Reading Summary

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Negotiating Penn’s Colony, 1681–1715

William Penn’s ‘‘holy experiment’’ did not develop from a blank slate. The new Quaker settlers obtained assistance, advice, and local perspectives from the Lenapes, Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and English who already lived along the Lenapewihittuck and had created an inclusive, tolerant, decentralized soci- ety based on economic goals. The Lenapes and old settlers had created a culture into which the Quaker colonists in West New Jersey and Pennsylva- nia easily moved.1 The Friends’ belief in religious liberty and commitment to friendly relations with Native Americans complemented cultural prac- tices already in place. Nevertheless, significant changes occurred in the region as swelling numbers of Europeans soon pushed Lenapes and old settlers from prime lands along the river and their central position in the economy and society. In the region that became Pennsylvania, Lenapes withdrew to the west and north of Quaker settlement, while on the east bank they maintained substantial communities in West Jersey, where less- organized European settlement left a great deal of land under Indian title. Because Lenapes on both sides of the Lenapewihittuck claimed territory throughout the region, they met periodically with William Penn and his lieutenants to confirm their friendship and cede land. They refused in par- ticular to transfer the area from what is now central Bucks County north to the Pocono Mountains when Penn could not pay their asking price; they threatened violence to protect that last stronghold. Though diminished in population and lacking the predominance of power they had before 1681, the Lenapes skillfully managed their relationship with the nonviolent Quaker government in order to remain a sovereign people. Many of the old settlers were similarly pressured to sell their farms along the river and soon found themselves largely excluded from Penn’s government when

Soderlund, Jean R.. Lenape Country : Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn, University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc., 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3442436. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2017-09-11 09:14:13.

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First Purchasers and other wealthy Englishmen took control. Nevertheless, the old settlers coalesced as an ethnic interest group known as ‘‘the Swedes’’ centered on the Swedish Lutheran church, creating a new political identity through which they protected individual and group interests within fac- tional Pennsylvania politics. Both the Lenapes and Swedes thus continued to shape Delaware Valley society and politics despite their new status as minority groups.

In August 1681, Europeans on the west side of the Lenapewihittuck faced a new regime when, according to a London newspaper, they wel- comed Deputy Governor William Markham with ‘‘a troop of horse and a company of foot, with drums beating and colors flying, having silk ensigns.’’ The report noted that the militia included ‘‘English, Dutch, and Swedes, born in the country and understanding the language and customs of the Indians,’’ which portended the new colony’s success. William Penn had appointed his cousin Markham soon after receiving the Pennsylvania charter on March 4, 1681. The deputy sailed promptly to New York, where he received Acting Governor Anthony Brockholls’s proclamation, which directed the inhabitants of the Delaware colony to pledge allegiance to the new proprietor. As yet, Pennsylvania’s southern boundary started at a point twelve miles north of New Castle. Penn only later received the deed for the Lower Counties (now the State of Delaware) from James, Duke of York, in August 1682, thus obtaining greater control over the river and uniting European residents along the western bank under his government.2

Deputy Governor Markham, following the terms of his commission, first chose a council of nine inhabitants, then with their assistance reconsti- tuted and temporarily continued the authority of Upland Court; sounded the river and prepared to survey the land; informed the Lenapes of the new government; and contacted Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore and the proprietor of Maryland, to determine the boundary dividing the two colo- nies. Markham appointed seven of his councilors as justices of Upland Court, which had a total of eleven members and remained the primary locus of government in Pennsylvania from the fall of 1681 to the fall of 1682, when Penn arrived and established his provincial assembly and county courts. The deputy governor named three longtime residents—Otto Ernest Cock, Lasse Cock, and James Sandelands—to both his council and the Upland bench, and he appointed to the court the Swedes Sven Svensson of Wicaco and Anders Bengtsson of Moyamensing, for a total of five old settlers: three Swedes (Bengtsson, Lasse Cock, and Svensson), a Holsteiner

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Figure 16. Portrait of William Penn, by Francis Place. HSP Treasures Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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(Otto Ernest Cock), and a Scot who had married into the Swedish nation (Sandelands). The six English members formed a slight majority of the Upland Court constituted in the fall of 1681. They included the Quakers William Biles, William Clayton, Thomas Fairman, Robert Lucas, and Rob- ert Wade, and another Englishman, William Warner, whose religion is unknown; all had moved to the west bank during the late 1670s.3

Despite changed personnel and greater reliance on trial by jury, the Upland Court continued its preference for resolving differences and pun- ishing crimes in ways that promoted social unity rather than division. Under the governments of New Netherland and the Duke of York, the old settlers had held significant autonomy. Their justices strove in most cases to govern with a light hand, minimizing the negative impact of their judg- ments on individuals and the community. As far as can be determined from brief court minutes at a distance in time of more than three centuries, their decisions appear to have been moderate and fair. Despite access to more onerous penalties under the Duke of York’s laws for such offenses as theft, robbery, and fornication, the magistrates used peace bonds and fines rather than corporal punishment to regulate behavior. While the Friends are gen- erally credited for initiating the use of peace bonds in the Delaware Valley, the Quakers in fact continued the earlier practice of Upland Court.4

During the period between 1676 and 1681, for which Upland Court records exist prior to Markham’s arrival, the old settler justices did their best to resolve issues peacefully among the sometimes quarrelsome Dela- ware colonists. In September 1677, for example, Mårten Mårtensson, Jr., of Calcon Hook complained that his neighbor Måns Petersson Stake had chased his wife, Margaret, with an axe and then threatened both of them with a gun, yelling ‘‘get ye gone you rogue and whore or else I will shoot you.’’ Stake frequently got drunk and landed in court for misconduct. On this occasion, Mårtensson asked the court to bind Stake to good behavior and to pay court costs. The justices found for the plaintiff, fined Stake fifty guilders, required that he post security for good behavior for one year, and pay the costs of the suit. When Stake soon violated his bond by punching Anders Bonde in the face in Lasse Coleman’s sauna and requested leniency of the court because he was drunk, the justices forgave ‘‘his breach of the behavior’’ and fined him one hundred guilders.5

In October 1680, Stake was in trouble again with another neighbor, Hans Geörgen (Urian), with whom Stake exchanged several suits and countersuits for slander and assault. Receiving evidence from Mårten

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Mårtensson and William Orian of ‘‘great wrangling,’’ violence, and threats, the justices bound both Stake and Geörgen ‘‘to their good behaviors, strictly to keep His Majesty’s peace to each other and all other His Majesty’s sub- jects for the space of one year and six weeks.’’ Stake was also fined two hundred guilders and the two men shared court costs for the assault case. In one of the slander suits, Geörgen accused Stake of calling him a thief, which the defendant denied, saying ‘‘that he has only said that some plank which [Geörgen] had were like his own.’’ The court found against Stake but simply required he apologize publicly for his rash words and pay the costs of the suit.6

Despite Stake’s misbehavior when drunk, the Upland Court—with sup- port of the community—fined him for his crimes but resisted harsher pun- ishment. Also at the October 1680 court, Justice Otto Ernest Cock complained that Stake ‘‘maliciously has defamed and most highly slandered him in his honor & reputation’’ by calling him a hog thief. The defendant responded that he had never heard that Cock had done such a thing and that if he said so, ‘‘it must have been in his drink, he humbly desires forgive- ness, since he finds himself in a great fault.’’ The court again required Stake to apologize, to which he promptly complied, but this time the magistrates assessed a fine of 1,000 guilders, which would have ruined him. Stake asked that the fine be remitted and, with Cock’s intercession, the justices agreed. Remarkably, Stake later served on quite a few juries and was named an overseer for the highways in 1682.7

In various ways, prior to 1681 as well as during the transition period, the Upland Court worked to resolve differences peacefully between more recent English immigrants and the old settlers. In November 1677, Nils Larsson Frände complained that an English merchant named John Test ‘‘hath been troublesome to his son about a knife’’ and wanted to know why. After hearing both sides, the justices, ‘‘finding the business and difference of no value, did order the parties to be friends and forgive one the other.’’ The men agreed, Frände paying the court costs.8 In numerous other cases, the plaintiffs and defendants settled their differences prior to a court hearing.

The Upland justices also dealt with several fornication and adultery cases, placing emphasis on requiring the defendants’ future good behavior rather than meting out harsh punishment. On March 13, 1677, Sheriff Edmund Cantwell charged Richard Duckett, a servant of Lasse Cock, and a mulatto woman, Swart (Black) Anna, with fornication. The court contin- ued the case to June 1677, when Duckett confessed that he had made Anna

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pregnant, but he said he intended to marry her. Evidently required by the court, Duckett promised ‘‘for the future not to frequent the company of the said Anna, and engage[d] to the court to maintain the said child as soon he is free etc.’’ At his master Lasse Cock’s request, the justices remitted any further penalty ‘‘upon his humiliation.’’ No record indicates whether Anna was punished. Three months later Duckett petitioned for and received a grant of one hundred acres of land on the east side of the Schuyl- kill River.9

In June 1680, Constable Anders Homman informed the court that Claes Cram was living in adultery with Anna Larsdotter, the wife of Bengt Jöns- son Salung. The justices were indifferent to the case and told Homman to apprehend the lovers if they were seen together in the future. At the next court, in October 1680, the justices heard three cases related to Cram and the adultery charge. They first heard Cram’s defamation suit against Hans Petersson for calling him a thief. The court found Petersson guilty, ordering him to pay Cram twenty guilders for loss of his time. Next, Anders Jönsson Ekoren complained that Constable Homman ‘‘hath pulled him by the beard & twisted his neck’’; Ekoren wanted an explanation and reparation. Homman replied that ‘‘hearing of a whore & a rogue which kept at [Ekor- en’s] house, he was in pursuit of them & was obstructed & hindered of doing his office’’ by the plaintiff. The court ordered a nonsuit against Ekoren and ‘‘strictly forewarne[d] him of harboring the whore [Anna Lars- dotter] & her associates for the future.’’ Later the same day, the justices took up Constable Homman’s accusation against Cram and Larsdotter, instructing them for the ‘‘future not to keep company together any more under what pretext soever upon pain of severe punishment.’’10

Under the Duke of York’s laws, the Upland Court could have used corporal punishment or fines to punish the couples for fornication and adultery, but instead the couples were warned not to keep company in the future.11 This may have been stringent punishment for Richard Duckett and Anna, who planned to marry, and perhaps for the accused adulterers Cram and Larsdotter as well. Still, the court showed little appetite for root- ing out sexual misconduct and seemed to hope that Constable Homman would drop the case. In general, prior to the fall of 1681, the justices avoided corporal punishment and ruining offenders with heavy fines, and they accepted promises for future good behavior.

The Upland Court continued without interruption after William Penn’s charter, convening in September 1681 as the June court had planned. The

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nine justices present included four old settlers and five Englishmen who had immigrated in recent years. John Test had been appointed sheriff and Thomas Revell, clerk of the Burlington Court, served in the same position at Upland. An important change in Upland Court’s procedures during the transition period from the fall of 1681 to the fall of 1682 was the frequent use of twelve-man juries, which generally each included two to four Swedes and Finns. More often than before 1681, plaintiffs and defendants reached agreement prior to the court hearing, perhaps because of the cost and increased uncertainty of a jury trial. Most of the cases that went to trial involved charges of assault and battery, trespass, and debt; each case brought damages (against the plaintiff or defendant, depending on the jury’s verdict) of six pence to £5, or requirement to pay the outstanding debt and cost of the suit.12

The new Upland Court, with its grand and petit juries, continued the relatively mild practices of its predecessor. For example, when Henry Reyn- olds had to account for ‘‘selling strong liquors by small measure in his house,’’ he admitted his guilt and was discharged without penalty. In a case of hog theft, Richard Noble, Peter Rambo, Jr., and Lasse Lawson testified in court that they had ‘‘found divers pieces of burnt pork or bacon’’ in John Andersson’s house and an outbuilding, ‘‘where (as an Indian had before then informed them) the said Anderson used to hide pork.’’ They added that Andersson threatened them during their search. Despite testi- mony from several others, the jury found the defendant not guilty, judging the evidence insufficient to prove guilt. In June 1682 Reynier Petersson, Anders Petersson, and Reynier’s wife, Annicka, accused Annicka’s brother Lasse Dalbo of some unlawful conduct for which the details are lacking. Dalbo, who also faced several suits for debt, had gone missing despite a warrant for his arrest. He appeared in September and was indicted by the grand jury. Dalbo pleaded not guilty, a judgment to which the petit jury and justices agreed after Reynier Petersson and Anders Petersson could ‘‘say nothing to the matter in the indictment.’’ While the court took considerable effort to bring Dalbo to justice, without sufficient evidence they proclaimed him innocent.13

In this transitional period, when both old settlers and more recent English immigrants served as Upland justices, Deputy Governor Markham and the court were successful in avoiding ethnic rivalries. In September 1681, at the first meeting of Upland Court under Penn’s government, Jus- tice Lasse Cock faced charges from the Englishmen Daniel Brinson, Charles

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Brigham, and Walter Pumphrey, who claimed that ‘‘they heard certain Indians speak against him & Captain Edmond Cantwell.’’ When Cock denied the accusation, declaring ‘‘he had never spoken those words to the Indians, or any of that nature,’’ the court—besides himself comprised of three old settlers and five recent English immigrants—found him innocent. While the records fail to indicate the specific words that Cock allegedly said, the recent transfer of proprietorship suggests that he was accused of trying somehow to undermine the new government. Like other old settlers, as a trader and confidant of the Lenapes, Lasse Cock held both a powerful and vulnerable position. The new English immigrants needed help in estab- lishing commerce and purchasing land, but they also envied the old settlers’ linguistic abilities and close relations with the Natives. When Lasse Cock suffered this attack from Brinson, Brigham, and Pumphrey, he represented other Swedes and Finns with similar ties to the Lenapes. The court’s finding of not guilty signaled to old settlers and recent immigrants alike that inter- ethnic conflict would not be tolerated—at least until the Pennsylvania gov- ernment gained from the expertise of such men as Cock.14

The John Andersson and Lasse Dalbo cases discussed earlier also pro- vide examples of how the Upland Court sought to integrate the old and new settlers into one community. In the accusation of hog theft against Andersson, when the English Quaker Richard Noble and the Swedes Peter Rambo, Jr., and Lasse Lawson brought the charges to court, three old set- tlers served as Andersson’s sureties. The Upland justices who found him innocent in March 1682 consisted of Markham presiding, five old settlers, and four Englishmen. Andersson’s petit jury included six old settlers and six Englishmen. Markham had constituted the balanced court, which, along with Sheriff John Test, empaneled mixed juries. Both the old and more recent settlers participated in political leadership during 1681–82, continu- ing the earlier inclusive practices of the Upland Court. Lasse Dalbo’s case, tried in September 1682, further demonstrates this integrative approach. Markham again presided at court, with four old settler and three English justices. This time, however, with the growing population of Penn’s colo- nists, both juries were heavily skewed toward the recent immigrants, with only one old settler on the grand jury and two Swedes on the petit jury. Still, the mostly English petit jury cleared the Swede Dalbo.15

After the fall of 1682, with the arrival of Proprietor and Governor Wil- liam Penn and thousands of new immigrating Friends, English Quaker domination of the Pennsylvania government accelerated and solidified.

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Penn created courts in Bucks, Philadelphia, and Chester counties to replace the single Upland Court. In Chester County he continued from the Upland Court two English Quakers (William Clayton and Robert Wade) and the Holsteiner Otto Ernest Cock, and he appointed four English Quaker First Purchasers (John Bezar, Thomas Brassey, John Simcock, and Ralph With- ers) to fill out the bench. Most subsequent appointees to the Chester County Court over the next several years were also affluent English Quak- ers. Otto Ernest Cock served from June to October 1683, then dropped off the court. The prosperous merchant and plantation owner James Sande- lands, a Scottish old settler, served in 1684–85 and from 1689 to his death in 1692. With overwhelming Quaker immigration to Pennsylvania, the old settlers lost political control, as power shifted to a more hierarchical Dela- ware Valley society. The well-to-do Quakers who invested in Pennsylvania expected to dominate. The new representative General Assembly replaced local leadership that had governed through Upland Court and had main- tained the old settlers’ autonomy under the governments of New Nether- land and the Duke of York. Very few of the old settlers served in the General Assembly as representatives of Bucks, Philadelphia, and Chester counties. From 1682 to 1691, Lasse Cock sat on the provincial council for one year and on the General Assembly for four, while Anders Bengtsson, Gunnar Rambo, James Sandelands, and Sven Svensson each served in the Assembly for one or two years. A few Dutch old settlers, such as Peter Alrichs and Casparus Herrman, represented New Castle County.16

Despite the loss of political leadership, many of the old settlers tried to maintain their homesteads and integrate with the new immigrants rather than move away. According to a Swedish minister, Andreas Rudman, who arrived in 1697, his parishioners told him that Deputy Governor Markham had invited them ‘‘to settle in one area and live according to their own laws, but the Swedes preferred to remain where they were, under the English, which they and their children later bitterly regretted.’’ While Mark- ham could not have offered to let them live under Swedish law, he probably meant that they could keep their own court as formerly. Certainly it would have benefited Penn to remove all the Swedes from the prime land along the Delaware and its tributaries. The proprietor did allocate territory for them northwest of the city on the Schuylkill, where some later settled.17

In early 1684, cases of witchcraft against two women of the old settler community signaled danger, challenging the wisdom of trying to live among the English. The provincial council, with Penn presiding and Lasse

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Figure 17. The Landing of Penn at Dock Creek, Philadelphia. Courtesy State Museum of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

Cock, William Clayton, John Simcock, and Thomas Holme as councilors, heard accusations against Margaret Matsson and Gertrude Hendricksson, with their husbands posting bond. Several weeks later the grand jury, of whom only one of twenty-one men was a Swede, found a true bill; the council then tried Matsson before a petit jury that included no Swedes. Matsson rejected the witnesses’ statements as hearsay, denying that she had bewitched cattle and the like. The jury found her ‘‘guilty of having the common fame of a witch’’ but not guilty of practicing witchcraft. The council then decided not to try Hendricksson, releasing both women on bond for good behavior. Matsson and her husband immediately sold their farm on Crum Creek and moved with their son and his family to West Jersey. Hendricksson and her husband also left the area, taking up land in New Castle County. Though one of the witnesses claimed he had heard Mattson was a witch twenty years previously, the Upland Court had not prosecuted her earlier.18

The Swedes continued to use the local courts to obtain redress for vari- ous offenses until the mid-1690s, when they believed the provincial court wrongly sentenced one of their community to death. In an analysis of the

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Chester County Court records, the historian William M. Offutt, Jr., found that the old settlers initially recognized the authority of the Quaker bench by taking each other to court but then stopped participating after the execu- tion of a Bucks County Swede named Dirick Johnsson (also known as Derick Clawson). Between 1681 and 1695 forty-two Swedes sued other Swedes, while from 1696 to 1710, only one Swede sued another. Cases in which Swedes sued non-Swedes also declined significantly. Offutt suggests that ‘‘[i]n light of the evenhanded treatment of Swedes in civil cases, this legal peripheralization is surprising’’; he offers a convincing explanation that Johnsson’s 1693 conviction and execution on circumstantial evidence alienated the old settler community. Johnsson was arrested for murdering an unidentified person found at Neshaminy Creek and was held in prison from June to October 1692, when he obtained release on bail. The court deferred Johnsson’s trial until the next spring ‘‘to see if something further might not be discovered’’ beyond the substantial amount of blood found in his house. In April 1693, apparently without further evidence, the grand jury indicted him, his sister, and his wife, Brita. A jury of the provincial court of Oyer and Terminer found Johnsson guilty but released the women. He was one of only two persons executed in the Quaker colony prior to 1718.19

Johnsson’s execution and the Swedes’ withdrawal from the courts coin- cided with their concerted effort to obtain Lutheran ministers and religious books from Sweden. Johnsson and his family were members of the Swedish Lutheran congregation at Wicaco, so their plight was well known to the old settlers. Johnsson’s brother Claes and the prominent community leader Peter Rambo—probably the church warden rather than his eighty-one- year-old father—each posted £50 bond for the defendant’s appearance at trial. Peter Gunnarsson Rambo and Peter Rambo, Jr., led the list of thirty signers who sought to renew their connection with the Swedish Crown and church. Five years earlier they had lost their Swedish minister, Lars Lock, who had officiated at the Crane Hook church where a Swedish layman named Carl Springer now read sermons and led the singing of hymns. At Wicaco, the Lutheran minister Jacob Fabritius had preached in Dutch for sixteen years. The Swedes and Finns had no complaint with Fabritius because they understood Dutch and praised him as ‘‘a good preacher’’ who has ‘‘done his office in all possible parts mighty well,’’ but he was advanced in years and blind. Thus the Swedes requested two learned Swedish minis- ters to help them maintain the Swedish language and religion, who could

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defend ‘‘us against all false opposers who can or may oppose any of us . . . that if tribulation should come amongst us, and we should suffer our faith, that we are ready to seal it with our blood.’’20

In their 1693 letter to Sweden, the old settlers expressed no specific complaints about their treatment by Penn’s government, stating that ‘‘[i]n general, we all confess and proclaim and in truth say that we have been exceedingly and mighty well treated, both in the Dutch government as well as in His Majesty the King of England’s time.’’ Yet by removing their intra- group quarrels from the Pennsylvania courts and strengthening their Swed- ish identity through the church, they adopted a new strategy of ethnic politics, abandoning hope for significant participation in provincial and local government. While the Swedes recognized their good fortune in living under a relatively benign regime, still they resented their loss of local power and self-determination. They questioned whether they could expect due process in the English courts and thus turned inward and toward Sweden to create a community for mutual support. Though not all old settlers affil- iated, the Swedish Lutheran congregations extended from Christina and Wicaco to incorporate colonists in Upper Merion along the Schuylkill, Elk River in Maryland, and Raccoon, Penn’s Neck, and Egg Harbor in West Jersey. By requesting Swedish ministers, people of Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, German, and other backgrounds united together to create a com- munity based on Swedish identity, known to themselves and others as ‘‘the Swedes.’’21

The Swedes claimed the rights they had retained under the Dutch and the Duke of York, using their churches as a political base. As before, their ministers provided leadership by writing letters and petitions and by culti- vating alliances with other outsider groups. The Swedes played an impor- tant role in developing interest-group politics in early Pennsylvania, opposing the authority of Quakers within a government sufficiently open to permit free exchange. When James Logan, Penn’s secretary of the province, attempted repressive action against the Swedes in 1709, they used their ties to the Church of England and Lenapes to battle back, thus resorting to methods they had previously employed under New Netherland and the Duke of York. As an ethnic group willing to defend their group identity, needs, and positions against centralized authority, the Swedes influenced the development of interest politics in colonial Pennsylvania.22

While Penn had expected to preside over a harmonious community dominated by Quakers in which the colonists dutifully paid quitrents and

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approved his proposed laws in appreciation for beneficent government, from the beginning the proprietor faced opposition even from fellow Friends. Like the old settlers and Lenapes, many Quakers carefully guarded their autonomy and economic welfare, and they thus used every excuse to block Penn’s efforts to cover the heavy expenses of colonization and obtain the profits he anticipated from the Pennsylvania grant. The Keithian con- troversy of the early 1690s complicated politics among the colonial leader- ship as the Society of Friends split over the insistence of a Scottish Quaker, George Keith, that Friends should adopt a confession of faith and acknowl- edge Jesus Christ more centrally in their religion. The spiritual debate became a vehicle for political factionalism, with many Keithians collaborat- ing with the Anglicans to oppose Quaker dominance. Penn’s personal trou- bles in England, as he dealt with accusations of treason after the Glorious Revolution deposed his patron James II (formerly the Duke of York), added to the colony’s political chaos in the 1690s. When Penn lost the Pennsylva- nia charter from 1692 to 1694, the monarchs William and Mary appointed a governor who—like most governors appointed by Penn—found the fac- tionalized populace nearly impossible to govern. Penn’s absence from Pennsylvania except for two short sojourns in 1682–84 and 1699–1701 removed his personal influence and helped to undercut the authority of his government.23

During the 1690s, Swedish freeholders only tentatively took part in pro- vincial politics fractured by the Keithian schism and Penn’s temporary loss of the government. In 1692, approximately 33 old settlers were among 261 dissidents who opposed the Quaker oligarchy’s plan for a tax on real and personal property to provide a salary for Deputy Governor Thomas Lloyd. The petition had its intended effect when the lower house of the Assembly refused to pass the bill. Just a few Swedes were among the 117 inhabitants of the town and county of Philadelphia who signed a welcoming address to Benjamin Fletcher, with whom William and Mary replaced Thomas Lloyd when they suspended Penn’s government. The Swedes’ opposition to the Quaker elite remained muted in the 1690s, as factions shifted with the Kei- thian schism and the return in 1694 of Penn’s right to govern. The proprie- tor helped the three Swedish ministers Andreas Rudman, Ericus Björk, and Jonas Aurén gain the English government’s permission to serve in Pennsyl- vania. After they arrived in 1697, the Swedes joyfully wrote to Penn thank- ing him for his assistance with the Crown. They were also pleased that Penn had once again appointed William Markham as deputy governor: ‘‘The

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LORD grant that we may always for the future have so good & loving governors as we now have. And also shall our real duty be as becomes true and obedient subjects.’’ They hoped that if Penn had received ‘‘false stories and ill deserved reports’’ about them from ‘‘ill disposed and malicious people’’ that he would discount them because ‘‘we live peaceably both in temporal & spiritual.’’ Still, like other non-Quakers, the Swedes were disap- pointed with their lack of representation in the Assembly and other offices. Robert Turner, an ex-Quaker who had joined the Keithians, alerted Penn in 1697 to ‘‘muttering & discontent’’ because ‘‘our Friends for this several years in the province I observe do not put up or propose either Dutch, Swede, Finn or any other person not of our persuasion: Baptist, Indepen- dent, Presbyterian, or Church of England man’’ for election.24 Nevertheless, over the next several years, the Swedish ministers focused their congrega- tions on building new churches and updating their knowledge of church ritual and discipline through tutoring and use of the Bibles and other reli- gious books the ministers had brought. From there, the Swedes built a political base in collaboration with their Anglican neighbors.

Swedes became alarmed in 1700 when Penn contemplated a naturaliza- tion fee to bolster his revenues. Like others in the province, the old settlers had rejoiced at his arrival the previous year for his second (and final) visit, hoping that he could resolve the political problems plaguing the colony. The Swedish ministers and some members of their congregations met with Penn as soon as he arrived ‘‘and found that he would not forget his given promises to embrace . . . Swedes, with the same favor and goodness as any of the rest.’’ Pastor Andreas Rudman lived near Penn ‘‘so that he had free access to him, and the governor himself often walk[ed] to his house.’’ Nevertheless, by 1700, the colonists discovered that Penn was primarily concerned about raising taxes to help pay his huge debts. As Ericus Björk wrote to the Swedish ambas- sador Carl Leijoncrona in London, ‘‘But so many as wished the governor here before he came, as many, and perhaps the greater part of them, would gladly see that he were not here now, for all his proposals, as the English notice, aim only for money.’’ Of particular concern to the Swedes was a proposal for a naturalization fee of thirty-two shillings, of which Penn would receive twenty shillings each. The Swedes lobbied the governor and Assembly against this, receiving an assurance that the tax would apply only to non- English who had arrived since the proprietor received the charter in 1681.25

Penn’s efforts to regularize his revenues from quitrents generated seri- ous animosity among the Swedes, raising resentments held since the early

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years of his proprietorship. The old settlers told Rudman that they had lost most of their best land to the English Quakers ‘‘who usurped property the Swedes held, especially along the water, cleared the land and made it bald, and crowded the Swedes, who had neither the will nor the understanding to strive with them.’’ By 1700, Rudman reported, nearly half of the old settlers had moved to West New Jersey and others had ‘‘sold their precious land along the water and had to go up into the country’’ where they had more land ‘‘in the woods.’’26

The Swedes’ anger over land claims came to a head in June 1709 when they petitioned the Pennsylvania Assembly about grievances against James Logan, the proprietor’s chief representative in the province with responsibili- ties (among others) for land titles and distribution, collection of quitrents, and relations with Native Americans (see Figure 18). While many individual colonists opposed Logan’s efforts to collect money for Penn, twenty-four Swedes banded together as an interest group to press their case, with help from the minister Andreas Sandel, who in 1702 had replaced Rudman at Wicaco. They organized their petition at a particularly contentious time in Pennsylvania politics after the arrival of a new governor, Charles Gookin. The Quaker lawyer David Lloyd led the majority in the Assembly in a power struggle with Logan over the extent of Penn’s proprietary privileges. The Swedes protested that Penn’s officials had taken the patents they received under the Duke of York and re-surveyed their land so that some lost acreage while others had to pay higher quitrents than before. They believed that their farms and quitrents should have remained the same regardless of whether the new surveys revealed a different acreage from previous patents. When Logan pressed them for payment, they claimed to be the tenants of Queen Anne rather than William Penn. Logan threatened ‘‘to make distress upon our goods for the said rents’’ and though some paid, he ‘‘most basely abused and reviled us, telling us we were no better than Indians, with several other scoffing terms.’’ The Swedes asked the Assembly to instruct Logan to restore their original patents and refund the excess quitrent money that ‘‘unjustly has [been] exacted from us these twenty years past.’’27

The Assembly referred the petition to Governor Gookin, recommend- ing that he give the Swedes ‘‘speedy relief.’’ Gookin discussed the document with his provincial council, including Logan, who denied that he and his predecessors had treated the old settlers unfairly. Two months later, in August 1709, two of the petitioners, Matthias Nitzelius and Mårten Mårtensson, returned to the Assembly for a response. Upon learning that

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Figure 18. Portrait of James Logan by Thomas Sully (after Gustavus Hesselius), 1831.

The Library Company of Philadelphia.

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the house had not heard back from the governor and provincial council, the Swedes warned that they would find assistance elsewhere. Representa- tives from the Assembly reported this to the council, interpreting it as a threat to seek help from the Swedish ambassador in London, which the council—attended that day by Gookin, Logan, and five wealthy Friends— considered ‘‘exceedingly insolent.’’ The council reprimanded Nitzelius, Mårtensson, and Nils Lycon, advising them that they should have peti- tioned the proprietor or his Board of Property for relief rather than the government. Instead of signing a group petition, the specific persons with grievances ‘‘ought to complain in a proper way, & not those of the nation conspire together, to make themselves a faction.’’ The council alleged that the Swedes had acted at the instigation of the proprietor’s enemies. The Swedes ‘‘had always behaved themselves peaceably & as good subjects hith- erto’’ and thus had been treated well by Penn’s government. They should refrain from group action—individuals with grievances should proceed in the English way by petitioning the proper agency or going to the law. In conclusion, the council advised the Swedes ‘‘to take more care of them- selves for the future, and not to render themselves obnoxious to their best friends, by factious caballing, only to gratify the ill-nature of those who never intended nor were capable of serving them.’’28

The petitioning Swedes did not yield, attending the Board of Property meeting on September 14, 1709. There they met with four of the same men who had attended the provincial council meeting in August—Logan, Edward Shippen, Richard Hill, and Samuel Preston—along with two other affluent Quakers, Griffith Owen and Caleb Pusey. After this meeting, the Swedes reported back to the Assembly that for all their efforts they had ‘‘received nothing but scurrilous and affrontive language from the Secretary [Logan], instead of satisfaction.’’29

Neither Logan nor the Swedes let the dispute drop, as the secretary returned to England in December 1709 to confer with Penn about the pro- prietor’s financial problems and the power struggle with David Lloyd and the Assembly; the Swedish community pursued interest politics. In England, after Logan reported to the proprietor on matters including the Swedes’ petition, Penn complained to the Swedish ambassador Carl Gyl- lenborg. The Pennsylvania Swedes, fearing loss of their supply of ministers and books, successfully defended their position to the Swedish government. The Swedes also took the offensive, joining with the Anglicans to oppose the Quakers’ right in government and legal matters to affirm that they were

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speaking the truth rather than take an oath. In doing so the Swedes embroiled themselves in a political struggle between the dominant Quaker faction and the Anglicans, who were members of the established church in England but a minority in Pennsylvania. The Friends refused to take oaths to assume political office or testify in court because they believed that peo- ple should not have to invoke God in promising to fulfill their duty or tell the truth. The Assembly had previously passed affirmation acts that the English Privy Council repealed, and it enacted yet another in 1710. If the British government refused Quakers the right to affirm in taking office, no observant Friend could hold office and thus they would lose control of the colony. In a 1711 letter to Queen Anne supporting the Anglican position, the Swedes actively opposed Quaker authority in Pennsylvania. They dis- puted the Friends’ claim that they should have the right of affirmation because ‘‘they were the first settlers, and out of a wilderness made this a country’’; instead, the older settlers pointed out the following: ‘‘most of us were born in this country long before any Quakers came, and . . . our ancestors and some of us their children living still . . . have reduced the natives here to general obedience, which was too difficult for men of Quaker principles to have done, so that the Quakers when they came found it a country in peace.’’30 In association with the Anglicans, whose ministers collaborated regularly with the Swedish pastors, the Swedes pursued their factional opposition to the Quaker government.

James Logan and the provincial council responded to the old settlers’ attacks in terms reminiscent of the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant and the English governor Francis Lovelace, questioning the Swedes’ loyalty and alliance with Native Americans. The council reminded Penn in August 1715 that the Swedes were ‘‘using their own language and having their own min- isters,’’ and thus the Swedes might side with their parent country if Great Britain and Sweden went to war. Even more, the proprietor should consider alerting the government about ‘‘the state of this river where there are such numbers of those people especially when the Indians of America seem so unsettled with whom these old inhabitants have a more intimate acquain- tance than any others.’’31 Indeed, the Swedish pastors had recognized the partnership of the Swedes and Natives in the late 1690s and early 1700s, stating that ‘‘they are like brothers and sisters,’’ with the Lenapes calling the Swedes ‘‘their own people and their brothers, which they do not call the English.’’ The two groups ‘‘live[d] together in the most friendly manner, in trade, in council and justice.’’ Andreas Rudman and Ericus Björk suggested

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to the Swedish ambassador in London that an important reason for this friendship was that the old settlers knew ‘‘all kinds of languages, Swedish, German, Finnish, Dutch, sometimes French, English, and American [Len- ape, Susquehannock], as their own language, the greater part of them, while the English only know their own.’’ While circumstances had changed since the Lenape sachem Naaman and the Swedish governor Risingh forged their coalition in 1654, ties remained that buttressed the cultural platform on which new immigrants further developed Delaware Valley society. Accord- ing to Andreas Sandel in 1702, the local Natives ‘‘are so faithful to the Swedes that if one of them should hear that a Swede was in any kind of danger, he would be willing to run a hundred miles to warn him.’’32

Since the mid-seventeenth century, under the governments of New Sweden, New Netherland, the Duke of York, and William Penn, the old settlers had maintained significant autonomy in alliance with neighboring Lenapes. Though the Swedes lost political power by 1682 with the over- whelming influx of new immigrants to Pennsylvania, they remained in- fluential in relations with the Lenapes and by working together as a community. Some Swedes resisted selling their plantations and protested when new surveys resulted in loss of acreage or increased quitrents. Others moved to locations in New Jersey, northeast Maryland, and up the Schuyl- kill River where they could pursue their woodland agriculture in proximity to Native Americans. As prior to 1681, the Swedes continued to oppose centralized power, now working through ethnic group politics rather than the local governmental authority they had held under the Dutch and Duke of York.

The influx of Europeans on both sides of the Delaware disrupted the Lenapes much more seriously than the Swedes, as the Natives’ population declined precipitously once again from smallpox and other diseases. While the Natives continued to live in autonomous (though linked) towns, the number of villages dwindled as groups merged to create new socially cohe- sive communities within various parts of West Jersey and in Bucks County, along the upper Schuylkill, and near the Brandywine River in Pennsylvania. As earlier, the Lenapes held land on both sides of the river and considered themselves a sovereign, independent people. To a certain extent, the experi- ence of Lenapes was similar to that of the Swedes after the new immigrants flooded in: just as the Armewamese, Mantes, Cohanseys, and others became known as ‘‘Delawares’’ to the English, people of Swedish, Finnish, Dutch,

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German, French, and English backgrounds who affiliated with the Swedish Lutheran community became ‘‘Swedes.’’ Both groups lost political power and prime lands along the Delaware and its tributaries.

The colonists and Lenapes alike noted the Natives’ population decline after the Quaker influx. In 1694, the Germantown leader Francis Daniel Pastorius wrote that so many Lenapes had died in the decade since he arrived that only about one-quarter remained. While many had passed away, some of the decline in Lenape numbers in Pastorius’s environs also resulted from migration north, west, and east to New Jersey. The Swedish ministers Rudman and Björk noted in 1697 that the Lenapes were ‘‘now very scarce’’ in the Philadelphia area though at Passyunk ‘‘there were for- merly many thousands, but now there are none. God has exterminated them through contagious diseases, war among themselves, etc.’’ At a July 1694 meeting of about eight Lenape sachems and two Susquehannocks with Deputy Governor Markham and the Pennsylvania Provincial Council, the Cohansey leader Mehocksett emphasized the Lenapes’ unity, stating that though some of them ‘‘live on the other side of the river, yet we reckon ourselves all one, because we drink one water,’’ the Lenapewihittuck. In response to the demand of the Iroquois that the Lenapes join them in fighting the French, the sachems sought support from the Pennsylvania government for refusing: ‘‘we having always been a peaceable people, & resolving to live so, & being but weak and very few in number, cannot assist them; & having resolved among ourselves not to go, do intend to send back this their belt of wampum.’’ The Lenapes made this decision despite the taunt of the Iroquois that ‘‘you Delaware Indians do nothing but stay at home & boil your pots, and are like women, while we Onondages & Sene- kaes go abroad & fight against the enemy.’’ As the historian Gunlög Fur notes, this is the first extant record of the Iroquois calling the Lenapes women. Though the Iroquois expected help from the Lenapes as part of the Anglo–Native American alliance called the Covenant Chain, the Lenapes demonstrated their independence by refusing to go to war. Thus they also reinforced the culture that they had mutually developed with the old set- tlers, and in turn they supported the Quakers’ commitment to nonviolence. The Iroquois complained about the Lenapes just as the English government found fault with the Pennsylvania colonists’ failure to supply troops.33

Despite their waning numbers, and in collaboration with the Swedes, the Lenapes bargained effectively in negotiations for the land that William

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Penn so eagerly sought. With Lasse Cock and other old settlers interpreting, the sachems explained the process and terms upon which they would sell territory. As with New Sweden, New Netherland, and the Duke of York, they anticipated annual gifts, fair exchange in the fur trade, renegotiated agreements when lands remained unsettled, and rights to hunt, fish, and travel in ceded areas. Penn intended to deal respectfully and justly with the Lenapes, purchasing all lands before settlement. In October 1681 he wrote to the sachems that he ‘‘desire[d] to enjoy [his new colony] with your love and consent, that we may always live together as neighbors and friends.’’ From 1682 to 1684 the proprietor systematically bought land along the Delaware, Schuylkill, and lower Susquehanna rivers for goods worth the substantial sum of at least £1,200. While Penn expected with this largesse to dictate the treaty terms, he and his associates soon learned that the Natives negotiated well.34

In July and early August 1682, sixteen sachems concluded the first treaty with Deputy Governor William Markham for land in southern Bucks County between Neshaminy Creek and the Delaware. Several of the Len- apes—Oreckton, Mamarakiekon, Nanacussy, and Sackoquewan—had pre- viously sold the territory to Governor Andros, but now they confirmed the transfer to Penn in return for a large amount of wampum, blankets, cloth- ing, guns, ammunition, tools, knives, rum, and Dutch guilders. At least part of the treaty took place at the home of Lasse Cock, who served as interpreter and advised Markham that he needed to bring together all likely owners of the land to confirm the purchase in order to avoid objections like those Ockanickon and Metapis had raised to the 1675 sale.35

The detail and precision of the July–August 1682 deed suggest that Markham wanted to avoid later controversies with the Lenapes over the exact limits of the land sold and to establish a basis for subsequent deals. His memorandum accompanying the deed outlines the general principles on which the sachems and Pennsylvania officials agreed to cooperate: the Lenapes would warn the English if they heard that other Indians planned to attack; the Lenapes and English would hold an annual meeting to review the terms of their agreements (and presumably exchange gifts); in any case of conflict between settlers and Natives they would ask the appropriate authorities for satisfaction ‘‘according to their offense’’; and Lenapes would complain to the Pennsylvania government before attacking a colonist who mistakenly settled on unpurchased land. The Natives carefully protected

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Figure 19. Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, 1771–72. This painting helped to perpetuate the myths that William Penn originated good relations with the Lenapes and that they passively received his beneficence. The work is also inaccurate in its portrayal of the Lenapes’ dress, Philadelphia in 1682, and Penn’s appearance.

Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr., Collection).

within this treaty the right of free passage across lands, which they had observed with the Swedes since the 1640s. Markham recorded the under- standing ‘‘that we may freely pass through any of their lands as well that which is not purchased as that which is, without molestation, as they do quietly amongst us.’’36

While the legendary treaty of Shackamaxon between Penn and the Len- ape sachems has been lost and thus we lack knowledge of the specifics of the proprietor’s first face-to-face meeting with the Natives, this memoran- dum of understanding between the Lenapes and Markham served as the foundation for Lenape-Pennsylvania relations. The sachems, with the help of Lasse Cock and other Swedes, convinced the deputy governor to con- tinue features of collaboration along the Lenapewihittuck that had existed since Naaman’s treaty with Governor Risingh in 1654: pledges to warn of

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enemy attack, permit joint access to lands, consult regularly, and work together to avoid disputes. In 1682, Penn readily agreed with several of these provisions. He had proposed an arbitration process for dealing with differences between colonists and Natives that he instructed his officials to explain to the Lenapes at their first meeting, and he was certainly gratified by their willingness to warn the colonists of any impending attack. In addi- tion, though the proprietor had initially opposed open hunting and fishing rights in Pennsylvania, he approved the Assembly’s bill for these privileges and by 1684 he was sufficiently comfortable with the concept of joint access to argue to Colonel George Talbot of Maryland, who was representing Lord Baltimore, that the ‘‘Indians have a native right to hunt, fish, and fowl in all places and are not to be hindered from it by the English.’’ Penn also understood that the Lenapes would insist on subsequent payment for land that the colonists failed to occupy promptly. In instructions to Markham in 1683 regarding the boundary dispute with Lord Baltimore, Penn wrote, ‘‘It hath been the practice of America . . . even among Indians & Christians, to account not taking up, marking & in some degree planting, a reversion of right; for the Indians do make people buy over again that land the people have not seated in some years after purchased which is the practice also of all these governments towards the people inhabiting under them.’’37

As months passed and the cost of purchasing and renewing land rights mounted, the proprietor found it more difficult to maintain his amicable persona while paying large sums he could ill afford. Still, initially, he com- plied with the sachems’ demands. In July 1684, inhabitants of Philadelphia complained that Penn had not yet given them clear title to their lands because he continued to present regular gifts to the Natives: ‘‘These present acts of civility & courtesy between the Proprietary and the Indians, being no regular purchase nor clearing of Indian title, as often experience has evidenced in America.’’ The settlers wanted Penn to force the Lenapes to adhere to English practice, which the proprietor could not do. He re- sponded sharply that he had purchased the land ‘‘at the greatest charge of any Proprietor & Governor in America. . . . [T]he land is both bought, the bounds either marked or natural.’’ He acknowledged that the Natives might be ‘‘unjust’’ and suspected the ‘‘hand’’ of an unnamed enemy ‘‘in our business.’’38

In December 1684 a Pennsylvania official, Nicholas More, informed Penn, after his return to England, that indeed there was a problem with the Lenapes, especially Nanacussy, who had signed the July–August 1682 deed

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for lower Bucks County and the July 1683 deed for land between the Schuylkill River and Pennypack Creek. More wrote that the ‘‘Indians are much displeased at our English settling upon their land, and seem to threaten us, saying that William Penn hath deceived them not paying for what he bought of them.’’ Nanacussy was impatient, ‘‘saying that William Penn shall be his brother no more’’ because he had not paid him what was previously promised and would now have to provide additional goods. The sachem was also angry because the Philadelphia magistrates failed to take action when he was robbed. More assured Penn that the provincial court would ‘‘do the utmost of our power to pacify him.’’39

A provincial councilor and surveyor-general named Thomas Holme warned Penn that the Falls sachem Tamany was threatening to burn the houses of settlers, that ‘‘he hath so discouraged our people that we cannot get them to go into Bucks County to settle’’; they were purchasing planta- tions in New Jersey instead. Penn responded to Holme that he had given the Lenapes match coats, stockings, and guns as a down payment and ‘‘if therefore they are rude and unruly, you must make them keep their word by just course.’’ Penn believed that the Lenapes should discipline Tamany for his misbehavior: ‘‘if the Indians will not punish him, we will & must, for they must never see you afraid of executing the justice they ought to do.’’ Pressured by both the colonists and Natives, and short on cash, Penn lost patience with the Lenapes when they would not meekly accept his terms. He believed he had been more than generous and that they should trust him to fulfill his debts. For their part, the Natives were infuriated and fearful, as thousands of colonists arrived to inhabit their land. The dynamic was much different from before Penn, and by 1684 it was clear that Euro- pean settlement in the Delaware Valley would be systematic and dense as in the Chesapeake and New England, not scattered as under the Swedes, Dutch, and Duke of York. The Quaker proprietor believed he had the Len- apes’ ‘‘love and consent’’ to take control of their country. He was unhappy when the sachems successfully pushed for larger payments than he wished to make.40 He had grasped their territory with gifts and promises rather than conquest but, all the same, his colonists now populated most of the lands adjacent to the Delaware. With the Lenapes’ diminished numbers, they could sustain their traditional livelihood in agricultural villages at the heads of tributaries, and by hunting and fishing in more remote areas of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They maintained ties with both the Swedes who also fled the onrush of new immigrants and other Natives who

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migrated into the Susquehanna Valley during the eighteenth century. Still, the Delaware Valley had become an English country. The Lenapes no longer dominated as they had before 1681.

Though relations between the Pennsylvania government and Lenape sachems stayed peaceful in comparison with other English colonies where fighting erupted in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, dis- agreements over land sales and conflicts between individuals of each side disrupted Penn’s hopes for intergroup harmony. Bucks County remained a trouble spot in 1686 when Israel Taylor surveyed land above the Falls that had not been bought. When the sachems threatened to kill the surveyor, Markham arranged to meet with them along with Lasse Cock, Måns Cock, Thomas Holme, and several English settlers to negotiate a deed. Holme later wrote Penn that the sachems demanded a high price, that the proprie- tor must send a large order of goods from England for ‘‘till all is paid, we can have no lines run.’’ Penn apparently never paid the sachems in full, leaving the bargain unsettled. James Logan and Penn’s heirs in 1737 used a copy of the draft deed to defraud the Natives of a vast territory from central Bucks County to the Poconos in what became known as the Walking Purchase.41

At the same time Markham arranged this treaty, in the summer of 1686, he received a false report that Lenapes had murdered Nicholas Scull and his family at their home northwest of the city in Philadelphia County near a Lenape town. During a religious ceremony, some of the Lenapes went to buy alcohol from Scull because he had sold it to them previously, but this time he refused. They broke into his house at night, overpowered him, and took some of his rum. The initial report via a neighbor was that the entire family was killed but further investigation yielded the truth. Markham was dubious about the first report because many Lenapes were in town, so he could not imagine that the sachems had planned an attack. Relations were good enough between the Native leaders and colonial government that Markham checked before assuming the worst. Still, he was unable to obtain satisfaction from the Lenapes who assaulted and robbed Scull. When Mark- ham tried to meet them at their town up the Schuylkill, with Måns Cock and Sven Svensson as interpreters, the troublemakers had departed, appar- ently protected by leading members of their community.42

With the overwhelming numbers of European immigrants after 1681 and sale of Lenape lands along the Delaware, the Natives built new commu- nities near the Brandywine and the upper Schuylkill. The Swedes retained

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Figure 20. ‘‘A Map of the Province of Pennsilvania Containing the Three Countyes of Chester, Philadelphia, & Bucks,’’ by Thomas Holme, 1687. This section of

the larger map shows where surveying stopped in central Bucks County because Penn failed to pay the Lenapes for the land.

Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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their links with the Lenapes by establishing homesteads nearby, in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey; French and English traders also settled on the upper Schuylkill. By the late seventeenth century, a significant market existed in England for deerskins as a source of leather, thus providing the Lenapes and other Pennsylvania Natives a commercial product they could supply directly, unlike beaver pelts that could be obtained in quantity only from Canada. Like the Swedes and Dutch before them, Penn, Logan, and other Pennsylvania colonists regarded the fur trade as an essential facet of successful colonization. Lasse Cock, Måns Cock, Sven Svensson, John Hansson Steelman, and other Swedes continued their commerce with the Lenapes and other Natives as far west as the Susquehanna and north to the Lehigh Valley. The English merchant Zachariah Whitpain and the French traders Jacques Le Tort, Peter Bizaillon, and Martin Chartier also exploited the Schuylkill’s strategic location. From there, they could access the Susque- hanna, Ohio, and Mississippi valleys by canoe and portage.43

The most successful of the fur traders in early eighteenth-century Penn- sylvania, however, was none other than James Logan, who edged out his employer, William Penn, to create a lucrative commercial scheme by which he earned profits in three ways: on furs purchased from the Natives, on manufactured goods sold to his network of traders, and on land he seized from Natives as well as from traders who fell into debt. Logan used his monopoly of power as Penn’s secretary, commissioner of property, and provincial councilor (among other offices) to build his fortune. To a large extent he filled the power vacuum resulting from Penn’s absence from the colony after 1701 and the proprietor’s incapacity after suffering a series of strokes in 1712.44

The Lenapes, like the Swedes, thus influenced the development of Penn- sylvania despite the thousands of new immigrants who came with Penn. At first, through their mutual alliance, the Natives and old settlers negotiated with the Quakers from a position of strength. Both groups welcomed the Quakers, offered assistance during their first difficult months in America, and initiated the proprietor and his officials into the legal, diplomatic, eco- nomic, and cultural practices of their society. Most of the new settlers accepted the norms that the Swedes and Lenapes had embraced: the lenient processes of the Upland Court; treaty protocol of the Lenapes and other Natives; broad acceptance of people of diverse ethnic backgrounds and reli- gions; joint use of property for hunting, fishing, and travel; and an unwill- ingness to submit to arbitrary authority. The Quakers’ beliefs were generally

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congruent with these norms, exemplified by Penn’s commitment to found his colony with the Lenapes’ ‘‘love and consent.’’ After the first years of transition, however, when Penn and his colonists became less dependent on help from the Swedes and Lenapes, the new regime learned that the pre- 1681 inhabitants could still exert power. The Swedes organized a robust ethnic interest group, taking advantage of the relatively benign, factional- ized Pennsylvania government and their long-standing ties with the Natives. The Lenapes, now diminished in population, land, and power, pursued an equally adept politics, manipulating the Quaker government with threats of violence. The Lenapes held on to their last bastion of land in eastern Pennsylvania from central Bucks County to the Poconos by refusing to permit surveys until they were fully paid for the territory, which the financially strapped Penn could not do. They counted on officials com- mitted to the Quaker peace testimony not to risk bloodshed—and were successful until James Logan and Penn’s sons stole the land through the 1737 Walking Purchase, leading two decades later to the Seven Years’ War.

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