from Westbury, Long Island, arrived in New York in May 1789, and opened a small wholesale and retail grocery. He joined other Friends in partnerships from 1790 to 1796, and thereafter conducted his business alone. As a shipping and commission merchant he acted as agent in various enterprises, but specialized, successively, in dry goods, in whale oil, and in cotton. He enjoyed remarkable success. Between 1797 and 1802, he earned $88,173 in commissions and over $23,000 from other sources. In 1804, he gave up his commission work and began to invest his own money in "adventures," particularly in four shipments of goods to foreign ports, his ships returning with cargoes purchased in Russia. He retired in 1805, in his thirty-eighth year, and returned to Westbury. An increasingly active Friend, he was the companion of his cousin, Elias Hicks, on many religious journeys, and Clerk of Westbury Monthly Meeting from 1816 until his death in 1820. The business papers of Isaac Hicks, now in the New-York Historical Society were kept together by his family for many years. From these thousands of letters and documents Robert Davison has been able to construct a remarkably detailed account of the activities of a particular businessman during a formative period in American commerce. If the sources fail to give an intimate portrait of the man himself, they do succeed in throwing light on the conditions under which he and other merchants of his time carried on their activities. Davison says that more than a third of Hicks's business was done with Friends. Others turned to him because of their confidence in Quaker honesty. They told him, more than once, that he had handled their business with the same care he would devote to his own. As a merchant he dealt in the products of slave labor and in items which Friends did not consider beneficial; as a Friend he gave up opportunities which others might have grasped, refused to overextend himself in risks, and took time fom his business for Friendly concerns. After weighing other possibilities, the author comes to the conclusion that Isaac Hicks's early retirement was due to his religious beliefs. He had found that he could not serve two masters. The New York Public LibraryGerald D. McDonald Elizabeth Fry. By John Kent. New York: Arco Publishing Company. 1963. 144 pages. $3.95. This is an effective book. It is not a "definitive biography" but rather an effort to distinguish Elizabeth Fry's actual accomplishments and failures as a prison reformer from the legends which have grown up about her and her work. The author also seeks to unravel the complex of motives and attitudes which energized and shaped her labors. The book in large measure accomplishes both of these objectives. Moreover, the volume is orderly, readable, and concise. John Kent is right in insisting that Elizabeth Fry was moved more by "religious compassion" than by sheer humanitarianism. She began regular visiting in London's Newgate Gaol late in 1816, when she was thirty-seven years old, the mother of nine children and, for over five years, a recorded minister in the 118Quaker History Society of Friends. This year, and the next two decades, were a time of widespread concern among the upper classes in England over the sharp upswing in crime and especially in juvenile delinquency. It was, in the language of our time, "a chaotic post-war era." It is the chief virtue of John Kent's book that it weighs the nature and validity of Elizabeth Fry's response to this crisis in public life. We are shown what was forward-looking and what was pietistic, what was publicly acclaimed and what was eventually officially denounced in her dealings with prisoners and prison administration. Elizabeth Fry's purposes in her prison work are acutely analyzed at three levels. In the first place, hers was an elemental and courageous response to human misery. Her first visit to the women's side of Newgate nearly overwhelmed her because of "the filth, the closeness of the...