A story by Charles Fox of just a few of the massacres of Indigenous people in Pennsylvania in the late 1700s. While the Friends and Moravians often harbored endangered Susquehannock, their pacifism meant they were largely unable to stop the marauding Scots-Irish who were doing the killing.
As one historian wrote:
The frontier did collapse in late 1763. The surprise was that the armed mob that descended from the frontier into Lancaster — and then to Philadelphia in 1764 — were White frontiersmen. Everybody had expected it would be Indians.
Even more tragically, a few of the people who escaped the mobs ended up being slaughtered in later attacks. Much of the colonial government wasn’t Quaker in the latter half of the century, including some of William Penn’s descendants. Still, Friends today can wonder whether the high-minded promises of eternal friendship between Quakers and Indigenous Peoples were more hollow and aspirational than we’d like to admit. (Of course most of the Lenape and Susquehannock died from European-imported diseases, with every boatload of settlers bringing more death to the original inhabitants.)
ICT
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