Memoir of Abel Thomas
The memoir of Abel Thomas (c. 1737–1816), a Pennsylvania farm labourer who taught himself to read, first set foot in a meetinghouse at about fifteen, and became a minister among Friends. His is a travelling life recorded in the worst years to travel. In 1778 he and his brother James passed through the lines to visit Friends on Long Island and in New York; they were seized on the way home, carried before the New Jersey Council of Safety, and examined on suspicion of having gone over to the enemy — the proceedings and Governor Livingston's pass are printed entire. In 1781 he rode south into the Carolinas and Georgia through two campaigning armies, was taken prisoner twice, once at Camden, and got his release from General Nathanael Greene in camp before Ninety-six. He settled at Monallen in Adams County in 1801, and in 1813, past seventy, made a last northern journey up the Hudson into New England, told in his own letters. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- A Quaker minister's journeys through the American Revolution
- Arrested crossing the lines in 1778, tried before the New Jersey Council of Safety
- Twice taken prisoner in the Carolinas, and released by General Nathanael Greene
- His own letters from the southern wilderness and from Providence
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read1.3 hours
- Length18,168 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 1.3 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 1.3 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 1 hour to 1.7 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 16,900 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 1,268 words |
| Total | 18,168 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 1,268 of the 18,168 words above, and they are part of what you are buying.
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
1 hour and 1.7 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 1.3 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 52–73 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
Abel Thomas was born in Merion, in Philadelphia County, the son of Jacob and Catharine Thomas. His mother died while he was an infant. His father remarried, had a large family and slender means, and moved to a remote place where there was no school, so Abel grew up a common day-labourer without the education that would have fitted him for any trade. At about thirteen he became uneasy about his own ignorance, and with whatever scraps he could find in his father’s house he taught himself his letters well enough to read. A neighbour helped him learn to write so as to be understood. His spelling, he says, stayed very poor.
The nearest meeting was ten miles off, and the family had no way of getting there. He was about fifteen before he ever stood in a place of worship. When he finally went, with his father’s leave and his elder brother for company, he found a room of people sitting in silence and could not think why. Then an elderly Friend stood up and spoke, and what Abel took away was not the argument. It was not the words that confirmed me, he wrote, but something of a savor that attended them.
That is the whole shape of the book in miniature: a man of very few advantages, listening hard.
What follows is a travelling life, and the remarkable thing about it is when he travelled. In 1778, with the war around them, Abel and his brother James felt a concern to visit Friends on Long Island and in New York — which meant going through the British lines and coming back through the American ones. They went. On the return they were arrested, examined, moved from guard to guard, taken to Newark and then to Princeton, and brought before the President and Council of Safety of the State of New Jersey on the charge of having been within the enemy’s lines. His defence is printed here in full, and so is the pass that Governor William Livingston finally signed. It is a quietly extraordinary document: two plain men explaining to a wartime tribunal that they had crossed a battlefront because they believed they were required to, and being believed.
Three years later he went south. In 1781 he and Thomas Winslow rode into North and South Carolina and on into Georgia, through country where, as he puts it, people were shooting each other on the roads for the sake of plunder. He was taken prisoner at Camden by the American army, and taken again later. He crossed the Savannah River when he had been warned it would cost him his life. He wrote to General Nathanael Greene, then besieging Ninety-six, asking leave to pass; Greene’s aide Nathaniel Pendleton answered the same week, and that reply is here too. An officer who had held him captive watched him ride by afterwards exactly as he had said he would, and called out to him.
He came home, married, and in 1801 moved his family to Monallen in Adams County, Pennsylvania. The last part of the book is the gentlest. In 1813, past seventy, he set out again — up the Hudson through Cornwall and New Windsor, east into Connecticut and Vermont and Rhode Island, down to Long Island and the old meetings at Jericho and Bethpage. These chapters are mostly his own letters, and they are full of the small arithmetic of an old man’s itinerary: which meeting on which day, who is travelling with him, how far it is to the next place. From Providence he wrote that the path lay open before him as clearly as at the beginning, and that so far as he knew he had not strayed from it to the right hand or to the left.
He died at Monallen on the 21st of the Third month, 1816, in the seventy-ninth year of his age. Near the end he said that in a little while he would land on that shore where he would have trouble no more.
The memoir is short and it is plain, which is the point. Abel Thomas had no learning to display and does not try. What he has instead is a very exact memory for what happened and a refusal to make himself the hero of it, and the result is one of the best first-hand accounts we have of what it was like to hold to the Quaker peace testimony while two armies moved through your country.
This Friends Illuminated edition presents the complete text in modern English, with the long inverted sentences of the Friends’ Library printing resolved, scripture references linked, and the places, officers and meetings of Revolutionary America identified for the present-day reader.
