QUAKERS AND INDIANS.
[TO THE EDITOR Or THP " SPECTATOR."'
SIE,—Contributors to your correspondence columns in recent issues have made the following statements about the affairs of Pennsyl- vania in the eighteenth century : (1) That the Pennsylvania Indians were exceptionally peaceful and poor-spirited tribes, and hence the success for seventy years of Quaker policy towards them must be discounted. (2) That the policy of the Pennsylvanian Govern- ment until 1776 was under Quaker control. (3) That in the Indian Wars of 1756-57 the Quakers urged the frontier Indians to make war on other tribes, and supplied them with money for the purpose. May I, with as much brevity as possible, reply to these assertions ? For the last three years I have been studying the history of the Society of Friends from the original records and other sources, and I believe the following statements to be accurate.
(1) Leaving the Pennsylvania Indians on one side for the moment, no one will deny the ferocity of those in New England. In the bloody wars between Indians and settlers at the end of the seven- teenth and beginning of the eighteenth century it was repeatedly asserted by Friends, and never, as far as I have found, denied, that Quakers enjoyed a remarkable immunity from attack. Thomas Story and Thomas Chalkley, two well-known Quaker travelling preachers, have left contemporary records of this in their memoirs. Story says (Life, p. 197) of the war of 1699: "I did not hear of any of our Friends that carried arms when abroad, or on their business, but two, and these the Indians had killed." Chalkley writes of the raids in 1704 (Journal, pp. 41-46) : "The Indians were very barbarous in the destruction of the English inhabitants, scalping some, and knocking out the brains of others (men, women, and children), by which the country was greatly alarmed both night and day. . . . Among the many hundreds that were slain I heard of but two or three of our Friends being killed, whose de- struction was very remarkable." Two men went out to work unarmed, "it being their principle not to use weapons of war, to offend others or to defend themselves," but at last they became alarmed and began to carry weapons. "And the Indians, who had seen thom several times without them, and let them alone, saying 'They were peaceable men, and hurt nobody, therefore they would not hurt them, now seeing them to have guns, and supposing they designed to kill the Indians, they therefore shot the men dead.', A Quaker woman, who lived in a lonely spot in the backwoods' took refuge, though with many doubts, in a' garrison" (or fortified house) and was killed one day in its neighbourhood, whi'e hea daughter and family, who stayed in the old home, were unmolested. The daughter's touching account may be found in Chalkley's Journal, and the whole family were personally known to Story. There is thus some evidence that a general policy of justice and goodwill would have kept peace with even the New England Indians.
On the other hand, the evidence for the innate peacefulness of the Shawnese and Delaware Indians, the frontier tribes of Penn- sylvania, is not very adequate. It is based mainly on a passage in Fiske (Dutch and Quaker Colonies, II., pp 164-66), to the effect that these tribes were tributary to the fiercer Iroquois, who called them " women " and kept them under control. After the death of Penn, his degenerate descendants, the non-Quaker Proprietors of the State, ousted these Indians from their lands by a long proems of injustice and fraud, which the Quaker Assembly was powerless to prevent. This treatment threw the tribes into the arms of the French ; in 1755 they helped to defeat Braddock's army, and during the winter of 1755-56 the Pennsylvanian frontier first knew the horrors of Indian warfare. President Sharpless, of If tiverford College, Pa, in his study of early Pennsylvanian history, A Quaker Experiment in Government, says : "When ill-treated they had their bloody revenge, exactly as in New England. They showed no lack of Indian spirit." As this was written in 1898, and President Sharpless's contributions to a more recent book, The Quakers in the American Colonies, contained no statement quite so definite, I wrote to him recently to ask whether he still joined issue with Fiske on this question. He replied (February 17th, 1916) that these Indians "were in a sense subject to the Iroquois of New York. That they were not specially mild-mannered is evident from the fact that when the Iroquois pressed them too hard they became as fierce as any other Indian warriors." (2) Up to the year 1756 the Assembly of Pennsylvania was pre- dominantly Quaker. In many directions, however, its power was
limited by the extensive and conflicting powers of the Crown and the Proprietary. In 1756 nearly all the Quaker members of the Assembly resigned, because the Governor and Council declared war against these frontier Indians. They believed that by justice and friendly negotiation the tribes could have been detached from the French affiance. The Assembly after 1756 maintained some of the old policy—e.g., resistance to the encroachments of the Pro- prietors—but the Society of Friends was in no way responsible for its acts. President Sharpless says of the period 1756-1776 that they are "twenty years which Quakers distinctly repudiate . . . the Quaker control ended with 1756. In increasing numbers after this date they absented themselves from the polls" (Quaker Experiment, p. 267). The pamphlet controversy of the "sixties," mentioned by one of your correspondents, arose out of an episode in 1764, when many inhabitants of Philadelphia, including some young Quakers, prepared to take up arms to defend a band of Moravian Indians against a lynching party of Presbyterian settlers, who had already murdered another band of Indians on tho frontier. No force was used, as Franklin's diplomacy availed to dismiss the lynchers, but a pamphlet quarrel followed, between the " Presby- terian " party, who held that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, and the " Quaker " party (largely made up of non-Friends), who held milder views.
(3) Mr. D. G. Barron quotes a remarkable document, relating what an Indian, through an interpreter, reported that Quakers,
through an interpreter, said at an Indian conference in 1756 or 1757. In 1756 the Society of Friends formed a "Friendly Association for gaining and preserving peace with the Indians by pacific measures " ; and as they had been taunted with an unwillingness to spend money on war, offered to give for this purpose "a much larger part of our estates, than the heaviest taxes of a war can be expected to provide." In the next two years they spent £5,000 in gifts of goods and clothing, and it was mainly by their efforts and those of their Moravia*
emissary, Frederick Post, that peace was restored. The "Friendly Association" was looked on with disfavour by the Government and military authorities, but the Indians, with a mistrust justified by their former treatment, refused to negotiate unless Friends were present, and representatives of the Society attended three conferences at Easton in 1756 and 1757. The course of these con- ferences was well known at the time, and was reported by an eye- witness, who acted as secretary for the Indians, Charles Thomson, In his book, The Alienation of the Delaware and Shaumese Indians. Friends were of great service in influencing the Indians to conclude a treaty of peace. The negotiations for the Six Nations and the Delawares were conducted by Tedynscung, chief sachem, not " Sequareesere," as Mr. Barron's document states. It is possible, of course, that the advice reported by the Indian may have been given by one of the Government officials, whom he did not distinguish from the Quakers, but it is more probable that the story was an invention. The English Government seems to have given it no credit, and I have found no trace of it in later anti-Quaker contro- versy in Pennqylvania.—I am, Sir, &o., MARGARET E. HIRST.
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