First City. Gary B. Nash
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a map of Pennsylvania proved harder to obtain. The proprietor sent his friend Thomas Holme to survey eastern Pennsylvania, and along with him went John Ladd, whose surveying instruments ended up in the Chicago Historical Society, which donated them to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania just 300 years after Ladd arrived on the Delaware. Holme and Ladd worked for five years surveying the site of Philadelphia and the original counties of Philadelphia, Bucks, and Chester. After Penn returned to London, he called again and again for the map. “All cry out, where is your map, what no map of your Settlements?” he wrote in September 1686 to Holme.14 Finally it came the following year—a monumental map (Figure 6) showing the land granted to 670 early settlers, with some tracts of land left unlabeled because of disputed land titles. It was quickly engraved on six plates and sold by Quaker booksellers in London.
Penn’s attempts to draft a frame of government were no less difficult. How did one devise a system of government that guaranteed a more just, peaceful, and equal society? Penn could do nothing by decree, and even the extensive powers granted him in his charter from the king were only as good as his settlers’ willingness to accept them. Like all utopia builders, Penn had to consult, cajole, and compromise in constructing his “frame of government.” Many interested parties advised and lobbied Penn in organizing the civil system under which colonists would live. Penn published an early version in London in 1681, one of twenty drafts of the Frame of Government finally hammered out the next year. But to his dismay, a ratifying convention, meeting at Chester in December 1682, shortly after Penn arrived in his colony, rejected the document because it gave too much power to the governor and council and too little to the elected assembly. It was hardly the golden age that the founders of the Historical Society remembered and wanted fellow Philadelphians to recall.
Pacifism and Indian Relations
“… the king of the Countrey where I live, hath given unto me a great Province therein, but I desire to enjoy it with your Love and Consent, that we may always live together as Neighbours and friends.”15 In this single sentence, written to Lenape chiefs of the Delaware Valley, Penn dissociated himself from nearly two hundred years of violent European colonization in the Americas. He imagined colonization without conquest in the sylvan woods granted by his king, though no precedent for this existed.
The Historical Society did not have the scholarly interest in the Indian languages, customs, and human traits held by American Philosophical Society members. However, Historical Society leaders were deeply invested in preserving the writings and artifacts related to Indian-white relations. Just treatment of the Indians and the covenant of friendship Penn established with them gave Quakers historical legitimacy earned by no other aspect of their lives. Also, Penn’s amity with the Indians stood in sharp contrast to the forcible sending of the Five Civilized Nations west along the “trail of tears” in the 1830s and the blood-drenched Indian wars west of the Mississippi River a generation later. Cultivating the memory of the founder’s uniqueness in Indian relations also gave the Society of Friends missionary work among western Indian nations throughout the nineteenth century a special resonance. The Philosophical Society publicized its ethnological and philological studies of Indians, while the Historical Society capitalized on the Quaker treatment of Indians. The lesson was not lost on President Ulysses S. Grant, who in 1869, seeking to reform the government’s treatment of western Native Americans, appointed Friends to direct the effort. Among those sent to the Great Plains were Samuel M. Janney, biographer of William Penn and author of other histories of the Quakers.
Within its first decade, the Historical Society acquired important Indian materials, including some of the writings of John Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary who had translated three Indian languages into English. Penn’s 1681 manuscript letter, “To the Kings of the Indians,” was a more poignant and usable piece. In it, Penn assured the Lenape of his good intentions and promised that the colony would have no walled forts, the symbols of interracial conflict to the north and south. “… the great God … hath made us not to devoure and destroy one an other but live Soberly and kindly together in the world … I have great love and regard towards you, and I desire to Winn and gain your love & friendship by a kind, just and peaceable life.”16 Penn also intended that such assurances would instill confidence in prospective settlers, who knew from reports published in England that up and down the Atlantic seaboard, from Maine to South Carolina, a devastating series of Indian wars had been fought just a few years before. Published in London in 1681, the manuscript letter would not be donated to the Historical Society until 1891, a year after the Wounded Knee Massacre ended the Great Plains Indian wars.
Other treasured acquisitions could solidify remembrance of the Quakers’ attempt to show that, by disavowing violence and practicing fair dealing, people of different cultures could live together. The deed from the Lenape for approximately one hundred square miles of present-day Bucks County, negotiated by Penn’s deputy William Markham in the summer of 1682, was not acquired until 1867, but it was frequently displayed to refresh the public’s memory of Quaker benevolence and fair play. Signed with marks by twelve Indian leaders, it is the first known written agreement in Pennsylvania between native people and Penn’s agents. There is more than a little irony in the fact that among the trade goods Markham agreed to exchange for the vast tract of land were guns and liquor. Markham was unaware that four of the Lenape chiefs had earlier sold a portion of this same tract to New York’s governor, Edmund Andros. Like other American Indian leaders, the Lenape chiefs did not view a deed as a complete surrender of land but rather as permission for white newcomers to use the land and live there with indigenous people.
Historians and anthropologists have pointed out that the peaceful relations between the Quakers and Lenape lasting throughout Penn’s lifetime were not simply the triumph of pacifist ideology. Much to the advantage of Quaker farmers seeking fertile land, the Delaware River valley may have been the least dense region of indigenous settlement along the Atlantic coastal plain. In addition, the semi-nomadic Lenape population had been sharply reduced by diseases brought by Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and English settlers who preceded the Quakers. By the time the Quakers arrived, the Lenape population had been halved by three smallpox epidemics that struck the tribe between 1620 and 1670. Also favoring the Quaker peace policy was the unusually unwarlike ways of the Lenape themselves. Yet historians have not been able to refute the reverent Lenape view of Penn, carefully recorded at the end of the founder’s life. In 1720, Indians reminded William Keith, Pennsylvania’s governor appointed by Penn’s widow, of their great love for Penn, who had promised at the first meeting with Indian chiefs “so much love and friendship, that he would not call them brothers, because brothers might differ; nor children, because they might offend and require correction; but he would reckon them as one body, one blood, one heart, and one head.”17
FIGURE 7. Great Belt of Wampum, HSP. The famous belt, fashioned from quahog shell beads and leather, shows a European with a broad hat, typical of Quaker garb, clasping hands with a Native American. At Philadelphia’s 1864 Great Central Fair to raise money for wounded Civil War soldiers, the Wampum Belt was conspicuously displayed in the creation of a “William Penn Parlor” along with a cup said to have been presented to Penn by a Lenape chief at the Shackamaxon treaty gathering.
These words were recalled at a meeting of the Historical Society in 1859, when John Granville Penn, the great-grandson of the founder, presented a handsome belt of wampum to the Society. Just as for Europeans a deed finalized a land exchange, the wampum belt for Indians signified a sealed agreement. Indians and Europeans also used simple shell beads or wampum (literally, “white string”) as a medium of exchange. The wampum belt (Figure 7) is the Historical Society’s most famous and asked-about possession because it reverberates hauntingly in the public consciousness as a reminder of what might have been in the tragic history of European exploitation of native peoples. Today, when peace studies programs have replaced military history, most school textbooks include an illustration of this famous wampum belt.
Acquiring the wampum belt occasioned unusual excitement at the Historical Society. Regarded