NED LANDSMAN

Professor of History
State University of New York at Stoneybrook
July 2002

James Logan was a man who traversed the boundaries of oceans and of cultures. Born in Ireland to a family of Scots Quakers, Logan spent his youth on highly contested terrain. Although the Quaker sect to which the family belonged suffered frequent persecution at the hands of other Protestants, when civil war broke out in 1689 during the bloody Irish equivalent of Britain’s “Glorious Revolution,” the Logans still suffered the violent attacks Irish Catholics visited on the local Protestant population. Although he spent his years on the east side of the Atlantic living in England and Ireland, he named his property “Stenton” after his father’s place of birth in Scotland. Logan was a slaveholder within a sect some of whose members were beginning to express the first antislavery positions to be found in the North American colonies. He was at once the foremost conduit in the northern colonies of the polite culture of the European Enlightenment and a regular and often successful negotiator with Native American groups that represented, in Enlightenment terms, among the least civilized inhabitants of the western world. Stenton, perhaps the most up-to-date Georgian house in Philadelphia, was visited both by cosmopolitan Europeans and by Native Americans, and it served as a meeting place for the cultures and commodities of Europe and the Americas.

Let us start with Stenton itself – the Stenton for which Logan’s property was named. It is a parish in the county of East Lothian, to the east of Edinburgh and north of the Border county of Berwick. Within the parish lies a village, also called Stenton. It is commonplace in Scotland for houses and estates to have names, but Stenton was no Logan family property. Most of the parish was owned by Lord Belhaven in Logan’s day, who was in fact Lord Belhaven and Stenton. Logan’s family, though possibly of some prominence long before, was of only modest wealth.  In calling his property “Stenton,” in the fashion of Scottish gentlemen, Logan was naming it after the parish or, more likely, the village from which he derived.  

Logan was a Quaker, a member of the Society of Friends, one of the marginal religious persuasions of seventeenth-century Britain. Originating within the radical spiritualist movement that emerged during the English Civil War (1640-1649), Quakers were known for their intense reliance on the direct, personal experience of the spirit: the name “Quaker” came from their alleged tendency to shake from spiritual possession. Quakers took Protestant ideas a good bit farther than most orthodox Protestants were willing to go. Thus where English Puritans and other Reformed Protestants attacked the Catholic church for its emphasis upon hierarchy and ritual, Quakers rejected the church itself as an official body, and any formal ministry, insisting instead upon a “Priesthood of all believers.”  They also rejected many signs of worldly rank, such as the doffing of one’s hat to one’s superior – hence the conventional image of Quakers in hats – and the use of the term “you” – still a mark of deference and respect in the seventeenth century – instead of the more familiar and egalitarian “thee” and “thou”. One recognized a Quaker by his or her dress and speech.

Where most of their contemporaries among the radical spiritual sects declined into forms of anarchy, the Society of Friends outlived most of their contemporaries because of the organizational structure initiated by founder George Fox. The Society developed an extensive hierarchy of meetings – local, monthly and yearly meetings, with women’s meetings as well as men’s. That organization helped balance the anarchic implications of Quaker spiritualism, which emphasized the workings of the spirit within over the authority of established institutions or creeds. In Pennsylvania, well-to-do Quaker merchants and landowners came to dominate the higher meetings and gave Philadelphia Quakerism in particular an especially organizational cast – which sometimes put them at odds with the often more egalitarian and spiritualist sensibilities of Friends in rural communities, especially those who had arrived before the Quaker migration to Pennsylvania, such as those in New Jersey and on Long Island. Friends in those places long retained a more individualistic spiritual bent.

Logan was not just a Quaker but a Scottish Quaker, a group whose ideas and practices differed substantially from those of their English co-religionists. Scottish Protestantism of all sorts placed greater emphasis than did most English Protestants on theology and creeds, and Scottish Quakers were no exception. Developing principally in eastern Scotland, and especially the northeastern vicinity of the city of Aberdeen, Scottish Quakerism produced probably the leading Quaker theologian of the era – Robert Barclay of Urie, author of the famous Apology for the True Christian Divinity as the same is held forth and preached by the people in scorn called Quakers  (1676).  Many of the leaders of the Society were associated with the early Enlightenment figures at Aberdeen’s universities, especially the famous Anglican bishop and Whig political writer Gilbert Burnet, who would eventually leave Scotland to become Bishop of Salisbury in England. Among those with connections to Burnet was George Keith, another Quaker from Aberdeen.  Keith, like those with whom he was connected, shared an intense interest in doctrinal and intellectual issues.  Keith started a schism in Pennsylvania in the early 1690s over what the Scotsman regarded as the insufficient attention Pennsylvania Quakers paid to Christian doctrine. The Keithian schism drew nearly all of the Scottish Quakers in the mid-Atlantic region out of the Society of Friends.

The Keithian schism was over and Keith had left Pennsylvania well before Logan’s arrival in the colony. He was drawn there not by his countrymen but by William Penn. Thus Logan was never confronted with the necessity of making the decision whether to remain within or abandon the Society of Friends. Neither did he ever display the level of personal spiritual commitment that many English Friends emphasized. Instead, he seemed much more devoted to intellectual inquiry of a sort that would have found a home in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century Aberdeen, and among such figures as Bishop Burnet and George Keith. Nor did he ever devote much attention to the organizational structure of Quaker meetings that loomed so large in his adopted home.

Yet Logan did draw upon his Quaker heritage. One of the branches of learning that most appealed to literary figures in the age of Enlightenment – including James Logan — was the new moral philosophy, associated in particular with such luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith.  The crux of the new philosophy was its emphasis upon what was called the “moral sense,” an innate and inner ability to apprehend immediately that which was just and right, a sense shared by all of humankind. In important respects that resembled the key Quaker doctrine of the “inner light” – the voice of the spirit existing within everyone. Of course the existence of an inner light or a moral sense did not guarantee that persons would attend to that voice, and both the Quaker emphasis on convincement and testimony, and the philosophers’ on moral preaching and the cultivation of the moral sense, were aimed at persuading people to listen to that inner voice rather than their own selfish interests.     

The new philosophy of the Scottish moralists owed a particular debt to their Protestant heritage. In particular, those moralists held a view of moral virtue quite different from those of many Pre-Reformation writers, in which virtue was essentially identified with moral behavior: a virtuous individual was one who led a moral life.  Protestant writers, by contrast, insisted upon the inability of men and women to conduct themselves morally through their own volition; true morality could only be inspired by the grace of God. True virtue, then, derived not from what one did, but from what motivated it – an indwelling principle of virtue. Eighteenth-century moralists stripped this idea of its precise Protestant implications – for them, adhering to the dictates of conscience and the moral sense did not require the experience or religious rebirth, but it insisted that true virtue required more than the performing of moral acts; it required an inner moral principle.

Moral philosophy appealed sufficiently to Logan that in 1735 he began work upon a treatise in that area, called “The Duties of Man Deduced from Nature,” which he never finished. Like the British Moralists he was reading, Logan suggested that moral truth was self-evident to the generality of humankind, recognizable from the nature of things. He circulated the manuscript to readers on both sides of the Atlantic for suggestions and criticism.

One aspect of Logan’s intellectual life that is most clearly evident at Stenton was his interest in refinement, in the styles and manners associated with politeness. Politeness had a particular meaning in the eighteenth century; it meant behavior intended to please or oblige. What is important about politeness in the eighteenth century was that to westerners, it signified what separated them from “savage” or “barbarous” peoples.  It was a set of rules of conduct and manners designed to persuade others without resort to arms or violence in the way that barbarous peoples would do.  Politeness of course had a class dimension as well, as none but the educated and cultured were thought able to control their tempers and their behavior in line with what politeness required. That aspect of politeness was closely connected to the principles of the “faculty psychology” that loomed so large in eighteenth-century thought.  In that understanding of psychology, the human mind was divided into capabilities or “faculties,” including the will, the passions, and the intellect. Polite behavior – and moral behavior in general – required a proper ordering of the faculties, with the understanding ruling over the lower faculties of passion and will and keeping them in their proper place. 

Politeness in the eighteenth century had connotations that we in the contemporary world find difficult to reconstruct.  To us, politeness is largely a matter of superficials – pleasant ones, to be sure, but far less consequential than our inner selves. In the eighteenth century the subject of manners seemed to hold more substantial importance. Politeness was most often contrasted with the opposing attributes of “rudeness” or “barbarity,” which were states of society from which modern civilized European culture was thought only recently to have emerged. The refinement of manners was one way to elevate societies above a principle of violence and the rule of the sword.

In Britain, the growth of politeness was often associated with the advent of “polite” genteel literature, linked especially to the great writers of the age, such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and Jonathan Swift. Addison and Steele collaborated on a series of periodicals, such as the Tatler and the Spectator, devoted – among other things – to disseminating refined sentiments and encouraging polite manners. Logan was living in England from 1710 through 1711, when those two periodicals first appeared, and he followed those works closely. Logan’s greatest literary friend in North America may well have been Governor Robert Hunter of New York and New Jersey, also a Scotsman, and one who befriended Addison, Steele, and Jonathan Swift. Hunter’s successor was to be the equally literate William Burnet, son of the Bishop Gilbert Burnet who had been so influential among Logan’s Scottish Quaker colleagues.

Not far removed from politeness in the eighteenth century was the pursuit of science, or natural philosophy, as it was then called; the man of science was assumed to be also a gentleman, a man or leisure, and a man of letters.  Logan had a special interest in natural philosophy as well as the mathematics that underlay it, and his experiments on the sexuality of plants were recognized within the transatlantic world of learning, earning him recognition abroad and publication in the prestigious Transactions of the Royal Society. 

Science in the eighteenth century was not merely a practical but a moral pursuit, at a time when Enlightened persons had come to think of their societies as standing at the threshold of a new age of knowledge and human improvement. The principal goal of the Enlightenment was to challenge all inherited knowledge, with considerable confidence that Enlightened reason properly applied would lead to advances not only in technical matters, but in a variety of human endeavors, from agriculture and economy to culture, to morals and the law. There is an excellent depiction of Enlightened Philadelphia in Benjamin Franklin’s famous Autobiography, in which he describes how he and a group of ambitious young tradesmen, of modest background and schooling, shared their interest in conversing about new books and new ideas, in religion, science, culture, and politics. James Logan was a consistent patron of such individuals, including Franklin, the glazier-mathematician Thomas Godfrey, and the Quaker plantsman John Bartram.

The pursuit of virtue and Enlightenment were among the keys to elevating societies to a fully civilized state, in eighteenth-century understandings. The boundaries between civilization and barbarism or savagery were a special concern in that era, and nowhere more than in provincial sectors of Britain, such as Scotland, Ireland, or the American colonies, where provincial inhabitants lived in close proximity to “barbarous” Scots Highlanders or “Wild Irish” or Native-American “savages.” Thus it was that Scots authors contributed disproportionately to the literature on the “stadial” or four-stages theory of the means by which societies progressed from savagery to barbarism to civilization.  It also seems that Scots and Irish provincials played disproportionate roles in negotiating with Native Americans on the American frontiers, and James Logan – along with Scots governors Burnet, Keith, and Spotswood, and others later in the century – was a very important part of that.  In Logan’s case, not only was he among the leading frontier negotiators in British America, but in 1731 he wrote an important document on “The State of the British Plantations in America.”

Another boundary that existed in Logan’s vicinity was slavery – that which separated slave from free, and it was also a subject that was becoming of great importance to Enlightenment thinkers and Quakers. Yet that was only becoming an intensely examined subject towards the end of Logan’s life. The Logan family employed slaves and other unfree workers at Stenton, but that was not a rarity during his lifetime among Pennsylvanians or among those interested in Enlightened learning. It was not even a rarity among Quakers.

One of the things that makes the institution of slavery so difficult for us to comprehend is the radical distinction we make between slave and free. To us, freedom seems the natural and common condition of humankind. It was much less so in the early modern era. Slavery itself was commonplace in the colonial world: it existed in every American colony, and no one seriously conceived of colonies without it. A great many others existed in situations of less than total freedom. The largest groups of laborers imported into Pennsylvania were slaves and indentured servants; the latter sacrificed four or more years of their lives to work as servants to others. Many others worked as either apprentices or common servants, which normally meant living under the roof and the authority of one’s employer. Many of the freedoms we identify – the freedom to marry, or even to have “free time” were severely limited. And property laws in most places meant that the property of married women was ordinarily placed under the authority of their husbands.  Freedom was thus a restricted concept in the early modern era, and it was commonly assumed that the complete removal of restrictions was impossible and unthinkable.

Most of the first challengers to slaveholding were Quakers, who objected to the tendency of slavery to promote luxury and violence and its seeming incompatibility with the notion of equality before God, but antislavery Quakers represented a small minority among Friends. Much early Quaker antislavery was associated with the most radical and spiritualist elements, such as that manifest by the early abolitionist Benjamin Lay, who many regarded as dangerously radical, and Burlington’s less disruptive, more spiritual John Woolman. Early Quaker antislavery in fact was more pronounced in New Jersey and Long Island – many of whose Quaker communities preceded Philadelphia’s – than in the wealthier, more commercially-oriented Quaker community of Philadelphia. 

By the time of James Logan’s death in 1751, a number of Quaker meetings were addressing questions about slavery, but not until 1754 did the Philadelphia Yearly meeting issue its first statement against slavery, and not for another four years did they authorize local meetings to discipline those who bought or sold slaves – over the objections of wealthy Quaker slaveholders. Neither slave traders nor slaveholders were as yet disowned by the Society. 

Some time after Logan’s death in 1751, the slave Dinah requested and was given her freedom — although she evidently continued to work at Stenton under conditions that may not have been very different from what they were before. The Yearly Meeting did not ban slaveholding until 1776 – again over the opposition of wealthy Philadelphia Quakers. Former slaves who attained their freedom were likely to remain laborers, and they were not welcomed even into the Society of Friends.

Stenton was a meeting-place not only for ideas and peoples; it was also a meeting place for goods. James Logan imported many refined goods from Europe for display in his home. He was also the conduit for much that was moving in the opposite direction.  Much of Logan’s fortune was made in the fur trade with Native Americans, and in fact all of the businesses he pursued – fur trading, iron manufacturing, and land sales – took him and his interests into territories controlled by or contested with Native Americans.

Logan’s position in the colony gave him an excellent start in these enterprises. As Penn’s agent and land commissioner, Logan had the ability to seek out lands for himself that would be valuable for sales or that would suit his businesses.  His iron plantation was located well up the Delaware River in the Lehigh vicinity, an area contested with native groups. His fur trading connected him to traders whose supplies included both finished European goods and products of the American plantations, including West Indian products such as rum. And his land interests were partly responsible for his willingness initially to promote the migration of his Scots-Irish countrymen to Pennsylvania and their settlement in the west. Logan in fact was largely responsible for their first migrations to Pennsylvania.  He would later have considerable second thoughts about the last of those, as the Ulster men and women became a challenging force in Pennsylvania politics and a constant source of antagonism to their Indian neighbors.

This material fits into an interpretation of Stenton in many ways. It touches on the topics of James Logan’s origins, on Quakers, on Atlantic culture, slavery, and the Enlightenment. It would be quite useful to have someone actually try to pin down Logan’s origins in Scottish records, and perhaps Ulster records also. It would be useful also for someone to go through the Logan Papers at the Historical Society to see if there is more information on Logan on slavery, on book-buying, or anything more about his Quaker beliefs.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).

Bridenbaugh, Carl and Jessica, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962; first published 1942).

Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966).

Dunn, Mary Maples and Richard S., et al. (eds), The Papers of William Penn, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981-   ).

Dunn, Richard S. and Mary Maples (eds), The World of William Penn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986).

Geiter, Mary K., William Penn (Harlow: Longman, 2000)

Fiering, Norman, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) – which has much about the eighteenth century, in spite of its title.

Howe, Daniel Walker, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Klein, Lawrence E.,  Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Landsman, Ned C., From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture 1689-1760 (New York: Twayne, 1997).

Landsman, Ned C.  Scotland and its First American Colony, 1680-1760 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Levy, Barry, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Lustig, Mary Lou, Robert Hunter, 1666-1734: New York’s Augustan Statesman (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1983).

May, Henry, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Nash, Gary B., Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community 1720-1840 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).

Nash, Gary B. and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom By Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Porter, Roy, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991).

Soderlund, Jean R., Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Stearns, Raymond P., Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).

Tolles, Frederick B., James Logan and the Culture of Provincial America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1957).

Vann, Richard, Social Development of English Quakerism, 1655-1755 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969)