First City. Gary B. Nash
value “historically and sentimentally” was nearly unsurpassed. When John Granville Penn came from London to Philadelphia to contribute what would become a nearly holy relic and explain at length its authenticity, Historical Society leaders spared no ceremony to sanctify the icon, even though an earlier inquiry cast doubt that Penn ever met with Lenape chiefs to conclude a treaty of peace. Even an ex-president, Martin Van Buren, was enlisted to send a letter, and his words could not have been better chosen to evoke the spirit of an earlier day. The gift of the wampum belt, wrote Van Buren, “secures to Pennsylvania an historical monument of peculiar value” and vouches for Penn’s “own noble resolution, taken at the outset, and never departed from, to found his Commonwealth ‘on deeds of peace.’” The founder’s great-grandson then gave what seemed an unassailable account of how the Penn family had acquired the belt and how it had remained in the family for nearly two hundred years. His great-grandfather, he related, had pressed a roll of parchment pledging a treaty of friendship into the hands of the chief sachem and implored him and other attending chiefs to “preserve it carefully for three generations, that their children might know what had passed between them, just as if he [Penn] had remained to repeat it.” Solemnly, the Indians reciprocated, “according to their national custom,” by giving Penn the wampum belt “with the record of a treaty of peace and friendship woven in its centre.”18
Though modern scholars have searched hard, no proof has been found that the peace treaty meeting took place. It is even possible that the Belt of Wampum was made after William Penn’s death in 1717. The belt depicts a portly European (presumably Penn) clasping hands with an American Indian, but in 1682 Penn was not portly at all; he was athletic enough to run races with some of the young Lenape men. Yet this modern-day sleuthing, while inconvenient for continuing to tell a story nearly as venerable as that of the landing at Plymouth Rock, has not tarnished the belt’s iconic status. People create legends to preserve essential truths as they understand them, and nothing has served Quaker values better (now widely shared in the post-Cold War era in the case of their peace testimony) than the touching gift of the wampum belt to Penn. Penn did carry through on his extraordinary promise in his letter to the Indian kings in 1681 by creating a mechanism for resolving any disputes between the settlers and the Lenape. “[I]f in any thing any shall offend you or your People,” he promised, “you shall have a full and Speedy Satisfaction for the same by an equall number of honest men on both sides.”19 Such intercultural arbitration, also implemented in the West Jersey colony across the Delaware River, though only briefly, was unprecedented.
If the Lenape did not string shells into a ceremonial wampum belt in 1682, the impulse to do so may not have been far from their intentions. Whatever the case, the early Historical Society councillors—and a great many non-Quakers since—have drawn tremendous sustenance from the wampum belt fable. Granville Penn certainly believed that a treaty of friendship was drawn up at Shackamaxon (present-day Kensington) just after Penn’s arrival in the fall of 1682 and that it had been sealed by the great Belt of Wampum. He cited as authority Thomas Clarkson’s 1813 Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William Penn and many documents mentioning the “old first treaties of friendship.” If the treaty of friendship meeting never occurred and the wampum belt was made many years later, we can appreciate how history is manipulated to fit the sensibilities of those living many years after a supposed event. Historians of public memory have mostly castigated the management of remembrance because the preservationist movement of the last century foisted many fables on an unsuspecting public. But the origins of the wampum belt legend, while doubtless reflecting the desire of nineteenth-century leaders to glorify as benign a previous Philadelphia elite from which they were descended, were buried deep in the hope of perpetuating the Quakers’ pacifist principles that had led to intercultural cooperation in a world of intercultural conflict.
FIGURE 8. Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, oil, 1771, PAFA. West’s painting, commissioned by Thomas Penn, son of Pennsylvania’s founder, almost immediately attracted attention: in 1773 a London publisher of engravings announced a 19-by-24-inch copy for 15 shillings. The painting was copied by engravers in Italy, Germany France, and Mexico as well as England, Scotland, and Ireland. The emotional appeal of the painting was noted a generation later by leading Quaker abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, who claimed that an engraved copy was the only piece of art found in the houses of most Quakers.
Benjamin West, one of Pennsylvania’s most famous painters and the first American-born painter to gain international fame, did his part to seal the memory of the Shackamaxon treaty of friendship meeting, even if it never took place. Just four years before the outbreak of the American Revolution, West painted what was to become one of the most widely reproduced paintings of a scene from American history (Figure 8). Europeans loved it because it showed them what Indians looked like, how they carried their babies, and how they dressed. But for Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic, West’s painting depicting Penn’s meeting with the Lenape became a symbol of the Quaker influence in American history and a reminder of the Quaker yearning for a peaceful world. In the early 1890s, plans were afoot among Quaker peace activists to place a copy in every Pennsylvania schoolhouse.
Living in England, West did not record history; he created it—or relied on an oral tradition of a “league of friendship,” if not a specific peace treaty. Relying on descriptions of Penn as an old man, West made him look older than thirty-eight, his age in 1682. He depicted Indian and Quaker clothing of the late 1700s, rather than the 1680s, and the buildings he depicted in Shackamaxon had not yet been built in 1682. Indians would not have carried weapons to a treaty meeting. A twentieth-century Quaker family legend alleges that the Indian mother with cradle-board baby is a likeness of West’s wife. The stately elm tree at Shackamaxon Creek, however, was real and when it fell many years later, in 1810, pieces of it were considered as good as gold.20
FIGURE 9. Jigsaw puzzle of Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, LCP. Jigsaw puzzles were a favorite card table game in nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class homes, so children probably gained more cognizance of the Penn treaty legend this way than from their school books. The Library Company dates the puzzle to about 1850 but has no record of how it was acquired.
Whatever its limitations as an accurate portrayal of Indian and early settler life near Philadelphia in 1682, West’s treaty painting probably influenced public memory more than any other artistic work except portraits of George Washington. It had to swim against the tide of westward migration as the idea of Manifest Destiny suffused popular feeling and made a virtue of fighting Indians. But by the 1850s manufacturers of household goods were using it on dishes, bed and window curtains, whiskey glasses, bed quilts, hand-painted trays, lamp shades, and jigsaw puzzles (Figure 9). American lithographers pumped a steady stream of copies into the market throughout the nineteenth century, including early copies by Currier and Ives, sometimes giving the treaty date in 1661. A Philadelphia member of the Historical Society purchased West’s famous painting in 1851 and allowed it to be exhibited at the city’s Great Central Fair in 1864. Millions viewed it at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago, where it was part of the Quaker-led Universal Peace Union exhibit.
The promise of a new era of intercultural comity lasted through Penn’s lifetime, but by the 1730s Penn’s open-door immigration policy had filled Pennsylvania with Scots-Irish and German immigrants who did not subscribe to Quaker pacifism and who hungered for land to the west of the largely Quaker settlements, lands still in the possession of native peoples.
Ironically, James Logan, Penn’s most trusted official from 1699 to the founder’s death in 1717, became a central figure in a new era of abrasive relations with the Lenape and other tribes. In 1735, when he was the colony’s largest land speculator, Logan produced what he alleged was a copy of an old deed signed in 1686 that ceded a huge area between the Lehigh and Delaware rivers to Penn. Although the Lenape chiefs challenged the validity of the document, allegedly copied from an original that Logan