First City. Gary B. Nash
Iroquois allies who held sway over the Lenape. Two years after the chiefs signed a confirmation of the alleged 1686 deed, Logan arranged to “walk off” the bounds of the Indian deed, which granted Penn’s heirs all the land from a specified point in Bucks County westward as far as a man could walk in a day and a half. Tishcohan (Figure 10) was one of the Lenape chiefs who learned to his dismay of the colonists’ trickery: two of Penn’s sons sent scouting parties through the woods to blaze a trail so that three specially trained woodsmen could average nearly four miles an hour in order to extend the Penns’ claim almost sixty miles into Delaware territory, or twice as far as anticipated by the Indian chiefs. This became known as the “Walking Purchase.” The voluminous papers of James Logan began reaching the Historical Society by 1840 and continued to arrive as late as 1984. Logan was so long lived and his interests so diverse—he was Pennsylvania’s first polymath—that his paper trail can be followed not only in the trove of his papers at the Historical Society but also in the collections of the Library Company, the Pennsylvania State Archives, the Philadelphia City Archives, and the American Philosophical Society.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Penn’s peaceful Indian policy was in tatters. The Seven Years’ War all but shattered it as the French and their Indian allies attacked Pennsylvania’s western settlements and set the frontier aflame. Philadelphia Quaker leaders quickly formed the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures in order to maintain the support of the Delaware (the term subsequently used for the Lenape)—an effort based not only on the hope of avoiding violence but also on the desire to maintain the Quakers’ lucrative trade with the Indians. To this end, Quaker leaders refreshed Indian memory by distributing to Indian sachems silver peace medals harking back to the William Penn era. From Quaker silversmith shops came large medals with King George II gracing one side and a Quaker and an Indian the other. The Quaker—William Penn—is shown extending a winged peace pipe across a campfire to an Indian who accepts the offer. Struck in 1757, the peace medal was the first of its kind made in the English colonies. In this cagy use of history Quaker silversmiths soon produced other silver symbols of peace: brooches, arm bracelets, pendants, and crosses.
FIGURE 10. Gustavus Hesselius, Tishcohan, oil, 1735, HSP. Tishcohan was one of the signators to the Walking Purchase deed. Hesselius (1682-1755) was a Swedish immigrant and Philadelphia’s only painter of note during the colonial period. Even the lack of competition did not give him full employment because most Quakers were still averse to displaying vanity through commissioning portraits and not enough affluent non-Quakers were available. Hesselius dressed Tishcohan with a trade blanket, a chipmunk-skin tobacco pouch with a leather thong, and a clay pipe of European manufacture.
By the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Quakers were under heavy attack in their own colony for their Indian peace policy, which, frontiersmen charged, drenched their farms with blood. In late 1763, Scots-Irish farmers from Paxton Creek, to become known as “the Paxton Boys,” massacred friendly and defenseless Conestoga Indians at Lancaster (where Penn had visited with Lenape leaders in 1700) and then marched to Philadelphia to demand that the legislative assembly protect the frontier (Figure 11). Franklin wrote a strongly worded pamphlet condemning the “white savages” for their unconscionable behavior, turning the election of 1764 into a scurrilous war of words. One part of the Quakers’ “Holy Experiment” was coming to an end.21
FIGURE 11. The Paxton Expedition, Inscribed to the Author of the Farce, LCP. This cartoon, distributed in 1764, is the first internal view of Philadelphia. The Court House at the center, built in 1707 on High (Market) Street, was the scene of annual voting for assemblymen. Voters mounted the stairs to cast their ballots in the central doorway The scene shows Philadelphians, with cannons and shouldered muskets, preparing to repel the advancing Paxton Boys. At the left is the Greater Meeting House, erected in 1754.
From the Lancaster Massacre and the Paxton Boys’ march on Philadelphia came America’s first political cartoons. Along with a barrage of election pamphlets, these cartoons helped politicize eligible voters. In the colony’s most heated election, Franklin lost his assembly seat—the only time he was to lose a political contest.
This deep fissure in late colonial society attracted the attention of the Library Company, which began collecting political pamphlets related to the Paxton Boys’ expedition and also a barrage of pamphlets leading up to the ferocious Philadelphia election of 1764. When the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 ignited intense argument over new British regulations, the Library Company gathered pamphlets sparked by the debate. Proud of this collecting policy, Franklin wrote in 1771 that libraries such as the one he founded “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defence of their privileges.”22 Over the waning years of the colonial era, the Library Company acquired a run of Philadelphia’s first newspaper, the American Weekly Mercury, many new scientific treatises and works of political thought, and museum objects such as fauna preserved in spirits, antique coins, fossils, Eskimo parkas, tanned buffalo skins, and a woman’s hand taken from an Egyptian mummy. But the Library Company’s special importance was in collecting printed materials related to every aspect of English and American life.
A Mixed Multitude
From the beginning, Penn’s colony attracted settlers from many parts of Europe, including many who had already sojourned in other West Indian or North American colonies. Speaking many languages and practicing many religions, they represented part of a tremendous worldwide redistribution of British, European, and African peoples, and their arrival gave early Pennsylvania a mélange of tongues, complexions, and religious beliefs. Penn tried to build a bedrock of tolerance to support this diverse population. He never entirely succeeded, but while prejudice and tensions sometimes flared into name-calling and near violence, Pennsylvania was spared the seething ethnic and religious hostilities that wracked Europe and many North American colonies in the seventeenth century.23
The collections of the Historical Society, Library Company, and Philosophical Society came to include rich evidence of Pennsylvania’s patchwork of cultures. Though most of these institutions’ leaders were alarmed by the late nineteenth-century wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, they still paid some attention to the region’s colonial ethnic past. Swedes were the first Europeans to live in what was to become Pennsylvania. Some fifty of them came to the Delaware Valley in 1638, and from that first experience came journals and drawings that provided a basis for Tomas Campanius Holm to write in Swedish what would later be translated as A Short Description of New Sweden. Published in Stockholm in 1702, Holm’s Short Description includes the earliest known pictures of the Lenape—in family groups, trading with Swedish settlers, battling other Indians, and burying their dead.
The Swedes’ arrival gave the Lenape their first experience with European intruders, and the contacts were bittersweet. The Indians welcomed trade, and the Swedes symbolized their peaceful intentions by translating Martin Luther’s writings into a volume in the Lenape language or in a trade pidgin. Philadelphia’s American Swedish Historical Museum, founded in 1926, and built with funding from wealthy Swedish-American industrialists, holds a copy of the book. But as in so many other cases of European-Indian contact, trade was often accompanied by mistrust and violence. It was also almost always accompanied by the exchange of culture. One vivid example of this is an infantry helmet, probably made in Sweden in the early seventeenth century, that became a prized possession of an Indian who was found buried with it near the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County. How it found its way to the Historical Society is unknown, a phantom gift that came “over the transom,” in the parlance of curators.
The Swedish influence in Pennsylvania waned after the arrival of the English. The descendants of the initial Swedish settlers were not numerous, and Philadelphia’s