Janney

and records in proceedings of the Society of Friends
in Baltimore^ Monthly Meeting, Baltimore Yearly Meet-
ting, and Friends' General Conference; an unpublished
autobiography; information furnished by Anne (Webb)
Janney.] CB

JANNEY, SAMUEL McPHERSON (Jan.
ii, i8oi-Apr. 30, 1880), author and Quaker
minister, was born in Loudoun County, Va., son
of Abijah Janney, whose ancestors had been
identified with the Society of Friends since its
beginnings, and his wife Jane (McPherson),
also of Quaker stock. At fourteen he left school
to work in the counting-house of an uncle at
Alexandria, but continued to seek an education;
he attended night schools, organized a local sci-
entific society, and wrote regularly for a literary
club, meanwhile reading avidly and devoting
himself to private study. On Mar. 9, 1826, he
married a third cousin, Elizabeth Janney, and
in 1830 he became partner in a cotton factory at
Occoquan. This never-flourishing venture was
abandoned in 1839 and Janney returned to Lou-
doun County to open a boarding school for girls.
Fifteen years later, having paid the debts ac-
cruing from his business failure, he retired, to
devote himself to literature and philanthropy.

For almost half a century preceding his death
he was an eloquent, liberal, and devout minister
in the Hicksite division of his sect, influential in
its councils, tirelessly active in evangelical work.
At the same time, his humanity knew neither
creed nor color. He labored to found Sunday
schools and day schools for negro children, was
among the first to advocate the abolition of slav-
ery within the District of Columbia, and zeal-
ously supported emancipation and colonization
societies, on one occasion his opinions concern-
ing slavery causing his presentment by a Lou-
doun County grand jury. With the dual aim of
enlightening the white electorate and of further-
ing anti-slavery sentiment through education, he
was earnest in promoting free public schools for
Virginia, although his efforts bore little immedi-
ate fruit. During the Civil War he supported
the Union, but ministered at his home to the
wounded of both armies and aided his afflicted
neighbors, regardless of their sympathies. His
early interest in the Indians led him to serve, at
some sacrifice, as superintendent of Indian af-
fairs in the Northern Superintendency (May
i86£-September 1871) until enfeebled health
caused him to resign.

He had contributed verses to several peri-
odicals before the appearance of his first volume,
The Last of the Lenape, and Other Poems, in
1839, and subsequently published others, but his
poetical work was mostly undistinguished: his
verses, although decorous, correct, and varied,

Jansen

lack wings. His reputation as an author de-
servedly rests on his prose works. His biog-
raphies, The Life of William Penn (1852) and
The Life of George Fox (1853), went through
repeated editions, and are still esteemed for their
scholarship and their valuable material; in them,
as well as in his four-volume History of the Re-
ligious Society of Friends, from its Rise to the
Year 1828 (i86o~€7), his simple, direct style,
careful study, and abundant quotation from origi-
nal sources show to advantage. His remaining
publications, most of them brief, deal with vari-
ous doctrinal or sociological subjects, but es-
pecial mention should be made of his autobi-
ographical Memoirs (1881), which furnishes a
clear picture of the author's gentle, modest, and
charitable nature.

1655-1917 (1917) ; Evening Star (Washington), May
'• I88o-l A. CO., Jr.

JANSEN, REINIER (d. Mar. 6, 1706 N.S.),
the printer who operated the first Quaker press
in America, is believed to have been a native of
Alkmaar, Holland, from which place he came to
Pennsylvania in 1698. On his arrival, he went
first to Germantown, where he was described as
a lace-maker, but within a year he was settled
in Philadelphia as a merchant Jansen reached
America about the time that a press and supplies
for a printing office were received from England
by the Quakers. There was then no printer in
the Province, and in answer to the request of
the Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends
in Philadelphia, Jansen agreed to operate the
press for the Society. He was a Quaker and
may have been responsible for the Dutch trans-
lation of Marmaduke Stephenson's Call from
Death to Life, published in Holland in 1676,
which bears the imprint: "Gedrukt voor Reyner
Jansen." The first books he printed for the
Quakers in his adopted city bear the date 1699.
Three of these have survived: An Epistle to
Friends, by Gertrude Dereek Niesen; The Dy-
ing Words of William Fletcher, and God's Pro-
tecting Providence. That he was inexperienced
in the printing art is confessed in the preface
written by Caleb Pusey to Satan's Harbinger
Encountered (1700), which bears Jansen's im-
print It is explained as an excuse for the typo-
graphical errors in the tract "that the printer
being a man of another nation and language, as
also not bred to that employment," was "conse-
quently something unexpert both in language
and calling" and that "the correctors" were not
"so frequently at hand as the case required."
When he came to America, Jansen left a son

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