Volume 2, Chapter 12, Pennsylvania, Quakers and Indians
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.
The libertarian Quaker opposition continued to be strong, however, and was led by David Lloyd, many times Speaker of the Assembly.
Lloyd led the struggle against feudal quit rents, against attempts to aid wars and to impose increased taxation,
and against a proprietary veto or the power of the Governor to dissolve the Assembly.
William Penn died in 1718 in a period of confusion and tumult over the inheritance of the proprietorship.
These disputes were settled by the late 1720s with Penn's younger son assuming the proprietorship.
But when Thomas Penn succeeded to the proprietorship in 1746, rule over Pennsylvania passed out
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.
With the proprietorship no longer Quaker, the Quakers tend to unite against the proprietary and to recover some of the purity of their principles.
Even when modified, Quaker principles were radical enough to be unique in the colonies.
Nowhere was this uniqueness more outstanding than in military affairs and in their treatment of the Indians.
William Penn had from the beginning set the pattern of peace and justice to the Indians
and scrupulously purchased Indian land claims even when the claims themselves were dubious.
Pursuing a policy of peace, incomprehensible to most of the other colonists who were generally
conscience-less in slaughtering the Indians, the Quakers of Pennsylvania built no forts,
established no militia, and hired no scouts and Indian fighters.
And by pursuing a policy of peace and no armaments, they found, mirabile dictu, that they had
nothing to fear. They had earned and gained the lasting respect of the Indians, and fair
play met with fair play in its turn. As in New Jersey, where Quakers were influential
in shaping Indian policy, there was no Indian war in the history of the colony so long as
the Quakers ruled. The non-Quaker historian Herbert L. Osgood paid high and eloquent tribute
to Quaker Policy. The Quakers would not make their religion, though Christian and Protestant,
a cause for war with either the heathen or the catholic. It is true that they based their
views on literal reading of the scripture text, but beneath this procedure lay a true
consciousness of the essentials of humanity which transcended all differences of color,
Race, Nation or creed. Quakers shared in the movement westward, so far as was a necessary consequence of the growth of population.
But with the artificial stimulation of these tendencies by military and commercial exploitation,
accompanied with the partial or complete destruction of native peoples, they had no sympathy.
To the great majority of people in their time, this attitude seemed perverse and purely obstructionist.
But for the modern man it appears worthy of all honor as a dim foreshadowing of what human relations should everywhere be.
But as the 18th century wore on, the Quakers began to lose control of Pennsylvania policy.
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.
In 1737, for example, the proprietors engaged in chicanery in extending a tract bought
from the Delaware Indians in Bucks County at the junction of the Delaware and the Lehigh
Rivers, the walking purchase.
The government then proceeded to insist that the Indians leave the land they had settled,
but the Quaker-dominated assembly refused to vote funds to allow enforcement of this
But most serious was the eagerness of the proprietary party to participate in the English
aggression against the French and their Indian allies on the other side of the Appalachians,
for the French had explored and occupied the Mississippi River and the Ohio Valley east
of the Appalachians. Now this extensive territory seemed ripe for the grabbing.
In 1739, England broke a quarter century of European peace by going to war with Spain,
and then escalated the war to include France. The Penns and their appointed governor, George
Thomas, were eager to enter the fray. Thomas urged the legislature to appropriate money
for defense, the age-old verbiage of the aggressor. The assembly replied that the Royal Charter
A Cardinal point of the Quaker creed, they pointed out, was to be principled against bearing arms in any case whatsoever.
Therefore forcing them to fight would constitute persecution of the Quakers.
As for non-Quakers, it would obviously be unjust to conscript them for war while exempting Quakers.
Therefore, all militia service should be voluntary.
Governor Thomas replied with three arguments.
One, the futility of voluntary defense.
That is, presumably, people were not as eager to defend themselves as Thomas and the militarists were to defend them.
2. Were not the Quakers interested in fighting the bloody religion of France and Spain, Catholicism?
3. Why would the Quakers not hesitate to kill a burglar and yet not defend themselves against an invading army?
To the last point, the Assembly trenchantly replied that the burglar was committing a conscious wrong,
In this he was, in effect, joined by James Logan, ever ready to bend Quaker principles to the proprietary interest.
Logan urged the Quakers to resign from the Assembly.
The Assembly cause was led by Speaker John Kinsey, who was also the Attorney General of the province.
The Quakers were supported by the Germans, who agreed with the Quaker policy of peace and fair dealing with the Indians.
of the Indians. Other Quaker leaders in the Assembly were Isaac Norris and Israel Pemberton.
John Conrad Weiser, the expansionist German-born advisor to Governor Thomas on Indian affairs,
rebuked his fellow Germans for their pro-peace policy, but to no avail. The Assembly also
effectively used the tactic of withholding the Governor's salary to win their points.
Polls intensified in this conflict between proprietary and assembly. In the fall elections
of 1742, a riot broke out in Philadelphia, where a goon squad of anti-Quaker sailors
raided the polls. Despite the deliberate failure of the pro-Thomas magistrates to suppress
this criminality, the Quakers won both at the polls and in the streets, staunchly backed
by the German Allies. Unfortunately, the assembly did not stick completely to its principles.
While consistently refusing to vote funds for a militia or for direct military purposes
during the war of the Austrian succession, known in America as King George's War, with
France in the 1740s, the assembly repeatedly evaded the issue by voting funds for the king's
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.
At one point, New England asked Pennsylvania for money to buy gunpowder for an aggressive
assault on the French fort of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
The assembly, urged to grant the money by Governor Thomas, slyly assuaged their consciences
by voting a grant to New England of the large sum of 3,000 pounds.
The funds were to be spent by Thomas on bread, flour, wheat or other grains, and it was well
understood in the colony that other grains meant nothing less than gunpowder.
In the meanwhile, Pennsylvania was storing up further trouble with the Delaware Indians
by completing the brutal eviction of the Delawares from their lands in upper Bucks County.
After having used fraud to claim the walking purchase and having been thwarted by the Quaker
Assembly in imposing eviction of the Indians, the Pennsylvania government turned to the
aggressive overlords of the Delawares, the Iroquois, the long-term allies of the English.
At a conference in Philadelphia in 1742, the Iroquois agreed, in return for bribes, to
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.
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.
The Delawares complied with the order, storing great bitterness in their hearts.
One of the most enthusiastic participants in King George's War against the French was George Croghan, an Ulster-Scott Indian trader in Pennsylvania.
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.
Penetrating beyond the Appalachians into the French territory of the Ohio Valley, Krogan
stirred up the Indians to massacre his French competition. Beginning by murdering five French
traders at Sandusky, the Krogan directed Indians burned French settlements during 1747 and
murdered traders throughout the Ohio Valley. A fellow English trader well summed up Krogan's
Croghan had at all times persuaded the Indians to destroy the French, by the presence he had made them.
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.
Krogan, delighted with his Indians, sent a scalp of one of the murdered Frenchmen to
Governor Thomas, and boasted that the Indians would soon seize the French port of Detroit.
This hope proved vain, but Weiser and Krogan persuaded the Pennsylvania government to grant
a 400-pound reward to the pillaging Indians, a gift hardly in line with Quaker principles.
It is no wonder that by the end of King George's War in 1748, George Croghan had emerged as
by far the largest Indian trader in Ohio, and was commonly called the King of the traders.
To keep these Indian allies, Croghan led the proprietors in forcibly driving the squatters
off their lands.
So enthusiastic was Croghan in going about his task that Thomas Penn was moved to applaud
Croghan.
The proprietor's agent commended the Reverend Mr. Peters, in overall command of the operation,
for executing the job with a hussar spirit, nothing but which will do with these people.
Hardly had the war with France ended when Krogan and Thomas Penn each came to the conclusion
that a government fort should be built in French territory on the Ohio River. Penn had
had power designs on the valley, while Croghan was worried not so much about French trade
as about the Ohio Company, a speculative land company to which Virginia had arbitrarily
granted a huge amount of land, and which stood to profit by any settling in this region.
Such settlement would have ended Croghan's opportunities for trade with the Indians.
Typically, Croghan lied repeatedly to the Pennsylvania authorities, asserting that the Indians were demanding such a fort of the English.
But while the Quaker assembly was perfectly willing to supply Croghan with bribes for the Indians, they were still reluctant to build a fort.
Thomas Penn and his officials were almost able to drive the fort through the assembly in the fall of 1751.
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.
Shorn of government favor, Krogan's trade was left dependent on his own business acumen,
which was hardly extensive. Overloaded in debt and swindling his partners and creditors
to the end, Krogan became insolvent shortly after his disgrace and the defeat of the Fort
Bill. Despite its evasions and compromises, the Quaker assembly managed to avoid direct
Direct Armed Participation in King George's War. The colony came closest in 1747, the
last full year of the war. Delaware, the non-Quaker sister colony under the proprietary of the
Penn family, had gladdened the rulers by voting for a militia and a fund for participation
in the war effort. It was repaid by a raid during July by a small landing party near
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.
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.
by pointing to the money they had saved the people of Pennsylvania by refraining from
appropriating funds for other alleged threats in the past.