WEBVTT NOTE 12. Pennsylvania: Quakers and Indians 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Volume 2, Chapter 12, Pennsylvania, Quakers and Indians 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:24.000 By the beginning of the 18th century, the original purely individualist Quaker principles had been modified by the proprietor of Pennsylvania, William Penn, and by the ruling proprietary party headed by Pennsylvania's agent, James Logan. 3 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:33.000 The libertarian Quaker opposition continued to be strong, however, and was led by David Lloyd, many times Speaker of the Assembly. 4 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:41.000 Lloyd led the struggle against feudal quit rents, against attempts to aid wars and to impose increased taxation, 5 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:47.000 and against a proprietary veto or the power of the Governor to dissolve the Assembly. 6 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:57.440 William Penn died in 1718 in a period of confusion and tumult over the inheritance of the proprietorship. 7 00:00:57.440 --> 00:01:05.080 These disputes were settled by the late 1720s with Penn's younger son assuming the proprietorship. 8 00:01:05.080 --> 00:01:12.320 But when Thomas Penn succeeded to the proprietorship in 1746, rule over Pennsylvania passed out 9 00:01:12.320 --> 00:01:27.320 Thomas Pann and his heirs had left the Quaker fold to become Anglicans. After Logan's death, the proprietary agent of Pennsylvania was an Anglican, the Reverend Richard Peters. 10 00:01:27.320 --> 00:01:38.320 With the proprietorship no longer Quaker, the Quakers tend to unite against the proprietary and to recover some of the purity of their principles. 11 00:01:38.320 --> 00:01:46.320 Even when modified, Quaker principles were radical enough to be unique in the colonies. 12 00:01:46.320 --> 00:01:53.320 Nowhere was this uniqueness more outstanding than in military affairs and in their treatment of the Indians. 13 00:01:53.320 --> 00:01:59.320 William Penn had from the beginning set the pattern of peace and justice to the Indians 14 00:01:59.320 --> 00:02:06.320 and scrupulously purchased Indian land claims even when the claims themselves were dubious. 15 00:02:06.320 --> 00:02:13.640 Pursuing a policy of peace, incomprehensible to most of the other colonists who were generally 16 00:02:13.640 --> 00:02:21.100 conscience-less in slaughtering the Indians, the Quakers of Pennsylvania built no forts, 17 00:02:21.100 --> 00:02:27.660 established no militia, and hired no scouts and Indian fighters. 18 00:02:27.660 --> 00:02:35.900 And by pursuing a policy of peace and no armaments, they found, mirabile dictu, that they had 19 00:02:35.900 --> 00:02:43.060 nothing to fear. They had earned and gained the lasting respect of the Indians, and fair 20 00:02:43.060 --> 00:02:50.180 play met with fair play in its turn. As in New Jersey, where Quakers were influential 21 00:02:50.180 --> 00:02:56.660 in shaping Indian policy, there was no Indian war in the history of the colony so long as 22 00:02:56.660 --> 00:03:05.460 the Quakers ruled. The non-Quaker historian Herbert L. Osgood paid high and eloquent tribute 23 00:03:05.460 --> 00:03:12.340 to Quaker Policy. The Quakers would not make their religion, though Christian and Protestant, 24 00:03:12.340 --> 00:03:18.700 a cause for war with either the heathen or the catholic. It is true that they based their 25 00:03:18.700 --> 00:03:24.980 views on literal reading of the scripture text, but beneath this procedure lay a true 26 00:03:24.980 --> 00:03:31.780 consciousness of the essentials of humanity which transcended all differences of color, 27 00:03:31.780 --> 00:03:41.780 Race, Nation or creed. Quakers shared in the movement westward, so far as was a necessary consequence of the growth of population. 28 00:03:41.780 --> 00:03:48.780 But with the artificial stimulation of these tendencies by military and commercial exploitation, 29 00:03:48.780 --> 00:03:54.780 accompanied with the partial or complete destruction of native peoples, they had no sympathy. 30 00:03:54.780 --> 00:04:01.780 To the great majority of people in their time, this attitude seemed perverse and purely obstructionist. 31 00:04:01.780 --> 00:04:11.780 But for the modern man it appears worthy of all honor as a dim foreshadowing of what human relations should everywhere be. 32 00:04:11.780 --> 00:04:18.780 But as the 18th century wore on, the Quakers began to lose control of Pennsylvania policy. 33 00:04:18.780 --> 00:04:32.780 We have seen the Ulster-Scott propensity for indiscriminate land grab and savagery toward the Indians. Furthermore, the new Anglican proprietary was not interested in peace or fair dealing. 34 00:04:32.780 --> 00:04:40.780 In 1737, for example, the proprietors engaged in chicanery in extending a tract bought 35 00:04:40.780 --> 00:04:46.140 from the Delaware Indians in Bucks County at the junction of the Delaware and the Lehigh 36 00:04:46.140 --> 00:04:50.140 Rivers, the walking purchase. 37 00:04:50.140 --> 00:04:55.460 The government then proceeded to insist that the Indians leave the land they had settled, 38 00:04:55.460 --> 00:05:00.980 but the Quaker-dominated assembly refused to vote funds to allow enforcement of this 39 00:05:00.980 --> 00:05:08.420 But most serious was the eagerness of the proprietary party to participate in the English 40 00:05:08.420 --> 00:05:14.700 aggression against the French and their Indian allies on the other side of the Appalachians, 41 00:05:14.700 --> 00:05:20.100 for the French had explored and occupied the Mississippi River and the Ohio Valley east 42 00:05:20.100 --> 00:05:26.340 of the Appalachians. Now this extensive territory seemed ripe for the grabbing. 43 00:05:26.340 --> 00:05:33.820 In 1739, England broke a quarter century of European peace by going to war with Spain, 44 00:05:33.820 --> 00:05:39.180 and then escalated the war to include France. The Penns and their appointed governor, George 45 00:05:39.180 --> 00:05:45.140 Thomas, were eager to enter the fray. Thomas urged the legislature to appropriate money 46 00:05:45.140 --> 00:05:52.560 for defense, the age-old verbiage of the aggressor. The assembly replied that the Royal Charter 47 00:05:52.560 --> 00:06:05.560 A Cardinal point of the Quaker creed, they pointed out, was to be principled against bearing arms in any case whatsoever. 48 00:06:05.560 --> 00:06:10.560 Therefore forcing them to fight would constitute persecution of the Quakers. 49 00:06:10.560 --> 00:06:18.560 As for non-Quakers, it would obviously be unjust to conscript them for war while exempting Quakers. 50 00:06:18.560 --> 00:06:22.560 Therefore, all militia service should be voluntary. 51 00:06:22.560 --> 00:06:26.560 Governor Thomas replied with three arguments. 52 00:06:26.560 --> 00:06:30.560 One, the futility of voluntary defense. 53 00:06:30.560 --> 00:06:39.560 That is, presumably, people were not as eager to defend themselves as Thomas and the militarists were to defend them. 54 00:06:39.560 --> 00:06:48.560 2. Were not the Quakers interested in fighting the bloody religion of France and Spain, Catholicism? 55 00:06:48.560 --> 00:06:58.560 3. Why would the Quakers not hesitate to kill a burglar and yet not defend themselves against an invading army? 56 00:06:58.560 --> 00:07:05.560 To the last point, the Assembly trenchantly replied that the burglar was committing a conscious wrong, 57 00:07:35.560 --> 00:07:44.560 In this he was, in effect, joined by James Logan, ever ready to bend Quaker principles to the proprietary interest. 58 00:07:44.560 --> 00:07:48.560 Logan urged the Quakers to resign from the Assembly. 59 00:07:48.560 --> 00:07:55.560 The Assembly cause was led by Speaker John Kinsey, who was also the Attorney General of the province. 60 00:07:55.560 --> 00:08:02.560 The Quakers were supported by the Germans, who agreed with the Quaker policy of peace and fair dealing with the Indians. 61 00:08:02.560 --> 00:08:09.560 of the Indians. Other Quaker leaders in the Assembly were Isaac Norris and Israel Pemberton. 62 00:08:10.400 --> 00:08:17.400 John Conrad Weiser, the expansionist German-born advisor to Governor Thomas on Indian affairs, 63 00:08:17.760 --> 00:08:24.760 rebuked his fellow Germans for their pro-peace policy, but to no avail. The Assembly also 64 00:08:24.800 --> 00:08:31.560 effectively used the tactic of withholding the Governor's salary to win their points. 65 00:08:31.560 --> 00:08:37.680 Polls intensified in this conflict between proprietary and assembly. In the fall elections 66 00:08:37.680 --> 00:08:44.680 of 1742, a riot broke out in Philadelphia, where a goon squad of anti-Quaker sailors 67 00:08:45.120 --> 00:08:51.160 raided the polls. Despite the deliberate failure of the pro-Thomas magistrates to suppress 68 00:08:51.160 --> 00:08:58.000 this criminality, the Quakers won both at the polls and in the streets, staunchly backed 69 00:08:58.000 --> 00:09:05.320 by the German Allies. Unfortunately, the assembly did not stick completely to its principles. 70 00:09:05.320 --> 00:09:11.040 While consistently refusing to vote funds for a militia or for direct military purposes 71 00:09:11.040 --> 00:09:17.740 during the war of the Austrian succession, known in America as King George's War, with 72 00:09:17.740 --> 00:09:25.760 France in the 1740s, the assembly repeatedly evaded the issue by voting funds for the king's 73 00:09:25.760 --> 00:09:50.760 Which funds the Crown could and did use for war? The Quakers did try to assuage their rather elastic consciences by rationalizing that they had not explicitly voted funds for war, and that warlike use was decided by the Crown, the same flimsy argument that the Logan Party had used during Queen Anne's War earlier in the century. 74 00:09:50.760 --> 00:09:56.680 At one point, New England asked Pennsylvania for money to buy gunpowder for an aggressive 75 00:09:56.680 --> 00:10:03.960 assault on the French fort of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. 76 00:10:03.960 --> 00:10:10.460 The assembly, urged to grant the money by Governor Thomas, slyly assuaged their consciences 77 00:10:10.460 --> 00:10:16.360 by voting a grant to New England of the large sum of 3,000 pounds. 78 00:10:16.360 --> 00:10:24.360 The funds were to be spent by Thomas on bread, flour, wheat or other grains, and it was well 79 00:10:24.360 --> 00:10:30.800 understood in the colony that other grains meant nothing less than gunpowder. 80 00:10:30.800 --> 00:10:35.440 In the meanwhile, Pennsylvania was storing up further trouble with the Delaware Indians 81 00:10:35.440 --> 00:10:42.960 by completing the brutal eviction of the Delawares from their lands in upper Bucks County. 82 00:10:42.960 --> 00:10:48.400 After having used fraud to claim the walking purchase and having been thwarted by the Quaker 83 00:10:48.400 --> 00:10:54.560 Assembly in imposing eviction of the Indians, the Pennsylvania government turned to the 84 00:10:54.560 --> 00:11:01.560 aggressive overlords of the Delawares, the Iroquois, the long-term allies of the English. 85 00:11:02.600 --> 00:11:09.600 At a conference in Philadelphia in 1742, the Iroquois agreed, in return for bribes, to 86 00:11:09.600 --> 00:11:31.600 To recognize the English purchase of Delaware Indian land, the lordly Iroquois chieftain not only ordered the Delawares off their own settled land, but also reviled these Indians, calling them women, and asserted that they had no right to sell their own land without consulting their overlords. 87 00:11:31.600 --> 00:11:45.600 The Pennsylvania government was happy to make all future land purchases from an Iroquois tribe that had no connection with and no personal commitment in work and energy to the land. 88 00:11:45.600 --> 00:11:51.600 The Delawares complied with the order, storing great bitterness in their hearts. 89 00:11:51.600 --> 00:12:02.600 One of the most enthusiastic participants in King George's War against the French was George Croghan, an Ulster-Scott Indian trader in Pennsylvania. 90 00:12:02.600 --> 00:12:15.600 Like John Conrad Weiser, also an Indian trader, the swindling, nearly illiterate Croghan had a direct economic interest in liquidating his French competitors in the Indian trade. 91 00:12:15.600 --> 00:12:22.800 Penetrating beyond the Appalachians into the French territory of the Ohio Valley, Krogan 92 00:12:22.800 --> 00:12:30.320 stirred up the Indians to massacre his French competition. Beginning by murdering five French 93 00:12:30.320 --> 00:12:39.080 traders at Sandusky, the Krogan directed Indians burned French settlements during 1747 and 94 00:12:39.080 --> 00:12:45.480 murdered traders throughout the Ohio Valley. A fellow English trader well summed up Krogan's 95 00:12:45.480 --> 00:12:53.480 Croghan had at all times persuaded the Indians to destroy the French, by the presence he had made them. 96 00:12:53.480 --> 00:13:04.480 That self-interest was his sole motive in everything he did, that his views were to engross the old trade and to scare the French from dealing with the Indians. 97 00:13:04.480 --> 00:13:10.400 Krogan, delighted with his Indians, sent a scalp of one of the murdered Frenchmen to 98 00:13:10.400 --> 00:13:16.960 Governor Thomas, and boasted that the Indians would soon seize the French port of Detroit. 99 00:13:16.960 --> 00:13:22.520 This hope proved vain, but Weiser and Krogan persuaded the Pennsylvania government to grant 100 00:13:22.520 --> 00:13:29.360 a 400-pound reward to the pillaging Indians, a gift hardly in line with Quaker principles. 101 00:13:29.360 --> 00:13:36.280 It is no wonder that by the end of King George's War in 1748, George Croghan had emerged as 102 00:13:36.280 --> 00:13:43.960 by far the largest Indian trader in Ohio, and was commonly called the King of the traders. 103 00:13:43.960 --> 00:13:49.560 To keep these Indian allies, Croghan led the proprietors in forcibly driving the squatters 104 00:13:49.560 --> 00:13:51.120 off their lands. 105 00:13:51.120 --> 00:13:57.200 So enthusiastic was Croghan in going about his task that Thomas Penn was moved to applaud 106 00:13:57.200 --> 00:13:58.880 Croghan. 107 00:13:58.880 --> 00:14:05.360 The proprietor's agent commended the Reverend Mr. Peters, in overall command of the operation, 108 00:14:05.360 --> 00:14:12.120 for executing the job with a hussar spirit, nothing but which will do with these people. 109 00:14:12.120 --> 00:14:18.160 Hardly had the war with France ended when Krogan and Thomas Penn each came to the conclusion 110 00:14:18.160 --> 00:14:24.620 that a government fort should be built in French territory on the Ohio River. Penn had 111 00:14:24.620 --> 00:14:30.340 had power designs on the valley, while Croghan was worried not so much about French trade 112 00:14:30.340 --> 00:14:37.260 as about the Ohio Company, a speculative land company to which Virginia had arbitrarily 113 00:14:37.260 --> 00:14:44.740 granted a huge amount of land, and which stood to profit by any settling in this region. 114 00:14:44.740 --> 00:14:49.780 Such settlement would have ended Croghan's opportunities for trade with the Indians. 115 00:14:49.780 --> 00:14:58.780 Typically, Croghan lied repeatedly to the Pennsylvania authorities, asserting that the Indians were demanding such a fort of the English. 116 00:14:58.780 --> 00:15:07.780 But while the Quaker assembly was perfectly willing to supply Croghan with bribes for the Indians, they were still reluctant to build a fort. 117 00:15:07.780 --> 00:15:15.780 Thomas Penn and his officials were almost able to drive the fort through the assembly in the fall of 1751. 118 00:15:15.780 --> 00:15:40.780 Then, at the last minute, Croghan's misrepresentations were publicly and dramatically revealed, and the project fell through. Quakers in the colony, slowly but surely dwindling in devotion to their principles, were saved to despite themselves for a while longer, and Pennsylvania was stopped from aggression in France's Ohio Valley. 119 00:15:40.780 --> 00:15:47.780 Shorn of government favor, Krogan's trade was left dependent on his own business acumen, 120 00:15:48.180 --> 00:15:54.420 which was hardly extensive. Overloaded in debt and swindling his partners and creditors 121 00:15:54.420 --> 00:16:01.020 to the end, Krogan became insolvent shortly after his disgrace and the defeat of the Fort 122 00:16:01.020 --> 00:16:08.020 Bill. Despite its evasions and compromises, the Quaker assembly managed to avoid direct 123 00:16:08.020 --> 00:16:15.660 Direct Armed Participation in King George's War. The colony came closest in 1747, the 124 00:16:15.660 --> 00:16:22.580 last full year of the war. Delaware, the non-Quaker sister colony under the proprietary of the 125 00:16:22.580 --> 00:16:29.660 Penn family, had gladdened the rulers by voting for a militia and a fund for participation 126 00:16:29.660 --> 00:16:36.580 in the war effort. It was repaid by a raid during July by a small landing party near 127 00:16:36.580 --> 00:17:06.580 The Landing Party plundered a few farms. Its strength and the damage done were negligible, but hysteria began to sweep Philadelphia, a hysteria carefully fostered and abetted by the War Party, constituting the ruling executive oligarchy. Rumors of a feared Spanish expedition from Havana circulated throughout the colony. The Council suggested that the landings be taken over. 128 00:17:06.580 --> 00:17:36.580 The assembly, however, kept its head in the midst of the war hysteria, and coolly and properly disparaged the supposed threat from the sea. It also trenchantly pointed out that since the time aggression against Canada had been suspended, there had been little threat to worry about from Indians in the north. The assembly concluded that it was time to take action. 129 00:17:36.580 --> 00:17:42.740 by pointing to the money they had saved the people of Pennsylvania by refraining from 130 00:17:42.740 --> 00:17:47.300 appropriating funds for other alleged threats in the past.