Philadelphia’s connections with the Atlantic predated William Penn’s founding of the city in 1682. Imperial rivalries among European powers in the seventeenth century made the Delaware Valley a site of colonization, conflict, and diplomatic wrangling. In 1638, the powerful Swedish monarchy established the colony of New Sweden in the area that later became portions of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. The colony survived until 1655, at which point the Dutch Republic conquered it and incorporated New Sweden into New Netherland. Less than ten years later, in 1664, the English took over New Netherland (renaming New Amsterdam as New York in the process), although the Dutch recaptured the colony during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74). The Treaty of Westminster (1674) relinquished New Netherland to the English. Such contests among European monarchies and republics gave the Delaware Valley a cosmopolitan hue. Before Penn arrived, Lenape people lived alongside Swedes, Dutch, Finns, and Germans; enslaved African people have been documented around the Delaware region from 1639.

Within a few decades of the city’s founding, Philadelphia had become a bustling port city and a center of transoceanic trade. Commercial networks bound Philadelphia to the Atlantic World. By the 1750s, Philadelphia had outgrown Boston to become the busiest port in British America. Its shipping carried flaxseed exports to Ireland and sugar grown by enslaved people in the Caribbean for refining along the Delaware waterfront. Philadelphia, in other words, quickly became integrated into the dense web of connections stretching across the Atlantic and beyond. From the beginning, pirates took advantage of these connections as they preyed on vessels. William Penn discovered to his dismay in a 1699 visit to his city that pirates thrived in Philadelphia, where they received significant support from some of the city’s well-to-do residents and royal officials, and from whence they ventured to target Muslim pilgrims in the Indian Ocean.

Religious Freedom, Economic Opportunity

Transatlantic migration peopled early Philadelphia and its surroundings. Irish, English, Welsh, and German Quakers accompanied Penn across the ocean, drawn—like other dissenting groups—by Penn’s promise of the religious freedom denied to them in the Old World. Other newcomers in the eighteenth century, frequently from the British Isles and Germany, flocked to the rich agricultural land to the west of the city. Their small farms offered better economic opportunities than could be found in Europe, giving the region a reputation as “the best poor man’s country.”

But that land belonged to other people and, consequently, European immigration to the Delaware Valley assumed a settler colonial character marked by diplomacy and conflict. Negotiations between Lenape people and Europeans in Greater Philadelphia became an important, if much mythologized, part of the early history of the region. Some Native Americans appear to have preferred dealing with pacific Quakers and established productive relationships with them. At least in the beginning, Penn and Quakers seemed to negotiate in good faith. However, as time passed, more and more Europeans arrived in the region, eyed Native American lands covetously, and plotted to appropriate further territory for themselves. By the mid-eighteenth century, Scots Irish settler colonials to the west of Philadelphia blamed the colony’s Quakers for checking further conquest. In 1763, a marauding band known as the Paxton Boys massacred the residents of a Susquehannock settlement in Lancaster County that had been on good terms with the colony. Such instances reveal how voluntary European migration across the Atlantic led to the violent expropriation of the region’s Native peoples.

Not all passages across the ocean, though, were voluntary. Indentured servitude and African enslavement—the first a temporary form of unfree labor, the second a permanent one—also crossed the Atlantic. Some European immigrants could pay their fare, but those who could not traded up to seven years of their future labor for passage to the Americas. Conditions indentured servants experienced varied wildly across different times and places, but most did not have easy lives. The German schoolmaster Gottlieb Mittelberger sought to discourage such emigration from his homeland. His Journey to Pennsylvania (1756), based on his voyage from Rotterdam to Philadelphia and his subsequent sojourn in Lancaster County, did not pull any punches about the misery and exploitation that indentured servants and other immigrants often faced.

Trafficked African people, assigned by their captors with the inheritable status of enslavement, also arrived in Philadelphia, sometimes on ships outfitted in the city. In the early years of the colony most came from the Caribbean. However, when that supply became more fraught, as it did during Seven Years’ War, Philadelphian traffickers turned to direct importation from Africa. At the beginning of the American Revolution, Philadelphia contained roughly seven hundred enslaved people, who brought with them elements of African and Caribbean culture like pepper pot soup. Philadelphia and its hinterland—where enslavers held over two thousand more people as property—never developed the export-oriented plantation economy that flourished in Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. That said, enslaved people served in households, craft industries, and aboard ships. Furthermore, Philadelphians who did not enslave people themselves often purchased the products of enslaved labor, invested in slaving voyages, and facilitated the buying and selling of their fellow human beings.

Clashes Abroad Reverberate in Philadelphia

A region scarred by Black enslavement became a cradle of white liberty over the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As the foremost port in British North America, Philadelphia played a critical role during the Seven Years’ War, the Imperial Crisis, and the American Revolution. Each of these upheavals had Atlantic origins and ramifications. The struggle between Great Britain and France in Europe reverberated in the Americas. Similarly, events that occurred in the Americas, like George Washington’s military encounter with Joseph Coulon de Jumonville in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, rippled across the Atlantic as well. For Philadelphians, the backdrop of conflict among great powers intensified existing transatlantic connections and created opportunities for new ones. Benjamin Franklin spent considerable time in Great Britain in the 1760s and 1770s trying to prevent war between Great Britain and the thirteen colonies, as well as securing jobs for his friends and associates. Franklin had long been an Atlantic celebrity and his growing disillusionment with Great Britain represented the fraying political and intellectual links between Parliament and its American possessions.

Over these years Philadelphia and its surrounding region became a key battleground in the age of Atlantic Revolutions. Between 1770 and 1833, violent upheavals transformed France, Haiti, and vast colonized regions of North and South America into republics. In 1776 the Second Continental Congress, composed of delegates who were often born and educated in Europe, met in Philadelphia to sign the foundational document of the new United States. The Declaration of Independence reverberated across the ocean and reflected the influence of transatlantic thought. Its authors presented facts to the candid world and addressed a much broader audience than the residents of the thirteen colonies. The draft of Thomas Jefferson also revealed the western drift of Enlightenment ideas. He adapted, for instance, the claim of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke that men had the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.” But the declaration, and the new republic it announced, were also shaped by Atlantic World slavery. As scholars have demonstrated, ideas about white freedom and liberty developed in tandem with racialized ideas about Black enslavement and submissiveness. Jefferson’s initial draft of the declaration placed the onus for slavery solely on Great Britain. From London, it prompted the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson to wonder why the loudest cries for liberty emanated from the mouths of enslavers.

The Imperial Crisis and the American Revolution severed links to Britain. For some in the Delaware Valley the divorce proved hard to imagine. By no means did all residents in the region flock to the Patriot cause, and “Loyalists” who wanted to maintain relations with the mother country could be found among both the economic elite and ordinary people. The Delaware Valley’s Atlantic merchants confronted a difficult dilemma. Ties to the British Empire granted local merchants access to imperial markets, not least in the Caribbean, where food grown in Philadelphia’s fertile hinterland had been exchanged for sugar and cash crops. War cut off such long-established trading routes and led to the questioning of loyalties. Quaker merchants like Henry Drinker often had deep ties to Great Britain. Drinker and his wife Elizabeth faced the challenge of trying to thread the needle between making concessions to revolutionaries while maintaining their Atlantic connections. Revolutionaries eventually arrested him for treason, imprisoning him in Virginia, while Elizabeth navigated life in British-occupied Philadelphia during 1777-78. After regaining control of the city, Patriots held 638 “Tory” collaborators as suspected traitors. The Drinkers, embedded in Atlantic World networks, suffered as they attempted to navigate the complex politics of the Revolutionary era. Other Philadelphian merchants turned their gaze to the west, looking for new markets in China and the Pacific.

Ripples of the American Revolution

The Revolutionary War, like the Seven Years’ War before it, recalibrated Atlantic relations in other ways, too. At Valley Forge in 1777-78 the Prussian officer Baron von Steuben helped to drill George Washington’s army. The British evacuated Philadelphia in June 1778 and retreated to New York. Around three thousand Philadelphian loyalists left the city with the British military forces, joining a wider exodus of Tories and their allies (including enslaved Black Americans who had been promised freedom in exchange for military service) to Canada and Britain. Von Steuben’s work at Valley Forge helped Washington fight the British to a draw at Monmouth. A few months before Patriots retook Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, having been dispatched to Paris, steered the rebel colonies into a crucial alliance with France that helped to determine the outcome of the war. The decision to use Franklin as a diplomat proved a sound one. He fascinated the French, who saw him as the premier example of American genius, and he played his role with aplomb.

In the decades following the American Revolution, Philadelphia remained closely connected to the political currents of the Atlantic World. The ideas of the American Revolution were carried east and south. Revolutions erupted elsewhere—in France, in other parts of Europe, in Haiti, and in Spanish America. The career of Thomas Paine indicates their entangled paths. Paine, who was born in Norfolk, England, had been convinced by Franklin to go to the Americas. Arriving in Philadelphia in late 1774, his influential pamphlet Common Sense made the case for revolution in plain language that appealed to a wide readership. In the doldrums of 1776, Paine’s The American Crisis helped buoy Patriot morale. After the American Revolution ended, Paine traveled to France and served as a member of the National Convention, where he narrowly avoided the guillotine after falling out of favor with leading Jacobins. Paine’s career as an Atlantic revolutionary, with Philadelphia at its center, demonstrates how ideas easily crossed oceans.

As a major port city and an Atlantic World hub, Philadelphia often welcomed revolutionaries like Paine, while selectively supporting revolutions elsewhere. French Minister Edmond-Charles Genêt, also called Citizen Genêt, arrived in Philadelphia to a rapturous welcome in 1793. Genêt angered George Washington by attempting to subvert Washington’s proclamation of U.S. neutrality in the brewing conflict between Great Britain and France. Another figure to become embroiled in partisan battles of the early republic was the Polish nobleman Tadeusz Kościuszko. Having fought with the colonials during the American Revolution and then for Poland against Russia and Prussia, in 1797 he returned as a political exile to the United States, where he lived briefly in Philadelphia until leaving for Europe in 1798. Kościuszko wrote a will that named Thomas Jefferson as the executor, dedicating his estate to purchasing the freedom of enslaved people and providing them with an education.

Exiles Find a Home

Whether as a place of refuge from revolution and reaction or as a source of support for insurgents, the Delaware Valley became enmeshed with tumultuous upheavals across the Atlantic. When revolution erupted in Haiti in 1791, French masters fled the island, forcing many of the people they enslaved to join them. The exiles who arrived in Philadelphia brought firsthand accounts of the hemisphere’s first Black-led revolution, which energized both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist politics. Another Francophone uprooted by revolutionary wars was Joseph Bonaparte, who fled to the United States after his brother Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Following a short sojourn in Philadelphia he moved out to an estate in nearby Bordentown, New Jersey, where he spent most of his remaining years. Supporters of the Greeks in the Greek War for Independence from the Ottoman Empire raised money for the cause and even tried to persuade the United States to intervene. And in 1848, citizens gathered on Independence Square to welcome the proclamation of a new French Republic. People did not always like the direction foreign revolutions took, but Philadelphians, both Black and white, recognized their city’s place in a revolutionary Atlantic World.

Black Philadelphians insisted that those Atlantic revolutions had to reckon with enslavement—the cry of liberty rang hollow if new republics were built on the back of forced labor. Finding allies, however, did not prove easy; abolitionism was never more than a minority sentiment among white people in the eighteenth century. That said, some of the region’s Quakers, African Americans, and other friends of liberty raised their voices in favor of ending enslavement and emancipating enslaved people. Connections to the Caribbean and Europe shaped antislavery activism in the Delaware Valley. An extraordinary individual named Benjamin Lay, a Quaker immigrant, became one of the region’s earliest abolitionists. Born in England the same year as Philadelphia’s founding, Lay spent years traversing the Atlantic as a sailor, left for Barbados, and from there migrated to Philadelphia. Lay’s abolitionism sprang from his ardent Quaker faith, as well as his experiences in Barbados, where he witnessed enslavement’s brutality firsthand. While in Barbados, Lay and his wife Sarah held meetings at their house and served meals to enslaved people, which infuriated white slaveholders. After he and Sarah relocated to Philadelphia, Lay tried to convince fellow Quakers in the region to emancipate enslaved people. While some Friends had rejected enslavement before Lay’s arrival, his activism led to his disownment, and he retreated to a cave he converted into a cottage in Abington, Pennsylvania. From there Lay continued to urge the region’s Friends to acknowledge Atlantic enslavement as apostasy. By the end of his life more Quaker voices in the region had begun to proclaim the abolitionism gospel, including the New Jersey merchant John Woolman, a member of the Chesterfield Friends Meeting, who died in Britain on an antislavery mission, and the French-born religious refugee Anthony Benezet, who played an important role in founding the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in 1775. The first abolition society in the Americas, it was later reorganized as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage (usually referred to as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society) in 1789.

The AME Church Goes Global

In the decades that followed, Black abolitionists in Philadelphia built institutions and cultivated connections that reached across the Atlantic. By doing so they recognized that the struggle against enslavement in the United States was part of a wider battle for rights that extended to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. Richard Allen, building on his efforts in establishing Philadelphia’s Free African Society in 1787 and Mother Bethel Church in 1794, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and became the church’s first bishop. AME churches subsequently sprang up all over the globe. By the end of the nineteenth century they had reached Bermuda, West Africa, and South Africa. An African American institution that began in Philadelphia therefore shaped the global spread of Black Christianity. Bishop Allen supported abolition, as did James Forten, a self-made sailmaker who after an initial flirtation with the idea of “colonizing” formerly enslaved Americans in Africa or Haiti became a fierce opponent of such schemes and an ardent advocate of an immediate end to enslavement. But the Atlantic connections of Philadelphia’s Black abolitionists are perhaps most evident in the career of Robert Purvis. Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, to parents of British, Moroccan, and Jewish roots, Purvis migrated to Philadelphia, where he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. Like many of his fellow abolitionists, Purvis sought to rally support in the United Kingdom, which had put enslavement on the path to extinction in its own colonies, and he traveled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean on fundraising missions while corresponding with prominent British figures in the antislavery movement. When, on August 1, 1842, Black abolitionists marched through the southern wards of the city to mark the eighth anniversary of abolition across the British empire, a rampaging white mob threatened to burn down Purvis’s house.

The Lombard Street Riot of 1842, as it became known, proved just one of a series of riots that pitted rival immigrant and racial groups against one another in the “turbulent era” of the 1830s and 1840s. Tensions over religion, enslavement, and politics that reached across the Atlantic Ocean played out on the streets of Philadelphia. Immigration from Europe continued in the decades after the Revolution, with British, Germans, and Irish (especially after the beginning of the Potato Famine in the 1840s) the most heavily represented. Old World experiences shaped their politics. British Chartists, veterans of the struggle for the vote in the United Kingdom, welcomed the political rights denied to them in their country of origin. Irish Catholics gravitated toward the Democratic Party, in part due to the hostility of prominent Democrats like Andrew Jackson toward Britain. Indeed, the frequency with which Irish Catholics participated in anti-abolitionist violence owed something to their equation of abolitionism with support for the British crown. Germans, on the other hand, often backed the new antislavery Republican Party in the 1850s, and many of them saw the fight against enslavement as a continuation of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. Catholic immigration in particular met a nativist backlash. The Philadelphia Nativist Riots of 1844, which saw the county placed under martial law, sprang from rumors that Irish newcomers wanted to replace the Protestant King James Bible in the city’s public schools. Philadelphia became a battleground in a conflict that stretched back to the English colonization of Ireland and break with Rome.

Movement across the ocean brought epidemics as well as people. Diseases rarely remained within the borders of one country; they spread rapidly across an increasingly connected world. Philadelphia’s status as an Atlantic port increased its vulnerability. A yellow fever epidemic in 1793, possibly carried on ships transporting French enslavers fleeing the Haitian Revolution, killed at least five thousand Philadelphians and sent tens of thousands fleeing from the city. Yellow fever recurred on a less destructive scale for decades. After the epidemic in 1793, the city decided to build new waterworks and engaged British-born architect Benjamin Latrobe to design them. Latrobe built the waterworks in a neoclassical style that evoked Athens. Cholera too crossed the Atlantic and caused epidemics in 1832, 1849, and 1866. By the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s sanitarians were learning from the hygiene measures that had begun to control such diseases in Europe.

The Arts and Sciences Flourish

Such exchange of knowledge had long been a feature of the region. The arts and sciences flourished in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram’s establishment of the American Philosophical Society in 1743 marked the first of many efforts for Philadelphians to demonstrate leadership in the arts and sciences. Philadelphia was the first city to lay claim to the mantle of the “Athens of America,” although some people later argued that Boston also deserved the title. The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was founded in 1812, in part to impel the creation and diffusion of knowledge about the sciences and in part to place science in the United States on a par with its status in Europe. While Atlantic World rivalries proved important, the flourishing of the arts and sciences in Philadelphia also sprang from cultural exchange and connection, with leaders in fields as diverse as medicine (Benjamin Rush), botany (John Bartram), and history (Henry Charles Lea) all maintaining close links through either education or correspondence to their European counterparts. The French, in particular, had a powerful influence on the city, not least through the career of the merchant Stephen Girard, an immigrant who became one of the richest men in the United States and left most of his estate to his adopted city. Such figures cultivated and affirmed Atlantic World relationships.

If Philadelphia’s intellectual connections to the Atlantic remained a constant across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the region’s significance to the transoceanic economy eventually started to wane in the 1800s. In contrast to Washington, D.C., which foreign observers and even many people in the U.S. derided as a miasmic swamp or a sleepy, provincial village, Philadelphia remained an Atlantic financial hub well into the 1830s. The Second Bank of the United States, based on Chestnut Street and boasting a federal charter from its foundation in 1816 to 1836, maintained transatlantic financial ties between the U.S. and Europe, particularly Great Britain. Its demise at the hands of President Jackson strained those relations, which suffered further when Pennsylvania defaulted on its debt payments to European creditors in 1842, prompting the English Lake poet (and out of pocket “surly creditor”) William Wordsworth to rail against the commonwealth’s “degenerate Men.” Furthermore, Philadelphia lost ground to New York City as an Atlantic port, as the Erie Canal (among other factors) fueled Manhattan’s ascent as the financial capital of the United States. The source of Greater Philadelphia’s wealth shifted from commerce to manufacturing, as the Athens of America transformed into the workshop of the world, which increased local support for high protective tariffs to protect home industry. These higher tariffs, however, made it harder for the city to cultivate European markets. Some Philadelphians nevertheless found overseas clients. Joseph Harrison Jr., for example, built locomotives for Russia and Czar Nicholas I awarded him a gold medal for completing the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. After his return to Philadelphia, Harrison amassed an impressive art collection, which he displayed at his mansion off Rittenhouse Square. Harrison, like some of his contemporaries, remained connected to the Atlantic World and prioritized connections and cultural exchange.

Philadelphia’s reputation as an Atlantic center of politics, finance, and commerce may have declined over the course of the nineteenth century but its links to its nearest ocean persisted in other respects. Immigration, which had slowed during the Civil War, accelerated again in the decades that followed. These arrivals increasingly came from eastern and southern Europe— especially Italy—rather than the western and northern reaches of the continent. Their children and grandchildren then often made the Atlantic crossing in reverse to fight in that continent’s wars. U.S. intervention in European conflict left a marked impact on the region’s economy and society. World War I and World War II stimulated ship production along the Delaware. During the latter, the Philadelphia Navy Yard employed over fifty thousand workers, whose labor made Philadelphia a vital part of the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Europe and Africa continued to exert an influence in art, design, and politics, too. Jacques-Henri-Auguste Gréber, a French landscape architect, designed and built the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and a proponent of Pan-Africanism, had a following in Philadelphia. Garvey is not the only example of Philadelphia’s connections to Africa. After the loosening of federal restrictions on immigration in the 1960s, Ethiopians, Ghanaians, Liberians, and Nigerians were prominently represented in the new African diaspora of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to Philadelphia.

Bonds of Culture Persist

Philadelphia’s Atlantic connections remained evident in spaces and civic life of the twenty-first century region. The Irish Memorial near Penn’s Landing, dedicated in 2003, sought to remind visitors about the migrants who built the city. The Mummers Parade could trace its roots back to older immigrant traditions from England, Germany, and Sweden. Annual Columbus Day celebrations testified to both the strength of Italian-American pride and the contested legacy of European colonization. Founders of the ODUNDE Festival, held the second Sunday in June, sought to celebrate the history and heritage of African peoples around the globe and created one of the longest-running and largest African American street festivals in the United States. Philadelphia’s historical connections to the Atlantic—forged in cultural exchange, revolutionary conflict, and the movement of peoples and revolutionary ideas—helped make the twenty-first century city a mecca for tourists. Yet such connections have sometimes underpinned a resurgent nativist politics that echoed an earlier era, as some residents used the region’s European cultural heritage to question the place of new immigrants from the Americas and Asia in the city. Philadelphia connections by the twenty-first century were global rather than primarily Atlantic. But the ocean the Delaware River empties into made the city a political and economic hub and the links it enabled remained lodged in civic memory.

Evan C. Rothera is Assistant Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. He is author of Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022) and coeditor, with Brian Matthew Jordan, of The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020). (Author information current at time of publication).

Founded in 1879, the Women’s National Indian Association organized by Mary Lucinda Bonney and Amelia Stone Quinton of the Home Mission Circle of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia became nationally prominent. During the association’s first three years, it merged and renamed itself often as it collaborated with other Protestant groups in the Northeast and Midwest who shared its missionary zeal and desire to ensure that Indians had their political rights on reservations protected.

While the women’s group focused primarily on religious matters, on December 15, 1882, thirty or forty wealthy reform-minded gentlemen gathered at the Philadelphia home of the Honorable John Welsh to hear from the judge’s sons, Herbert (1851-1941), and Henry S. Pancoast (1875-1939). They had just returned from a visit to the Dakota Territory as guests of Episcopal missionary Bishop William Hobart Hare (1838-1909). Concerned about the living conditions of the Sioux and U.S. Indian Bureau corruption, the men created the Indian Rights Association (IRA).

Over the next 100 years, the IRA worked “to secure to the Indians of the United States the political and civil rights already guaranteed to them by treaty and statutes of the United States.” Members concentrated on education, enforcement of state and territory law on reservations, and the establishment of a system of individual land ownership on reservations. IRA members believed assimilation and Americanization within a Protestant context were the way for Indians to survive in the fast-growing United States.

The IRA’s strength and longevity came largely from a strategy focused on popular opinion and federal legislation. Within two years of its founding, the IRA established a second office in Washington, D.C., and within three years had chapters nationally. Use of the press and lobbyists allowed the IRA leadership to affect federal appointments and introduce bills such as the Citizenship Act of 1924, which granted U.S. citizenship to all Indians. The IRA investigated tribal complaints about federal agencies, filed amicus briefs on Indian issues, and supported tribes in property conflicts and tribal recognition. Its Indian Truth, published from 1924 to 1986, promised, in its editor’s words, “a brief comprehensive review of Indian happenings”— from social news to legal proceedings and summaries of educational programs.

Due to this publication and an active speaker circuit, the IRA became one of the primary sources of information and documentation of life on Indian reservations. By the mid-1900s, IRA’s mission changed from educating Indians in the ways of the “white” world to educating mainstream Americans about native cultures. In 1971, the board of directors officially recognized a shift in its mission with new policies.

By the time of its centennial in 1982, the IRA found it necessary to reconsider not only its mission but its purpose for being. Indian-run organizations were performing many of the functions that it had. Unable to develop a unique niche and find funding, the IRA closed its doors in 1994.

Beth A. Twiss Houting is the Senior Director of Programs and Services at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. She holds a B.A. in History from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. from the University of Delaware in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture with a Certificate in Museum Studies. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Prior to European colonization, Lenape territory (the Lenapehoking) encompassed the areas of later New York City, western Connecticut, southern New York, Philadelphia, the Poconos, the Lehigh and Delaware Valleys, the entirety of New Jersey, and eastern Delaware (as well the land along the western bank of the Delaware River and Bay from the Poconos to at least Cape Henlopen). From the moment of first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century, the Lenape engaged in cultural and commercial exchanges with European colonists in the Lenapehoking (colonists included Swedes, Finns, Quakers, the Dutch, the French, the English, Germans, and other Europeans). While influential in the region throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, under the pressure of European settlement Lenape peoples faced removal to the western United States or Eastern Canada. Among the latest removals were the Lenape of Brotherton, New Jersey, who sold their lands to the state in December 1801 and relocated to areas near Oneida Lake in New York (in 1832, they sold their remaining hunting and fishing rights).

Lenape descendants remained in the region in various small communities, but records of their lives and public presence in the nineteenth century are rare. In New Jersey, records document Lenape children who served as indentured servants to white merchants and farmers. Lenape existence remained somewhat obscure to non-Native people until the middle of the twentieth century. Then, on the heels of the civil rights movement and influenced by the American Indian Movement (AIM), Lenape peoples of the Greater Philadelphia region pursued greater self-determination, seeking to exercise their right to define their own identities and cultural expression. The many groups that formed in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware included the Nanticoke Lenni Lenape (NLL), which became a formal entity on August 7, 1978 (New Jersey state recognition granted in 1982), and the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania (LNPA), which formed in the 1990s.

Hosting Traditional Ceremonies

Among the numerous groups in eastern Pennsylvania, southern New York, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware, the LNPA became one of the most active. While neither a federally recognized nor a state-recognized tribe (Pennsylvania did not have an office of Indian affairs or any process of state recognition), the organization gained 501(c)(3) status in 2001. Headquartered in Easton, Pennsylvania, the LNPA hosted traditional ceremonies, maintained a cultural heritage center and museum, organized Lenape language education programs, and engaged in community service. The group sought to explain Indigenous history and assert that the original inhabitants of Pennsylvania did not simply disappear in the face of aggressive European-American expansion. Its activities included a quadrennial “Rising Nation River Journey” trip down the length of the Delaware River (from Hancock, New York, to Cape May, New Jersey), which had a mission of signing new treaties of friendship and brotherhood with local churches, educational institutions, environmental preservation groups, and historical societies. This activity sought to continue traditions of goodwill that began with meetings and treaties between William Penn (1644-1718) and Chief Tamanend (c. 1625-1701) in the 1680s. The LNPA also initiated yearly friendship treaty signings at Temple University and other Philadelphia-region universities. Close ties with Temple also resulted in a celebration of Indigenous Peoples Day on October 14, 2019. The LNPA’s relationship with the Tri-College Consortium (Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore Colleges) culminated in the offering of Lenape language classes at Swarthmore and presentations, conferences, and other events at Haverford and Bryn Mawr.

The Nanticoke Lenni Lenape maintained a strong presence in southern New Jersey. Centered in Bridgeton, they became one of the state’s three recognized tribes (which also included Ramapough Lenape Indian Nation of Mahwah, Bergen County, and the Powhatan Renape of Rancocas, Burlington County). The NLL, formed in the 1970s and recognized by the state in 1982, took a confederated approach to the process of recognition with members from various Nanticoke and Lenape groups. Led by Mark “Quiet Hawk” Gould (b. c.1942), the group sought to unite the Indigenous community within southern New Jersey and further assert indigenous identity in their historical homeland. The tribe held multiple gatherings, participated in community outreach programs in Bridgeton and Philadelphia, and worked alongside other Lenape and Nanticoke entities within the region.

A Historically Native American Church

Among the most vibrant Indigenous groups in the region, in 1995 the NLL community resecured their tribal grounds in Fairton, New Jersey. Their church, Saint John United Methodist Church (UMC) in Fordville, was designated a historically Native American church by the New Jersey annual conference of the UMC. This led to similar recognition by the national General Conference of the Methodist Church in 2017. During the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, members of the church and NLL provided food and relief to the community (especially in Fairfield Township).

Together with the Nanticoke Tribe of Delaware and the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware, the Nanticoke Lenni Lenape formed the Confederation of Sovereign Nentego-Lenape Tribes on May 20, 2007. Akin to the NLL, the Nanticoke Tribe of Delaware, based in Sussex County, and the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware, in the Dover area, also sought to preserve the region’s Lenape heritage. Both tribes were state-recognized entities. The Nanticoke of Delaware maintained a museum and cultural center in Millsboro, Delaware. Both Delaware groups participated in powwows, helped maintain the confederation’s online museum, and fostered community among Indigenous peoples of the region.

Descendants of the original inhabitants of the greater Philadelphia region persisted despite the ravages of colonization and forced assimilation. Their resilience was a testament to the strength of their ancestors, and their efforts in education and community outreach had an enduring effect on the region and its citizens. By preserving their culture, these groups ensured the Lenapes’ place in the history of the region and its future.

Matthew Soderblom is a Ph.D. student at Temple University, where he specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and frontier literature. His research interests include Indigenous and American immigrant literatures. He is currently working on a project involving the works of Willa Cather, Zitkalá-Šá, and O.E. Rølvaag. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The colonies that became the state of Delaware lay in the middle of the North American Atlantic coast, extending about 120 miles north from the Atlantic Ocean along the southwestern shore of the Delaware (South) Bay and River to within 10 miles of Philadelphia. Between 1609 and 1704, the area was a contested borderland between north and south, as a dozen native and colonial political and commercial regimes sought to assert authority over the region. William Penn (1644-1718) ultimately gained control of the area as an addition to his land grant for Pennsylvania.

The bay and river—named in 1610 by English explorer Samuel Argall (1580-1626) in honor of Virginia’s governor, Thomas West, Lord De La Warr (1576-1618)—provided a rich, diverse estuarine environment for natives and colonists. A network of natural harbors and navigable rivers enabled trade along the coast and access into the interior. Early historic maps show extensive oyster-laden shoals in the shallow southern reaches of the bay. Shad, sturgeon, and other fish migrated annually up the river. An extensive marsh system lined the bay and river, broken by broad meadows and savannahs. Waterfowl, small mammals, fish, and salt hay abounded, and these lands proved amenable to grazing cattle. The forested coastal plain provided wild game and timber for structures, fencing, and shipbuilding, as did the Cypress Swamp in southern Sussex County. The northern Piedmont hills yielded flint for native people’s stone toolmaking and Europeans exploited the iron ore at Iron Hill, near Newark, New Castle County.

Lenape and Susquehannocks

For most of the seventeenth century, Lenape Algonquian people exerted the greatest political and economic control over the country from central New Jersey through eastern Pennsylvania and along the Delaware Bay to its mouth at Cape Henlopen (Sussex County). Led by sachems and councils of elders, they lived in unpalisaded towns and spoke Unami. Over the course of the century, these Lenape natives created with European settlers a distinctive society that valued peace over conflict, religious freedom, collaboration, respect for diverse people, and local authority. Nonetheless, desire for profits led to contention, and native traders shifted among European nations to obtain the quantity and quality of goods they sought. Exchange provided the source of the Lenapes’ power, which they used to provoke colonial rivalries.

Inland, Susquehannock (Minquas) peoples living in fortified villages along the Susquehanna River proved especially determined to maintain independence in the fur trade, and played Swedes, Dutch, and English against each other. A decade of intermittent war with Lenapes between 1626 and 1636 typified the larger contest for control over furs in the North Atlantic world. The outcome earned Susquehannock traders the right to do business in Lenape areas along Delaware Bay and instigated a trade alliance among the groups.

Dutch Republic and Sweden along the Delaware

While the Lenapes defended their homeland against the Susquehannocks and northern Iroquois, Europeans from the Dutch Republic’s West India Company, the City of Amsterdam, and Sweden established small trading colonies. Lenapes welcomed trade with Dutch sailors, who entered the bay and river by about 1615. The Dutch West India Company established Fort Nassau on the eastern side of the Delaware River in 1626 as part of its colony of New Netherland, an outpost of the Dutch commercial empire and potential source of furs for the expanding European market. Dutch activity expanded in 1629, when officials bargained with a southernmost Lenape community, Sickoneysincks, for a tract of land reaching from Cape Henlopen to the mouth of the Delaware River. By 1631 the resulting colony, Zwaanendael, consisted of about thirty colonists housed in a palisaded fort. Within a year, however, the venture ended in violence. After the Sickoneysincks determined that the Dutch intended to build an agricultural settlement, not merely a trading fort, they destroyed the fort and its occupants. Though the colony failed, its brief existence prevented the future area of Delaware, or at least southern Delaware, from being adjudged part of Maryland.

In the mid-1630s, Peter Minuit (c. 1580-1638), former director of New Netherland, negotiated with the Swedish government to establish the New Sweden colony under Swedish protection. He understood the strategic geographical importance of the lower Delaware Valley, and that the Dutch West India Company had insufficient resources to devote to its development and defense. The New Sweden Company, under leadership of Minuit and other investors, benefited from Dutch colonial experience and funding while enjoying the added advantage of patronage and the protection of the Swedish monarch. For the crown, New Sweden promised to strengthen the nation’s new position as a European power, naval experience, and imperial growth.

The New Sweden Company built Fort Christina, the first permanent European settlement in Delaware, in 1638. The fort, which became the base of one of two primary European settlements along the west side of the river in the seventeenth century, stood at the confluence of the Brandywine and Christina Creeks, later Wilmington, northern New Castle County. At its peak, the colony claimed territory along both sides of the Delaware from the mouth of the bay to the falls (later Trenton, New Jersey), and the settlers traded with Lenapes and Susquehannocks. New Sweden officials established fortifications along the river in an effort to control trade with Indian fur suppliers. Most New Sweden settlers lived along the tributaries of the Delaware River between what later became Wilmington and Philadelphia.

Despite their nations’ alliance in Europe, Dutch West India Company and New Sweden Company settlers believed the lower Delaware Valley could not accommodate them both. They maneuvered for trade advantages, particularly after Peter Stuyvesant (d. 1672) became director-general of New Netherland in 1647. By 1650, the Dutch administration on Manhattan Island and directors in Amsterdam had realized the importance of settling the lower Delaware. Stuyvesant provocatively replaced Fort Nassau in 1651 with Fort Casimir, a second principal European settlement just south of the Swedish Fort Christina. Stuyvesant was concerned not only with Swedes but with English efforts to colonize the river.

After Stuyvesant invaded New Sweden in 1655, Sweden lost its tenuous foothold in this middling borderland. The Dutch then divided the settlements on the Delaware into two colonies. The City of Amsterdam created its “City Colony” in the region surrounding Fort Casimir below the Christina River, centered on New Amstel (later New Castle). Two rows of house and garden plots extended south from the fort along the river. Purportedly 110 houses were completed within a year for Dutch administrators, soldiers, traders, and a mix of settlers from across northern Europe. Within a few years, however, political infighting and economic turmoil led to outmigration, and the population plummeted. Settlers arriving from Maryland and Virginia caused concern because Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore (1637-1715) considered the lands between the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River part of his proprietorship. Plans to profit from the tobacco trade with Maryland were stymied by epidemic and the inability of farmers to support the population.

The second Dutch colony, the “Company Colony” north of the Christina River, remained under the administration of Dutch West India Company with a predominantly Swedish and Finnish population. Dutch administrators remained suspicious and distrustful of these Finnish and Swedish settlers. The Dutch renamed the Swedes’ Fort Christina as Fort Altena, but the “Swedish nation” remained strong in other settlements upriver. The Dutch depended on the Swedes’ skills as farmers, interpreters, messengers, diplomats, and soldiers.

English: Duke of York

The unstable, contested relationships among the multinational, multicultural population of the lower Delaware Valley paved the way for conquest by the English in 1664, after Charles II (1630-85) granted his brother James, Duke of York (1633-1701), proprietary rights to land extending from New England to the east side of Delaware Bay. A bloodless invasion of the west shore at Fort Casimir extended the English claim, and the Duke created New Castle County (1664). Beginning in the late 1660s, Swedes, Finns, and Dutch from the Christina Valley and New Castle moved west and south, while English settlers, including some from Maryland, moved to the west bank of the Delaware in small but increasing numbers. Often they brought enslaved Africans with them. In 1670 Governor Francis Lovelace (c. 1621-75) established the first local court in southern Delaware, at Whorekill (later Sussex County). By the mid-1670s, distinct communities of Finns, a wealthy elite, and multiethnic peasants had emerged along the west coast of the lower Delaware. The “Swedish nation” remained autonomous and resilient through alliances with Lenapes and Susquehannocks.

Under the Duke of York, the tobacco economy in Delaware flourished. By 1680, pork and corn joined tobacco as the principal agricultural exports to England, Scotland, and the West Indies. Sufficient population growth and economic development had occurred along the central Delaware coast to warrant the division of Kent County from Whorekill in that year. In some areas these new colonists and descendants of earlier settlers expanded into grain farming and milling and established commercial orchards and animal husbandry operations.

English: William Penn

In 1681 William Penn convinced the English Crown to grant him a charter to 45,000 square miles on the western side of the Delaware River, with a southern boundary on the river twelve miles north of New Castle. Two years later, just before Penn sailed for Pennsylvania, the Duke of York deeded him possession of the three Delaware counties of New Castle, Kent, and Sussex (the Lower Counties). At the time, only about four hundred nonnative inhabitants—Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, and English settlers, and approximately one hundred enslaved Africans—shared with Lenape peoples the entire settled area from Cape Henlopen to New Castle.

In the 1690s, many Lenapes sold claims along the Delaware and moved west into former lands of Minquas-Susquehannock peoples. The borderland region remained torn by religious schism and political rivalry. An extended dispute with Lord Baltimore over the Maryland-Three Lower Counties of Delaware boundary also plagued Penn’s administration.

Penn sought to establish a predominantly Quaker colony. The ethnically, religiously diverse Lower Counties resisted efforts to incorporate them under one proprietary government for Pennsylvania based in Philadelphia. Conflicts arose over autonomy, representation, divergent economic interests, and military defense. Although the region remained Penn’s domain, beginning in 1704 a separate Assembly governed the Lower Counties of Delaware.

By the early eighteenth century, the increasingly European-American landscape of Delaware’s three counties consisted of a few small port towns like New Castle in New Castle County and Lewes in Sussex County and dispersed farmsteads where the land possessed good agricultural qualities. Farmers located their farmsteads near waterways or roads, and cleared small areas for buildings and tobacco, rye, barley, and wheat fields, orchards, and livestock grazing lands. As Philadelphia rapidly grew to be the second-largest city in English North America, Delaware became part of the city’s agricultural and commercial hinterland.

Lu Ann De Cunzo holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization with a specialization in historical archaeology. Her research has addressed diverse themes and topics of lower Delaware Valley history and cultures between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. She is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The health of the colonial population varied by race and region. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as in the rest of the colonies, Native Americans were struck by epidemic diseases introduced from the Old World, including smallpox and measles. Africans and African Americans also suffered, facing overwork, malnutrition, and a new disease environment. European migrants brought European diseases with them, but they also encountered diseases imported from Africa, including yellow fever and a deadly form of malaria. Beyond these patterns, other variables also affected colonial health. Cities were less healthy than rural regions, as local and international trade networks facilitated the spread of disease and as crowding and improper disposal of wastes led to sickness. European immigrants often suffered from higher death rates than native-born colonists. Disease environments also changed over time. In general, the seventeenth century was healthier than the eighteenth. As the population grew and trade expanded, diseases spread more easily.

Philadelphia and the surrounding region stood at the intersection of these patterns. As a multiethnic city, Philadelphia had a population that included Native Americans, Blacks (both free and enslaved), and European immigrants from Britain, Germany, and elsewhere. In the colonial period, the city saw both chronic and epidemic threats to health. All colonial cities suffered from overcrowding and problems with waste disposal. At the same time, as a major port, Philadelphia was subject to epidemic diseases imported from Europe, the West Indies, and Africa. Local officials (in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey) tried to impose quarantines when infectious disease was known to exist, but such quarantines were of limited effectiveness. Even when human beings respected a quarantine, the mosquitoes that carried malaria or yellow fever would not. By the end of the seventeenth century, Philadelphia’s death rate exceeded its birth rate, and the city grew only because of continuing migration. Major killers in the region included chronic threats like dysentery and respiratory illnesses as well as epidemic diseases like smallpox and yellow fever.

Pennsylvania Hospital

In confronting this disease environment, residents of the city turned to a wide variety of medical practitioners. Philadelphia was the site of one of the first hospitals in the British colonies, Pennsylvania Hospital, founded in 1751. Still, university-trained physicians were rare, and their services might be expensive. One historian estimated that in the 1770s, only about 200 physicians with medical degrees lived in all of the American colonies combined. These doctors had studied in Europe, as there were no medical schools in America until the first, the Medical Department of the College of Philadelphia, opened in 1765, drawing students from Pennsylvania and elsewhere. This school closed during the Revolution, but reopened in the 1790s. No medical school was founded in New Jersey in the colonial period, but New Jersey doctors formed the New Jersey Medical Society in 1766 in an attempt to professionalize the practice of medicine in the colony. Whether in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, most colonial doctors did not study medicine at school. Rather, they trained through an apprenticeship with a local physician, often studying and observing his medical practice for a three-year period.

But Pennsylvania and New Jersey residents also turned to other practitioners. Ministers commonly attempted to aid the sick with physical as well as spiritual help. In Elizabethtown, New Jersey, for example, the Reverend John Dickinson  acted both as pastor and medical practitioner. Ordinary men and women might grow herbs, gather medicinal plants, or trade time-honored remedies with each other. Midwives aided women in childbirth, a realm of health care from which men were largely excluded. The belief that each land and climate produced both its own sicknesses and its own remedies led some colonists to seek advice from Native American healers, and American plants like guaiacum, sassafras, tobacco, and ipecacuanha (often called “Indian Physick”) had long been incorporated into colonial medicine. Colonists might also attempt to treat themselves or their families with the aid of medical handbooks. Major works printed or reprinted in Philadelphia included John Tennent’s Every Man His Own Doctor, first published in Virginia in 1734 and reprinted in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin in 1734, 1736, and (in German) 1749; William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, first published in Edinburgh in 1769 and reprinted in Philadelphia in 1771, 1772, and 1774; and the theologian John Wesley’s Primitive Physick, first published in London in 1747 and reprinted in Philadelphia in 1764 and 1770 and in Trenton in 1788.

Popular medicine seldom had a strong theoretical basis. Plants or other remedies were popular because they worked (or seemed to work), often by causing powerful physical reactions. Those who read Every Man His Own Doctor, for example, would have found many remedies advising that the sick person be dosed with “Indian Physick” (ipecac) to cause vomiting or suggesting that a medicine made from mallow (an imported herb) and peach-blossom syrup would cause purging. Buchan preferred milder remedies, though noting that bleeding and purging could sometimes be useful. Wesley, on the other hand, was far more suspicious of doctors. In Primitive Physick, he maintained that temperate habits and moderate exercise could ward off many diseases, and that drinking water could treat many illnesses effectively. Doctors, he thought, had made medicine unnecessarily complicated in order to gain money and honor for themselves.

Theories of Medical Procedure

University-trained physicians deplored the lack of system in such popular remedies. The Philadelphia physician John Morgan (1735-89) was among the first professors in Philadelphia’s medical school. In his Apology for Attempting to Introduce the Regular Practice of Physic (published in Philadelphia in 1765) he proudly declared that he had studied with “the most celebrated masters in every branch of medicine” in Europe. The human body, he wrote, was so complex that long years of education were necessary to understand its workings. Formal medical training was vital, for an untrained or half-trained physician was as likely to inadvertently poison a patient as heal him or her.

Morgan and other university-trained physicians were profoundly influenced by the ideas of leading European physicians, including the Dutch doctor Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) and the British physician William Cullen (1710-90).  Boerhaave had theorized that the human body was made up of “solids” and “fluids,” which must be kept in balance. Disease resulted from imbalances in the solids and fluids, which could often be remedied by bleeding or purging the patient to restore balance. Cullen’s theory of medicine was somewhat different, as he believed that diseases might be caused by contagion from another person or by breathing infected air (a miasma). Their remedies, however, were much the same. Eighteenth-century doctors in Philadelphia, as in Europe, generally believed that the best cures had dramatic effects on the body. Medicines that caused vomiting and purging (including ipecac and jalap) were popular, as was mercury (to cause salivation). Such treatments were intended to restore balance to the body by drawing off corrupt or excessive matter. Doctors also relied on bleeding, which might have the additional benefit of lowering a fever or even causing a suffering patient to lose consciousness. For those who trusted these doctors, the dramatic effect of their medicines testified to their strength. Skeptics argued that such powerful drugs could only weaken a sick person. One satirical poem summed up the remedies of the day: “Piss, Spew, and Spit, / Perspiration and Sweat; / Purge, Bleed, and Blister, / Issues and Clyster.”

Philadelphia was at the center of a major medical controversy during the American Revolution, when a smallpox epidemic ravaged the colonies between 1775 and 1782. A process for inoculation for smallpox had been known for much of the 1700s. It involved taking pus from the sores of a smallpox victim and introducing the infected matter into an incision in a healthy person. That person would then contract smallpox, but usually in a milder form. Inoculation was controversial in the 1700s, not least because an inoculated person, while sick, was fully contagious. Since inoculation was quite expensive, poorer citizens resented the idea that the wealthy, by inoculating themselves, put the larger community at risk. Nonetheless, inoculation was quite common (and unregulated) in colonial Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Patrick Henry (1736-99), and Martha Washington (1731-1802) were all inoculated there. During the American Revolution, George Washington (1732-99) ordered soldiers inoculated. In Pennsylvania, military inoculations took place in Philadelphia, Newtown, and Bethlehem.

Colonial Philadelphia’s status as a growing city and a major port led to a dangerous disease environment. Its institutions (including the first American medical school and Pennsylvania Hospital) were among the first of their kind in the colonies, but in the end, most of the medical treatments of the day could do little to slow or stop the spread of sickness.

Martha K. Robinson is Associate Professor of History at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include “New Worlds, New Medicines: Indian Remedies and English Medicine in Early America,” Early American Studies 3 (Spring 2005): 94-110. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Moravians’ origins go back to 1722, when a German nobleman, Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf (1700-60), allowed a small group of Protestant dissenters from Bohemia and Moravia to settle on his land in Saxony. These dissenters, called the Unitas Fratrum, drew inspiration from the Czech reformer Jan Hus (1369-1415) and other Protestants and had faced persecution from Catholic authorities. Zinzendorf became the most influential and powerful Moravian leader of the eighteenth century. Ordained as a Lutheran minister in 1735 and consecrated as a Moravian bishop in 1737, Zinzendorf and his followers believed that God wanted them to send missionaries around the world. As part of that effort, in 1741 Zinzendorf traveled to Pennsylvania, where the Moravians founded Bethlehem. The town grew rapidly from only 131 settlers in 1741 to more than 1,200 Moravians in Bethlehem and the surrounding region by 1753. Other distinctively Moravian communities followed, including Nazareth, Gnadenthal, and Christiansbrunn in Pennsylvania and Wachovia in North Carolina. Other Moravians settled in largely non-Moravian areas, including Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere.

In the eighteenth century, Bethlehem served two purposes–it was designed both as a model community whose members were devoted to God and as the home base and economic support for local and global missionary efforts. The Moravians purchased thousands of acres of land and became successful farmers. They also engaged in skilled trades, including blacksmithing, carpentry, and pottery making. During the first twenty years of the settlement (1741-62), Moravian workers at Bethlehem drew no wages. The church provided their food, clothing, and housing, and they saw themselves as working for the glory of God and the support of the Moravian missionary effort.

Separation of the Sexes

During these years, the residents of Bethlehem lived in same-sex communal housing and worked in communally owned enterprises. Church members lived, prayed, and worked in a number of cohorts, or “choirs,” with others of the same sex and similar age. Moravian leaders believed that this system, which kept men and women separated at nearly all times, reduced the likelihood of sexual sin and encouraged both men and women to focus their attention on God.

Although newcomers to America in the 1740s, Moravians shared in the emotional fervor of the First Great Awakening, a series of Protestant revivals that spanned the colonies. Like other evangelicals, the Moravians emphasized conversion, moral living, and a personal and heartfelt relationship with Christ. Moravians corresponded with the Methodist leaders John Wesley (1703-91) and Charles Wesley (1707-88) and even purchased land from the itinerant evangelist George Whitefield (1714-70), although Whitefield eventually rejected the Moravians because they did not believe in predestination, the belief that God had already chosen who would be saved and who would be damned.

Although the Moravians shared many beliefs with other evangelicals, they also had distinctive ideas and customs that set them apart. Zinzendorf encouraged a simple, childlike faith and trust in God and a mystical devotion to Jesus, focusing particularly on Jesus’s love and self-sacrifice for humanity. Moravian prayers and hymns invited worshippers to contemplate the wounds of Christ and to regard themselves (men and women alike) as the brides of Christ. Moravians considered the wound in Jesus’s side particularly significant, viewing it as a mystical opening where believers could shelter and as a gate to heaven. Another distinctive characteristic was the practice of submitting important questions to “the Lot.” Moravians believed that God directed all earthly affairs, and there was therefore no such thing as chance or luck. Before making important decisions (such as those regarding marriages, church membership, and the choosing of ministers), the Moravians drew lots. In setting up the draw, one slip of paper gave an affirmative answer, a second one a negative answer, and a third one was left blank. If the blank one was drawn, no action would be taken at the time, but the question could be resubmitted at a later date.

Zinzendorf and his fellow Moravians believed that men and women of all nations and peoples could be saved. As a result, in the eighteenth century they sent missionaries to many places, including Africa, the Caribbean, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and across the British colonies in America. In America, they hoped both to encourage unity among Protestant Christians, and to convert African slaves and Native Americans.

Unity Proves Elusive

The quest for unity among Protestants proved elusive. Believing that true Christians could be found in all churches, Zinzendorf hoped to dissolve denominational boundaries. His vision soon led to conflict between the Moravians and other German Christians in Pennsylvania. In 1742, Zinzendorf (an ordained Lutheran clergyman) was invited to preach to the Lutheran congregation in Philadelphia. His preaching was so powerful that the Lutherans asked him to become their pastor. He accepted, although his leadership would divide the congregation. To avoid further dissension, Zinzendorf and his followers left the congregation and Zinzendorf founded a new church near Bread and Race Streets, shared by Lutherans and Moravians. Zinzendorf also arranged a series of meetings or synods between Moravians and other German Christians. Seven synods took place between January and June 1742 in Philadelphia, Germantown, and elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Although more than a hundred representatives of various denominations attended the first synod in Germantown, the delegates found Zinzendorf overbearing and feared that he wanted to absorb the other churches into the Moravians. As a result, the later synods were poorly attended. Zinzendorf’s dream of uniting German Christians in America had failed.

The Moravians hoped for converts across the world, but those in Pennsylvania sought especially to convert Native Americans, which led to tensions between Moravians and other white settlers. Important Moravian missionaries included Johann Pyrlaeus (1713-85), David Zeisberger (1721-1808), and John Heckewelder (1743-1823). Moravian missionaries had more success than most other Protestant missionaries due to a number of factors, including their efforts to become fluent in Native American languages, their respect for Indian cultures, and their emphasis on the love of God. In evaluating potential converts, they looked more for a sense of sin and unworthiness, a love of God, and moral living rather than doctrinal precision. Moravian missionaries worked among the Mahican and Delaware Indians north of Philadelphia and in the Susquehanna Valley. They also sent missionaries to multiethnic towns, including Shamokin. In 1746, the Moravians founded a mission town called Gnadenhütten, some thirty miles from Bethlehem. By 1753, it was home to about 125 Delawares and Mahicans.

In the 1760s, however, the Moravian missions to the Indians foundered in the face of increasing hostility in the backcountry between whites and Indians. In 1763, the Delaware leader Teedyuscung (1700-63), who had once lived at Gnadenhütten, was murdered by unknown assailants. Later in the year, several Moravian Indians were killed, and this event (and others like it) set off a cycle of revenge killing among Indians and whites from Pennsylvania to Virginia. By November 1763, the colonial government feared that the Paxton Boys, vigilantes hostile toward both the Indians and the Moravians, intended to massacre backcountry Indians. The government demanded that Indians living at Bethlehem, Nazareth, and elsewhere report to Philadelphia. The Indians were imprisoned there, first on Province Island and then in disused army barracks for a year and a half. Even Moravian Indians who were full members of the Bethlehem community were forced to move. The Indians suffered from hunger and disease during their imprisonment, and by the time they were freed (in March 1765), fifty-six of the approximately 140 captives had died. After leaving Philadelphia, the survivors were not permitted to return to their homes. They were resettled near Wyalusing, in the northeast corner of Pennsylvania, where they established a town called Friedenshütten. This community, however, was short-lived, as the inhabitants were forced to move west in the 1780s under the twin threat of white and Iroquois expansion.

Complications of Pacifism

During the American Revolution, Pennsylvania Moravians faced serious difficulties. As pacifists and largely apolitical, they believed Christians should submit to legitimate authority. This made them unpopular with their patriot neighbors, who already distrusted them because of the Moravians’ good relationship with local Indians. During the war, the government of Pennsylvania forced Moravians to pay taxes and fines for their refusal to serve in the military, and the patriots demanded supplies from them. The General Hospital of the American Army was located at Bethlehem from December 1776 to March 1777 and from September 1777 to June 1778. The Americans also stored military equipment there.

By the end of the 1700s, the Moravians had lost much of their former distinctiveness. Due to debt and economic difficulties, they abandoned their communal economy at Bethlehem in 1762 and after the American Revolution grew to resemble other German Christian groups. In Philadelphia, the original congregation, located near Bread and Race Streets, began performing all services in English in 1817. (Previously, services had been held both in German and English.) In 1856, the congregation moved to a new church at Wood and Franklin Streets.

In Pennsylvania, Bethlehem remained the center of Moravian life. Nineteenth-century Moravians, like their predecessors, continued to sponsor missionary work, with missionary societies founded in 1818, 1840, and 1849. They also focused on education. The Moravians founded separate schools for boys and girls in the eighteenth century, and these gradually developed into the Moravian College and Theological Seminary (founded in Nazareth in 1807, relocated to Bethlehem in 1858) and the Bethlehem Female Seminary (1863). The men’s and women’s institutions merged in 1954 to form Moravian College.

Bethlehem’s Accessibility Grows

Nineteenth-century Moravians were also touched by events in the outside world. Economic change and the development of industry brought canals and railroads to Bethlehem, strengthening its ties to the outside world and leading to greater Americanization. In the case of warfare, for example, early Moravians had been pacifists who resisted service in the American Revolution. At the outbreak of the War of 1812, Moravians hotly debated the question of military service, but the Elders’ Conference ruled that a man who voluntarily joined the militia did not forfeit his membership in the church. During the Civil War, several students and two professors left the Moravian College and Theological Seminary to enlist.

In the twentieth century, the main developments of the church took place elsewhere, as the church expanded in the South, the Midwest, Canada, and overseas. As of 2018, the worldwide Moravian church was divided into twenty-four Provinces, nine of which were located in North America and the Caribbean. The Moravian church also evolved into a mainline Protestant denomination. Ecumenically-minded from the beginning, the Moravian church continued to teach that true Christians can be found in all denominations. In the twenty-first century, the church entered into full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Episcopal Church, and the United Methodist Church, in 2000, 2010, 2011 and 2018, respectively.

Bethlehem, which lies within the North American Northern Province, remained the home of Moravian College, a liberal arts institution, and Moravian Theological Seminary, an ecumenical seminary offering master’s degrees in Divinity, Theological Studies, Chaplaincy, and Clinical Counseling. As of 2007, Bethlehem had six Moravian churches, with an estimated total membership of about 3,300, and Moravian congregations also existed in Philadelphia and in Cinnaminson and Riverside, New Jersey.

Martha K. Robinson is an Associate Professor of History at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include “New Worlds, New Medicines: Indian Remedies and English Medicine in Early America,” Early American Studies 3 (Spring 2005): 94-110. (Author information current at time of publication.)

By 1754, European colonization had substantially altered the location and number of Native Americans in Pennsylvania. The Delawares (also known as Lenapes) had been mostly dispossessed from the river valley that was their original homeland. Despite being stripped of their claim to the Lehigh Valley by the Walking Purchase (1737), some Delawares still lived in that region in Moravian missions while others remained in small towns in central and southern New Jersey. Many Delawares had migrated into the Susquehanna Valley and the Ohio-Allegheny region, which was called the “Ohio country” by colonists. Elsewhere, Indians from the northern Chesapeake Bay and North Carolina migrated into the Susquehanna Valley in the early eighteenth century. By the 1740s, two Indian towns with polyglot populations had become important centers in Pennsylvania’s Indian relations: Conestoga in Lancaster County and Shamokin, at the juncture of the north and west branches of the Susquehanna (modern Sunbury). Farther west, Delawares who settled in the Ohio country were joined there by Shawnees and Senecas who were also drawn to the region by its bountiful resources. Thus, on the eve of the Seven Years’ War, Pennsylvania’s native population included a number of groups that had already experienced the consequences of colonization. By moving into the Susquehanna and Ohio regions, where they amalgamated with each other, these groups established new homelands and new alliances to defend them.

In 1754, the Natives’ claim to these homelands came under attack from several directions. Agents acting on behalf of the Penn family and Connecticut’s Susquehannah Company completed land purchases with the Iroquois Indians of New York who ceded significant portions of western Pennsylvania without any approval from the Indians who lived there. Virginian land speculators raced against the Penn family to lay claim to the Ohio country, again relying on cooperative Iroquois from New York. At the same time, the French asserted their possession of the region by building forts between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. After a British army commanded by General Edward Braddock was defeated by a French and Indian force at the Monongahela River in July 1755, war engulfed the Pennsylvania frontier. Delawares and Shawnees supplied by the French at Fort Duquesne (modern Pittsburgh) raided frontier communities in a broad arc from northwestern New Jersey through the Lehigh Valley to the Juniata River, taking captives, destroying livestock, and killing poorly defended settlers. Pennsylvania’s government responded by instituting scalp bounties that encouraged indiscriminate reprisals against any Indians within the colony’s borders.

Easton Treaty of 1758

A Delaware Indian named Teedyuscung (1700?-1763) emerged as an important intercultural diplomat at a series of treaty conferences convened in Easton, Pennsylvania, between 1755 and 1758. Teedyuscung claimed to represent ten Indian nations, but his chief objective was securing the Delawares’ possession of the Wyoming Valley, along the northern branch of the Susquehanna River (near modern Wilkes-Barre). In negotiations with the Pennsylvanians and other British colonial officials, he asserted the Pennsylvania Indians’ independence from the Iroquois. In this effort, he was supported by Philadelphia Quakers who sought to restore peace by exposing the fraudulent land purchases William Penn’s heirs had made with the Iroquois. Although neither Teedyuscung nor the Quakers succeeded entirely in their mission, the Easton Treaty of 1758 did end Pennsylvania’s Indian war by restoring some of the disputed territory and by promising that the British would evacuate the Ohio country after the French had been defeated.

An uneasy peace returned to Pennsylvania after 1758, but the war had permanently altered relations there between native and European peoples. Pennsylvania colonists, despite their ethnic and cultural differences, came to see themselves as sharing a common, racially-defined “white” identity in contrast to the Indians’ “savage” one. In the Ohio country, a Delaware prophet named Neolin (fl. 1760) preached a doctrine of “separate paths,” urging Indians to revive ancient customs and spurn Christianity, alcohol, and other aspects of colonial culture he held responsible for corrupting the native way of life. This revivalist message fueled a pan-Indian resistance to the soldiers and settlers who began moving into the Ohio and Susquehanna regions after 1758. In 1763, renewed hostilities sparked by military occupation and land-grabbing broke out in western Pennsylvania. Pontiac’s War (1763-65) plunged the Pennsylvania frontier into another wave of violence, including an Indian siege at Fort Pitt (the British post built on the site of the old Fort Duquesne), during which British officers discussed using smallpox as a biological weapon against the enemy. In Lancaster County, a group of colonial vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys murdered the Native population of Conestoga Indian Town, which had been allied with the Pennsylvania government since 1701. The Paxton Boys then marched on Philadelphia, threatening to kill Indians from the Moravian missions who had sought refuge there, but intervention by Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) and other city leaders prevented further violence.

By 1765, a decade of warfare had altered the power dynamic in Pennsylvania’s Indian relations. Quakers no longer exerted moral or political authority in the colony’s Indian policy. Instead, frontier settlers assumed all Indians were hostile and tacitly condoned their exile or murder. Speculators from within and outside the colony competed against each other for Indian land, paying little heed to the retrocessions that natives had negotiated at Easton in 1758. At the Fort Stanwix Treaty of 1768, the British Crown’s Indian agent Sir William Johnson (1715-74) conducted yet another land sale with the Iroquois that ceded Delaware and Shawnee homelands without their consent.

The Revolution’s Toll on Indians

The American Revolution accelerated Indian dispossession in Pennsylvania. Freed from the restraints of British imperial authority, the Americans attacked and uprooted Native populations. A Continental Army expedition in 1779 laid waste to Indian towns in the northern Susquehanna and Allegheny Valleys. In March 1782, militiamen from the Pittsburgh area murdered nearly 100 Delaware men, women, and children in the Moravian mission town of Gnadenhütten in the Ohio country. By the war’s end, nearly every Indian community within Pennsylvania’s borders had either been destroyed or abandoned and their survivors forced to seek refuge in Ohio or New York. The state of Pennsylvania recognized no federal or state Indian reservations within its borders. By the 1790s, only one small Indian community remained within Pennsylvania: a group of Seneca Indians who lived along the Allegheny River on land privately owned by their leader, Cornplanter (c. 1750-1836). Cornplanter’s Town remained on this property until its inhabitants were forced to relocate onto Seneca reservation lands in New York by the construction of the Kinzua Dam in the 1960s.

Despite the fact that Indians and colonists alike often invoked the memory of William Penn in their treaty negotiations, the Quaker founder’s vision of a peaceable kingdom in Pennsylvania never came to fruition. The Penn family’s hunger for Indian land contributed to this deterioration in relations, but other causes included the militarization of Pennsylvania’s frontier after 1754, the unstoppable stream of settlers who invaded Indian territory, and the intrusion of imperial officials and land speculators from other colonies into Pennsylvania’s Indian affairs. Most importantly, after 1754 the mosaic of ethnic identities within Pennsylvania hardened into two separate and diametrically opposed racial categories: white and Indian. Europeans pursued policies that denied natives membership in the Pennsylvania commonwealth, while natives trying to survive the onslaught of colonization decided that their best option was to move beyond the reach of their European neighbors.

Timothy J. Shannon is Professor of History at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His publications include Indians and Colonists at the Crossroad of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) and Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008). (Author information current at time of publication.)

In the mid-1600s, upheavals among Indians in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions helped clear the way for the European settlement of the Delaware Valley. The Iroquois, equipped with Dutch (and later English) firearms, struck out against the Huron and other native groups to secure fur trading routes and take captives to replenish their numbers, which had been decimated by European diseases. By the time Charles II (1630-85) granted Penn his colonial charter, Iroquois raids had largely depopulated the Susquehanna Valley of its native inhabitants.

The Lenapes, or Delawares, who lived on both sides of the Delaware River, had been dealing with Dutch and Swedish colonists for decades and in 1675-77 sold lands in what became West New Jersey to English Quakers. Beginning in 1682, the Lenapes ceded lands on the west bank of the Delaware to Penn in exchange for cloth, guns, powder, alcohol, and other trade goods. Lenape chiefs such as Tamanend (Tammany) did not “sell” land as much as grant shared usage rights in the hopes of establishing a relationship with a potentially powerful European ally.

Mutual Benefits

With the Susquehanna Valley open for hunting beaver and other pelts that Europeans prized for Atlantic markets, the Lenapes were disposed to negotiate with Penn, a man they called Miquon (meaning “feather,” or quill pen, a Delaware pun on his last name). Penn, in return, promised he would deal with Indians honestly and fairly. These early treaties cemented Pennsylvania’s reputation as a peaceable colony where love and friendship prevailed between Indians and colonists, as famously portrayed later by the paintings of Benjamin West (1738-1820) and Edward Hicks (1780-1849).

William Penn, the Quaker founder and proprietor, desperately needed Indian partners. New York and Connecticut each claimed territory south of where Pennsylvania fixed its northern border, while Maryland’s Charles Calvert (1637-1715), Lord Baltimore, hotly disputed the location of Pennsylvania’s southern boundary. One reading of Maryland’s charter, in fact, placed that colony’s upper border north of Philadelphia. Penn used Indian titles to legitimate his land claims and ward off rivals. He also coveted Indian lands in the Susquehanna Valley, west of Philadelphia. By the early 1690s, Indians, fleeing warfare and colonization elsewhere, began settling the Susquehanna, including Lenape communities relocating to escape the growing colonial population in the Delaware Valley. They were joined by returning Susquehannocks (the original inhabitants of the region, now known as “Conestogas”), Shawnees, Mahicans, Senecas, Cayugas, Nanticokes, and Conoys, among others. These native settlers formed polyglot, multiethnic communities in Indian towns like Conestoga, Pequea, and, a little later, Shamokin.

Even before Penn consulted with Indian leaders in those communities, he sold colonists subscriptions to lands in the Susquehanna. Penn viewed the lower Susquehanna, with its access to the Chesapeake, as strategically vital to Pennsylvania’s commercial success. By attracting colonists there, he also hoped to redirect the lucrative Indian fur trade away from Albany, New York.

Fortunately for Penn, Indians in the Susquehanna had good reasons to accommodate colonists. The Iroquois claimed the region by right of conquest (owing to their mid-seventeenth-century raids), and through their Covenant Chain alliance with New York, they also claimed to speak on behalf of all Indian groups living there. After Governor Thomas Dongan (1634-1715) of New York sold Penn his claim to the Susquehanna for a meager £100, Shawnee, Conoy, and Conestoga leaders seized the opportunity to recognize Pennsylvania’s authority in 1701. In doing so, they sought political legitimacy (at the expense of the Iroquois) as well as a valuable trading partner. As he did almost two decades earlier, Penn promised his Indian allies that his government would protect them from unruly colonists and dishonest traders.

Peace Preserved by “Go-betweens”

The 1701 treaty ensured Pennsylvania’s “long peace” would continue, although uneasily. It was held together by diplomatic “go-betweens,” Indian and colonial, who smoothed over the inevitable conflicts that arose in a frontier zone of multiple and overlapping native jurisdictions and where Pennsylvania held little authority. In one notable instance, in 1722, the murder of an Indian named Sawantaeny (d. 1722) by an English trader, John Cartlidge (1684-1722), during a drunken brawl touched off a diplomatic crisis that sent Pennsylvania officials to the Susquehanna Indian town of Conestoga (and the governor to Albany because Sawantaeny was a Seneca Iroquois). The willingness of the Iroquois, provincial government, and Susquehanna Indians to overlook the murder and forgive Cartlidge (who eventually was freed after the Iroquois received restitution) demonstrated the value of maintaining good relations on the frontier, where political stability was necessary for peaceful coexistence and the continued profitability of the fur trade. It also demonstrated that the Pennsylvania government understood the importance of observing Indian diplomatic protocols, especially during a political crisis.

The provincial official who led Pennsylvania’s investigation of Sawantaeny’s murder, James Logan (1674-1751), had an interest in maintaining order in the Susquehanna. The son of Scottish Quaker converts, Logan came to Pennsylvania in 1699 to serve as Penn’s provincial secretary. Shortly before leaving the colony in 1701, Penn entrusted Logan to look after his proprietary interests and manage his estate at Pennsbury. Logan remained in Pennsylvania for the rest of his life. During that time, he became a major political figure, serving, among other positions, as provincial councilor, land commissioner, and Pennsylvania’s chief Indian diplomat. He ran a successful merchant business in Philadelphia that supplied Indian customers using a cartel of traders who hauled his dry goods and rum into the Susquehanna on “Conestoga” wagons. By 1720, Logan had monopolized the fur trade and became one of the wealthiest colonists in Philadelphia.

Logan also engineered the “Walking Purchase,” one of the most infamous chapters in the history of Native American-Pennsylvania relations. In 1737, Logan and Thomas Penn (1702-75), then acting as Pennsylvania’s governor, claimed to possess a 1686 deed from the Lenape chief Mechkilikishi granting William Penn all the Indian lands that could be acquired within a day-and-a-half’s walk from Wrightstown in Bucks County. Although the deed was probably forged, the Iroquois sanctioned the “walk,” which took place in September with three of the colony’s fastest runners covering more than sixty miles. Logan used the “running walk,” as the Lenape termed it, to claim over a thousand square miles of Indian territory in the Delaware Forks (or in Lenape, Lechauwitank), where the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers converge (and where Allentown and Bethlehem are now located). Under pressure from the Iroquois, the Lenape in the region, along with their leader, Nutimus, were forced to relocate to the Wyoming Valley (near present-day Wilkes-Barre) and Shamokin.

The Walking Purchase and the colonization of the Susquehanna Valley left a bitter legacy in Pennsylvania-Native American relations. The Lenape chief Teedyuscung (c. 1700-63), who was among those displaced from the Delaware Forks, reemerged in the Wyoming Valley as a warrior who conducted periodic raids on Euroamerican settlements in eastern Pennsylvania during the Seven Years’ War. In a strange twist, he took part in the Treaty of Easton in 1758 as an ally of the Quakers and helped to broker a peace between the Pennsylvania government and Ohio Valley Indians, primarily Lenapes and Shawnees who had been displaced earlier from the Susquehanna. Murdered in 1763 by arsonists who burned his cabin under mysterious circumstances (likely colonists from Connecticut’s Susquehanna Company), Teedyuscung did not live to see many of his people forced to relocate again, under British imperial and Iroquois pressure, west of the Appalachians. His life and death, however, symbolized the entangled and intimate relations of Pennsylvanians and Native Americans through the first half of the eighteenth century.

Michael Goode is an Assistant Professor of Early American History at Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Trying to maintain peace from the early seventeenth century to 1763 was demanding work. Intermediaries spent much time on the road carrying letters and wampum belts across treacherous terrain. Once they reached their destination, they translated the letters and belts as well as swapped and gathered information. At the great councils, which followed Native American customs, intermediaries translated the speeches given by Indigenous and colonial leaders. Following Indigenous protocols enabled Native American leaders to select go-betweens based on kinship connections and their standing within the community, while colonial leaders had to identify individuals with an intimate knowledge of a particular Indigenous culture and language, which were extremely difficult to learn.

The earliest colonial intermediaries in the region were Dutch fur traders. Two of the first were Simon Root, who lived in a home at Wigquakoing (now Wicacoa in South Philadelphia), and Jan Andriessen, who lived near Fort Casimir (present-day New Castle, Delaware). On July 13, 1647, for example, Root and Andriessen, who claimed to understand the Susquehannock language, testified to New Netherland director-general Petrus Stuyvesant (c. 1592-1672) that Aquariochquo and Quadickho, two Susquehannock leaders, wanted to continue mutual trade with the Dutch even though New Sweden governor Johan Printz (1592–1663) had asked for permission to set up a trading post among them. Printz claimed that he, not the impoverished Dutch, could sell them plenty of powder, lead, and guns.

The Growth of Intermediaries

Root and Andriessen were soon joined by a number of other Dutch and Swedish intermediaries, including Jacob Svensson who acted as a go-between for the Swedes and Dutch with the Susquehannocks and Lunaapeew (Lenapes). However, the most important intermediary in the second half of the seventeenth century was one of Root’s neighbors, the Swedish fur trader Lars Petersson Cock (d. 1699). Prior to the arrival in 1682 of the new proprietor of Pennsylvania, William Penn (1644-1718), Cock arranged, in his own home, land sales between Lunaapeew leaders and the proprietor’s representatives.

When Cock died in 1699, finding a replacement proved to be quite difficult. Although Pennsylvania officials employed a number of Native American go-betweens, including a Conoy named Ouseywayteichks who reportedly knew four Indigenous languages, and the English-speaking Susquehannock Shawydoohungh, provincial officials were loath to rely solely on Indians no matter how effective they might be. Thus, officials also turned to French fur traders such as the Huguenot Jacques Le Tort (c. 1651-c. 1702) and his son James Le Tort (c. 1675-c. 1742), who married a Shawnee woman; the brothers Pierre Bizaillon (1662–1742) and Michel Bizaillon; and Martin Chartier (1655–1718), who married a Shawnee woman named Sewatha Straight Tail (b. 1660). Provincial leaders also relied on the Quaker fur traders John Cartlidge (1684-c. 1723) and Edmond Cartlidge (1689-1740) who spoke Unami, the language of the Lunaapeew groups who occupied the southern part of Lenapehoking, which included present-day southern New Jersey and a small portion of eastern Pennsylvania and northeastern Delaware. By 1722 Native American and colonial leaders had plenty of intermediaries to call on when trade and land crises arose.

In 1728 rumors of war swept across the region. The Lunaapeew proposed war against the European settlers while Susquehannocks threatened war against the Shawnees. Meanwhile, a skirmish between eleven Shawnees and twenty colonists in the Tool-pay hanna (Schuylkill River) valley led to the murder of three Lunaapeew. Governor Patrick Gordon (1644-1736) immediately dispatched several fur traders, including James Le Tort, to gather information about the circulating rumors, offer condolences to the Delawares, and reprimand the Shawnees. The go-betweens were also instructed to remind as many Indians as possible of William Penn’s friendship. To renew that friendship, intermediaries brought the parties together at a series of treaty councils in 1728, in May at Conestoga, in June at the Quaker Meeting House in Philadelphia, and in October at the Philadelphia Courthouse. As a result, a frontier war was averted.

A New Generation of Go-Betweens

Following the councils of 1728, a new group of intermediaries emerged. The most prominent of these men were Shickellamy (d. 1748), an Onyota’a:ka leader living in the multi-ethnic town of Shamokin (present-day Sunbury and Shamokin Dam), and the German farmer Conrad Weiser (1696-1760) of Tulpehocken. They helped orchestrate a series of major treaties between the leaders of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Province of Pennsylvania in 1732, 1736, and 1742, which promoted trade and asserted control over the peoples living between Onondaga and Philadelphia. The population increased steadily between the two capitals, however, leading to more frequent disputes between Native Americans and their colonial neighbors.

Competing claims to the lands of the Ohio Country led to the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) between the English and French and their various Native American allies. After the French defeated a British expedition sent to capture Fort Duquesne on July 9, 1755, a group of Delawares began raiding provincial settlements from the Juniata River to Shamokin. Following the raid on the settlement at Penn’s Creek (October 16, 1755), the intermediaries hit the road once again. Scarouyady (d. 1758), an Onyota’a:ka leader, and Andrew Montour (c. 1720-72), a French-Onyota’a:ka-Algonkin guide, headed for Onondaga. In 1756 Kos Showweyha (d. 1756), an Onöndowa’ga (Seneca); Sata Karoyis, a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk);and William Lacquis, a Jersey Delaware, trod the paths multiple times between Philadelphia and the Delaware villages on the North Branch of the Susquehanna. Then, in 1758, the English-speaking Delaware Pisquetomen (fl. 1731-62) and the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post (1710-85) set out for the Allegheny Valley with the offer of Governor William Denny (1709-65) to renew the peace with the Ohio Indians provided they remained neutral. Remarkably, in the midst of the Seven Years’ War, this new group of intermediaries was able to ensure the loyalty of the Iroquois, appease the Haudenosaunee, and neutralize the Ohio Indians.

Decline of the Intermediaries

Hearts, however, were hardening. Many Native Americans had become disillusioned with the colonists’ apparent intent on achieving their end of acquiring land at any cost, which included the use by colonial intermediaries of presents, bribes, liquor, fake maps, and vague treaty statements. On the other hand, the majority of colonists, incensed by Indian attacks, believed the time for Indian councils had passed. Although intermediaries such as the Irish fur trader turned deputy Indian agent, George Croghan (1718-82), continued to negotiate treaties, the government of Pennsylvania called upon them less and less frequently.

Over the course of the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century, Indigenous and European go-betweens had often interpreted the kaleidoscope of cultures that existed in the region that became southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware. For many years they helped maintain a tenuous peace, but, with questionable methods such as fake maps and vague treaty statements, some intermediaries collaborated with the government of Pennsylvania and land speculators. This triggered resentment among many Native Americans, which played a role in the outbreak of violence and the Seven Years’ War.

Stephen T. Staggs is an Adjunct Professor of History at Calvin College and author of “The View from the Dutch Republic: Protestant Conceptualizations of Indians,” which appeared in De Halve Maen (Spring 2013). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Native Americans lived in what became southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware for more than 10,000 years before the arrival of Europeans in the early seventeenth century. By emphasizing peace and trade, the Lenapes retained their sovereignty and power through 1680, unlike Native peoples in New England and Virginia who suffered disastrous conflicts with the colonists. Before William Penn founded Pennsylvania, the Lenapes and their allies among the Swedish, Finnish, and Dutch settlers created a society based on the ideals of peace, individual freedom, and inclusion of people of different beliefs and backgrounds.

The first Americans settled in the region as glaciers gradually receded in North America at the end of the last ice age. Because of the accumulation of ice, the Atlantic seashore was located more than sixty miles to the east of its present location. As the glaciers melted, the ocean level rose, submerging evidence of early communities along the coast. Archaeological data about the people inhabiting the lower Delaware Valley from this early era through the Woodland Period (c. 1000 B.C. to 1600 A.D.) indicate significant continuity over thousands of years. The Lenapes, like their ancestors, relied upon hunting, fishing, gathering, and—in the later years—small-scale agriculture. They lived in small autonomous towns without palisades, suggesting they kept mostly at peace with their neighbors and more-distant nations.

Isolation of the Lower Delaware Valley

For centuries the Native people of the lower Delaware Valley remained isolated from other parts of the Americas, including the peoples of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys who built agricultural civilizations based on the “three sisters”: corn, beans, and squash. These crops complemented one another in cultivation and providing humans a nutritious diet. The geography of Pennsylvania, particularly the north-south orientation of the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers, limited interaction of Delaware Valley natives with the Mississippians who built cities, tall burial mounds, and stratified societies in the interior of the continent. Though the Lenapes raised corn, beans, and squash by the time the Europeans came, the natives took advantage of the abundance of game animals, fish, shellfish, berries, wild rice, and other foods rather than engage in large-scale agriculture.

The Lenape people included groups such as the Armewamese, Cohanzicks, Mantes, and Sickoneysincks, who built towns along tributaries of the Delaware River and on the Atlantic seacoast near Delaware Bay. They spoke Unami, an Algonquian language similar to the dialects of their allies the Munsees, who controlled the region to the north up into southern New York, and the Nanticokes of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The Lenapes’ neighbors to the west were the Susquehannocks, an Iroquoian people of the Susquehanna Valley.

The size of the precontact Delaware Valley population is unknown because European sailors and fishermen brought pathogens even before the Dutch arrived. Colonization of Europeans in North America had a devastating impact on the Lenapes and other natives because they lacked immunity to smallpox, influenza, measles, and other diseases. In 1600 the Lenapes numbered an estimated 7,500; by the 1650s their population decreased to about 4,000, and to about 3,000 by 1670. The Lenapes’ population decline was not as severe in the 1600s as among some other groups whose numbers dropped by ninety percent or more. The Lenapes’ success in avoiding war during most of the seventeenth century contributed to their strength and continued sovereignty over their land.

Lenape Gender Roles

The Lenapes divided work on the basis of gender: Women raised crops, gathered nuts and fruit, built houses, made clothing and furniture, took care of the children, and prepared meals, while men cleared land, hunted, fished, and protected the town from enemies.  Native women held an equivalent status with men in their families and society; parents extended freedom to their children as well, practicing flexible, affectionate child-rearing.

During the seventeenth century, the Lenapes’ sociopolitical structure appears to have been democratic, egalitarian, and based on matrilineal kinship groups, with descent through the mother’s line. The heads of kinship groups chose the group’s leader, or sachem, who held authority by following the people’s will. With advice, the sachem assigned fields for planting and made decisions on hunting, trade, diplomacy, and war.

In religion, existing evidence suggests that the Lenapes believed the earth and sky formed a spiritual realm of which they were a part, not the masters. Spirits inhabited the natural world and could be found in plants, animals, rocks, or clouds. Natives could obtain a personal relationship with a spirit, or manitou, who would provide help and counsel to the individual throughout his or her life. Lenapes also believed in a Master Spirit or Creator, who was all-powerful and all-knowing, but whose presence was rarely felt.

When Dutch explorers entered the Delaware River about 1615, the Lenapes welcomed their trade. In 1624, they granted permission for a short-lived settlement on Burlington Island and in 1626 allowed construction of Fort Nassau across the river from the future site of Philadelphia. The Lenapes and colonists developed a trade jargon based on Unami that became standard trade language throughout the region.

Keeping Old Ways, Adopting New

The Lenapes retained their autonomy and traditional ways of life while selectively adopting new technology from the Europeans.  Native women and men appreciated the convenience of woolen cloth, firearms, and metal tools, incorporating them into their culture but not abandoning their traditional economic cycle of hunting, fishing, gathering, and agriculture.

The Dutch trade precipitated war between the Lenapes and Susquehannocks from 1626 to 1636 because the Susquehannocks sought to control the Delaware River. They killed many Lenapes and pushed them from the west to east bank, burning towns and crops. The Lenapes fought back, eager to trade for European cloth, guns, and metal goods in exchange for beaver, otter, and other furs. While these local pelts were thinner because of milder mid-Atlantic winters than those the Susquehannocks obtained from central Canada through the continental fur trade, the Lenapes had a successful market with the Dutch. The war ended by about 1636 when a truce, which developed into an alliance, permitted both the Lenapes and Susquehannocks to trade in the region.

In 1631, violence flared when wealthy Dutch investors started a plantation called Swanendael near present-day Lewes, Delaware, at the mouth of Delaware Bay. It seemed to Lenapes that the Dutch were shifting their priorities from trade to plantation agriculture similar to the English colonists in Virginia who murdered natives and expropriated land. The Sickoneysincks, the Lenape group near Cape Henlopen, destroyed Swanendael, killing its thirty-two residents. When Dutch captain David de Vries (1593-1655) arrived in early 1632, he made peace and reestablished trade with the Sickoneysincks.

Over the next half century, Lenapes controlled the lower Delaware Valley, accepting European trade goods in exchange for small parcels of land for forts and farms, but not plantation colonies. With the attack on Swanendael and its memory, the Lenapes restricted European settlement. In 1670, just 850 Europeans lived in the lower Delaware Valley compared with 52,000 in New England, 38,000 in Virginia and Maryland, and 6,700 in New York and eastern New Jersey. With an estimated population of 3,000 in 1670, the Lenapes remained more numerous and powerful than the Europeans.

New Sweden Established

Seven years after Swanendael, in 1638, the Lenapes permitted a small group of Swedish, Finnish, and Dutch colonists to establish New Sweden at the location of current Wilmington, Delaware. Lenapes and Susquehannocks traded with New Sweden and the Dutch mariners who continued to frequent the river. While the Europeans fought each other over trade and land, the Lenapes dominated the region. In the mid-1640s they nearly evicted the Swedes because of their lack of trade goods and the bellicose posturing of their governor Johan Printz (1592-1663). Relations improved by 1654 when Naaman and other sachems concluded a treaty with the new Swedish governor, Johan Risingh (c. 1617-72), in which each side promised to warn the other if they heard of impending attack by another nation. They also pledged to discuss problems such as assaults and murders, stray livestock, and land theft before going to war.

By the 1650s, many of the Armewamese group of Lenapes lived adjacent to the Swedes and Finns in the area that became Philadelphia, a locale the Swedish engineer Peter Lindeström (1632-1691) praised for its beauty, freshwater springs, multitude of fruit trees, and many kinds of animals. Lindeström identified six towns from the Delaware to the falls of the Schuylkill that the Armewamese built to be near the terminus of the Susquehannock trade. The Lenapes also sold corn as a cash crop to New Sweden when its supplies ran short.

After the Dutch conquered New Sweden in 1655, the Lenapes, Swedes, and Finns solidified their alliance to resist heavy-handed Dutch authority. The Lenapes warned the Swedes of the Dutch assault; their Susquehannock and Munsee allies attacked Manhattan, forcing Director Peter Stuyvesant (d. 1672) and his troops to withdraw from the Delaware Valley.  While the Dutch claimed the region, the Lenapes ruled their country in alliance with the Munsees, Susquehannocks, Swedes, and Finns.

With the English conquest of the Dutch colony in 1664, the alliance of Lenapes, Swedes, and Finns remained firm as together they resisted English efforts, under the Duke of York, to impose their power and expropriate land. In the late 1660s, the Armewamese left their towns where Philadelphia now stands, migrating to join the Mantes and Cohanzick communities in New Jersey. Though it is unclear whether settlers forced out the Armewamese or they left voluntarily, their relocation moved the center of Lenape population and power across the river.

In 1675-76, the alliance of Lenapes, Swedes, and Finns helped Lenape country escape the horrors of war similar to Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia and King Philip’s War in New England. Through shared economic goals and common values of peace, individual freedom, and openness to people of different cultures, the Lenapes and their European allies established the ideals of Delaware Valley society before William Penn received his land grant for Pennsylvania in 1681.

Jean R. Soderlund is a Professor of History at Lehigh University and author of Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn. (Author information current at time of publication.)