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.)

The ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ Lost: A Friendship Found  — ICT

The Conestoga massacres in Pennsylvania more than 250 years ago forever changed Native-White relations

ICT

The whole issue is really powerful and I hope you find it as enlightening as I did.

Where I live, in one of the colonial-era Quaker colonies of the Mid-Atlantic United States, there has long been a benevolent portrayal of Quakers’ relations with the local Indigenous Peoples. We are told that early Friend William Penn negotiated the Treaty of Shackamaxon with Lenape leader Tamanend, a moment memorialized by parks, statues, and a famous painting by Benjamin West. The great French philosopher Voltaire declared it “the only treaty never sworn to and never broken.” The new settlers bought each plot of land from the local Lenape bands. Violence in the first half-century of Quaker governance was rare; cooperation and good will were the norm.

And yet: there is no federally recognized Indigenous Nation left in this former Lenape territory. Every boatload of Quakers that sailed up from Delaware Bay brought the threat of another round of deadly smallpox. Every creek dammed to power a mill cut off the spawning fish runs that stocked upland creeks. Every pig let loose from an English farmstead ate through nearby Lenape maize and squash plantings.

For those of you turning to the dictionary, manumissions are the documents promising the freedom of enslaved humans. Despite our popular image, Quakers enslaved Africans for over a century, starting with Quaker on Barbados in the 1660s. That island was the first fabulously successful British colony in the Western Hemisphere and that economy was built on sugar and slaves. Quaker missionaries converted slave-owning White Barbadians.¹

Barbados became less friendly to Quakers in following decades (repressive laws, natural disasters) and many moved to William Penn’s new colony in the 1680s, bringing their enslaved people and a Quaker acceptance of human bondage with them. Katherine Gerbner’s “Slavery in the Quaker World” is a good place to start with this history (and yes, I interviewed her too a few years ago).

Some Friends started formally writing against slavery starting in 1688 but rich, slave-holding Friends (including William Penn) didn’t agree and the protests were shelved. It wasn’t until 1776 that Friends in Philadelphia formally acknowledged that human bondage and Quaker principles were opposed. Slave-owning Friends had two choices: free those in their bondage or be disowned from the religious society.

The manumission papers are the receipts of the former Friends. Copies of the freedom promises were sent up the chain of Quaker bureaucracy as proof and eventually ended up in the archives of Haverford College.

My first interview, “Inside Haverford’s Manumission Archives,” is with David Satten-López, the Haverford fellowship student who digitized a portion of these records, and Mary Crauderueff, who heads Haverford’s Quaker collections.

The second interview is a video conversation with Avis Wanda McClinton, a strong voice on remembering the Quaker history of forced bondage.

I’m so glad we’re talking about this tragic history more and happy that folks like Avis, Mary, and David have let me be part of the conversation.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

William Penn’s introduction to George Fox’s Journal (1691) speaks to something very like community:

“Besides these general doctrines, as the larger branches, there sprang forth several particular doctrines, that did exemplify and farther explain the truth and efficacy of the general doctrine before observed, in their lives and examples: as,

Communion and loving one another. This is anoted mark in the mouth of all sorts of people concerning them: They will meet, they will help and stick one to another. Whence it is common to hear some say: Look how the Quakers love and take care of one another. Others, less moderate, will say: The Quakers live none but themselves: and if loving one another. and having an intimate communion in religion, and constant care to meet to worship God, and help one another, be any mark of primitive Christianity, they had it, blessed be the Lord in ample manner.”

This certainly sounds like community to me.

Whether you believe in an intelligent Satan (along the lines of Peter Wagner’s ideas) or a more impersonal mechanism of demonic evil (Walter Wink), we shouldn’t pretend that such nodes just go away. Their evil persists. The basis for apology and repentance is not white guilt or shame or any form of self-flagellation. Instead, it is to conduct spiritual warfare against the demons of racism and oppression and false witness, to declare them off-limits in the land that we now share, so that we can conduct our future stewardship—and make our public investments— in freedom and mutual regard.

I’m drawn to the old notion of “The Tempter” as a force that leads us to do what’s personally rewarding rather than morally just. I think it explains a lot of internal struggles I’ve faced, even in simple witnesses. As Johan says, these massive injustices can’t just be undone but they need to be recognized for the immensity of their scale. I’ve also seen this weird way in which progressive whites can blithely disregard Native American perspectives on these issues. Listening more and waiting for complicated answers seems essential in my opinion.

Another good deep-dive for Friends interested in this is Betsy Cazden’s Friends Journal 2006 article, Quaker Money, Old Money, and White Privilege. It’s one I turn to every so often to remind myself of some of our monied Quaker norms. Johan gives a pass to William Penn but I think it’s important to remember that his colonial ambitions were deeply enmeshed in at least three different wars and conveniently served the political calculations of two empires, the perfect storm of an opportunity for a group of pacifist idealists.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/11/quakers-and-native-americans-its.html

The archival material in the Library relating to William Penn includes property deeds relating to land in Pennsylvania, such as the one pictured below. There are also letters from William Penn amongst other people’s papers. One notable example, dated 13th of 11th month 1690 (13 January 1691, in the modern calendar), is a letter from him to Margaret Fox, formerly Margaret Fell, telling her of the death of her husband, George Fox.

William Penn: commemorations and curios

It sounds like there have been lots of momentos made from the elm tree under which William Penn is said to have signed a treaty with the Lenape in 1683. The Penn Treaty Park museum has stirring accounts of the storm that tore the tree from its roots in 1810. There were so many relic hunters hacking off pieces of the fallen tree that the owners of the property owners hired a guard. Their solution was the obvious capitalist one: chop the remainder up and sell it.

According to an article on the Haverford College site, cuttings of the original tree were taken in its lifetime and trees have been propagated from its lineage for a few generations now. Haverford recently planted a “great grandchild” of the original treaty elm on its campus to replace a fallen grandchild. Newtown Meeting in nearby Bucks County has a great great grandchild.

The idea of Quaker relics and trees imbued with special properties because of a lineage of placement doesn’t really jive very well with many Friends’ ideas of the Quaker testimonies. But I’m glad that the treaty is remembered. The tree had served as a sort of memorial; with its demise, a group came together to more properly remember the location and commemorate the treaty.

The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious, and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the divers liveries they wear here makes them strangers. This world is a form; our bodies are forms; and no visible acts of devotion can be without forms. But yet the less form in religion the better, since God is a Spirit; for the more mental our worship, the more adequate to the nature of God; the more silent, the more suitable to the language of a Spirit.

—William Penn

Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity; but, for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.

— William Penn, 1693