Broomstick

Robert Tompkins faces a challenging case of witchcraft and serious justice, as Swedish settlers and Quakers clash in…

Friends Journal

There’s no transcript of the actual trial so we don’t know the blow-by-blow. We know that Margaret Mattson was found guilty of having the reputation of a witch, a strange finding indeed.

The Swedes were the original European inhabitants of the Delaware River basin. Many were ethnic Finns who had brought folk remedies with them. They were close to the Native Lenape peoples and intermarried and allied themselves with one another against later Europeans rulers, the Dutch then English.

Being first amongst the Europeans, the Swedes/Finns had settled in some of the choicest land along the mouths of creeks and there was a lot of political pressure to move them out or hem them in. Accusations of witchcraft were part of this context. The English accusers might well have been engaging in classic scapegoating behavior meant to steal land and resources.

Like the Lenape, many Swedes/Finns eventually moved across the river to West Jersey, which had a strong Lenape presence, a much slower influx of English Quakers, and clearer boundaries between the two, such as Burlington County’s so-called “Indian Line” at the head of west-flowing creeks flowing into the Delaware. Margaret Mattson was part of this exodus. She might have won the trial but her Pennsylvania neighbors succeeded in bullying her out of the colony. The folksy story of Quaker toleration may be a lot shakier than later biographers made it out to be.

If you’re interesting in all this, Jean Soderlund’s work, esp. 2014’s Lenape Country, is fabulous and deconstructs a lot of myths promulgated by later Quaker settlers. She recently wrote about some of this for Friends Journal. There’s also a pretty good PDF of the trial here.

Some of this history lives on. I have to drive 1/2 hour to Quaker meeting because most of South Jersey’s Quaker meetings are located west of the long-forgotten “Indian Line.” Here’s the SJ Quaker map with the approximate line of watersheds toward the Delaware River. (The four outlier South Jersey Quaker meetings are all within a mile or two of Atlantic Ocean bays. Seafaring Quakers, often from Long Island/New England, settled them.)

Another favorite is Jean Soderlund’s look at Lenape People, Quakers, and peace in the seventeenth century. I reached out to Jean after reading her 2015 book, Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn. On of her theses was that a lot of the culture of peace that we’ve attributed to Pennsylvania Quakers was already well in place along both shores of the Delaware River long before Penn’s arrival, negotiated by the Lenape who protected it through a succession of Dutch and Swedish settlements and governors. As I wrote in my opening column this month:

Friends have often spent a lot of time thinking about Quaker culture and justifying it to ourselves and others. Our histories and the stories we tell about ourselves have often been crafted to provide a unified vision for who we should be now. It’s a continual process, and storytelling continues to shape our self-image today.

“Who Do We Think We Are?”

I think a lot of what has become American Quaker culture was forged in the first fifty years of Philadelphia-area governing and that if we’re to understand who we are now, it helps to understand how a band of persecuted radicals in England adapted to becoming landowners, colonizers, and governors over a sometimes unwilling land of Lenape, Swedes, Dutch, Finns and non-Quaker English.

As a lover of maps, I’ve often be intrigued by the environs  of the Delaware River. As the tides go up and down, the timelessness of the river becomes a kind of gentle solace to the industrialization along its banks. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the islands which somehow remain in its course. I’ve camped at Pea Patch Island down by Delaware and found a surprising family connection in its convoluted ownership. But closer to my commute is Petty Island, sitting alongside the New Jersey mainland a short distance north of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Petty Island is owned by the Citgo oil company and until just a few months ago was still dotted with its oil tanks and a large marine cargo facility. Satellite views still show this twentieth century industry. But in a very long and oftentimes-uncertain process it’s due to become part of New Jersey natural lands and eventually to become a preserve. The public is generally still not allowed on the island but there are occasional trips and on this past Saturday I got to tour the island.

We were very lucky to have Bob Shinn as our tour guide. He’s a walking encyclopedia of the island and the state geopolitics and waves of names and commercial uses it’s been through. He literally wrote the entry on Petty Island in the Philadelphia Encyclopedia. Not surprisingly there’s a lot of Quakers in the early recorded history and the deed between the first Quaker owner and three Lenape representatives is intact in the Haverford College collections (this deed was also a major part of a talk by Lenape–settler history given by Jean Soderlund a few months ago at Rancocas Meeting (see also her book Lenape Country)).

The ever-changing, never-settled history of the island continues with its name. Wikipedia, Google Maps, and—most importantly—Bob Shinn call it “Petty Island,” while the guard shack, welcome sign, NJ Audubon Society, and New Jersey Natural Lands Trust adds the possessive to make it “Petty’s Island.” The latter is especially awkward-sounding to my ears, as South Jersey place names characteristically drop the apostrophes over time (for example, the river landing named after Captain George May is now the town of “Mays Landing.”)

Remnants of the industrialization remain: the massive three-story loading facility has been kept to become the bones of a future visitors center; the adjacent asphalt parking area has just been replanted as a meadow and is mostly a lot of rocks and short blades of grass (with some Fowler’s toads!). We were lucky enough to be the first public group to be there since this had all been cleared away.

Bonus: I didn’t realize till we were about to get in our cars that South Jersey Trails was also on the tour. He wrote it up too! If you look carefully, I’m in the background of one of the shots, and now that I’m looking I think that’s him in some of mine.