THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA—SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA.
But it may be said, it is one thing to sit at home in our study
and write of Christian principles, and another to go out into new
settlements amongst wild tribes, and maintain them; that it is easy
to condemn the conduct of others, but might not be so easy to govern
our own temper, when assailed on all sides with signal dangers,
and irritated with cruelties; that the Indians would not listen to
persuasion; that they were faithless, vindictive beyond measure, and
fonder of blood than of peace; that there was no possible mode of
dealing with them but driving them out, or exterminating them.—Arise,
William Penn, and give answer! These are the very things that in his
day he heard on all hands. On all hands he was pointed to arms, by
which the colonies were defended: he was told that nothing but force
could secure the colonists against the red men: he was told that
there was no faith in them, and therefore no faith could be kept with
them. He believed in the power of Christianity, and therefore he did
not believe these assertions. He believed the Indians to be men, and
that they were, therefore, accessible to the language and motives of
humanity. He believed in the omnipotence of justice and good faith, and
disbelieved all the sophistry by which wars and violence are maintained
by an interested generation. He resolved to try the experiment of
kindness and peace: it was a grand and a momentous trial: it was no
other than to put the truth of Christianity to the test, and to learn
whether the World’s philosophy or that of the Bible were the best.
It was attempted to alarm him by all kinds of bloody bugbears: he
was ridiculed as an enthusiast, but he calmly cast himself on his
conviction of the literal truth of the Gospel, and the result was the
most splendid triumph in history. He demonstrated, in the face of the
world, and all its arguments and all its practice, that peace may be
maintained when men will it; and that there is no need, and therefore
no excuse, for the bloodshed and the violence that are perpetually
marking the expanding boundaries of what is oddly enough termed
civilization.
William Penn received a grant of the province to which he gave the name
of Pennsylvania, as payment for money owing to his father, Admiral
Penn, from the government. He accepted this grant, because it secured
him against any other claimant from Europe. It gave him a title in
the eyes of the Christian world; but he did not believe that it gave
him any other title. He knew in his conscience that the country was
already in the occupation of tribes of Indians, who inherited it from
their ancestors by a term of possession, which probably was unequalled
by anything which the inhabitants of Europe had to shew for their
territories. I cannot better state Penn’s proceedings on this occasion
than in the words of the Edinburgh Review, when noticing Clarkson’s
Life of this Christian statesman.
“The country assigned to him by the royal charter was yet full of
its original inhabitants; and the principles of William Penn did not
allow him to look upon that gift as a warrant to dispossess the first
inhabitants of the land. He had accordingly appointed his commissioners
the preceding year to treat with them for the fair purchase of part
of their lands, and for their joint possession of the remainder; and
the terms of the settlement being now nearly agreed upon, he proceeded
very soon after his arrival to conclude the settlement, and solemnly to
pledge his faith, and to ratify and confirm the treaty, in right both
of the Indians and the planters. For this purpose a grand convocation
of the tribes had been appointed near the spot where Philadelphia now
stands; and it was agreed that he and the presiding Sachems should
meet and exchange faith under the spreading branches of a prodigious
elm-tree that grew on the banks of the river. On the day appointed,
accordingly, an innumerable company of the Indians assembled in that
neighbourhood, and were seen, with their dark faces and brandished
arms, moving in vast swarms in the depth of the woods that then
overshaded that now cultivated region. On the other hand, William
Penn, with a moderate attendance of friends, advanced to meet them. He
came, of course, unarmed—in his usual plain dress—without banners,
or mace, or guard, or carriages, and only distinguished from his
companions by wearing a blue sash of silk network (which, it seems,
is still preserved by Mr. Kett, of Seething Hall, near Norwich), and
by having in his hand a roll of parchment, on which was engrossed the
confirmation of the treaty of purchase and amity. As soon as he drew
near the spot where the Sachems were assembled, the whole multitude
of the Indians threw down their weapons, and seated themselves on the
ground in groups, each under his own chieftain, and the presiding chief
intimated to William Penn that the natives were ready to hear him.
“Having been thus called upon he began:—‘The Great Spirit,’ he said,
‘who made him and them, who ruled the heaven and the earth, and who
knew the innermost thoughts of man, knew that he and his friends had
a hearty desire to live in peace and friendship with them, and to
serve them to the uttermost of their power. It was not their custom to
use hostile weapons against their fellow-creatures, for which reason
they had come unarmed. Their object was not to do injury, and thus
provoke the Great Spirit, but to do good. They were then met on the
broad pathway of goodfaith and goodwill, so that no advantage was to
be taken on either side, but all was to be openness, brotherhood, and
love.’ After these and other words, he unrolled the parchment, and, by
means of the same intrepreter, conveyed to them, article by article,
the conditions of the purchase, and the words of the compact then
made for their eternal union. Among other things, they were not to be
molested, even in the territory they had alienated, for it was to be
common to them and the English. They were to have the same liberty to
do all things therein relating to the improvement of their grounds
and providing sustenance for their families, which the English had.
If disputes should arise between the two, they should be settled by
twelve persons, half of whom should be English, and half Indians. He
then paid them for the land, and made them many presents besides from
the merchandise which had been open before them. Having done this,
he laid the roll of parchment on the ground, observing again that
the ground should be common to both people. He then added that he
would not do as the Marylanders did, that is, call them children, or
brothers only: for often parents were apt to whip their children too
severely, and brothers sometimes would differ; neither would he compare
the friendship between him and them to a chain, for the rain might
sometimes rust it, or a tree might fall and break it; but he should
consider them as the same flesh and blood as the Christians, and the
same as if one man’s body was to be divided into two parts. He then
took up the parchment, and presented it to the Sachem who wore the horn
in the chaplet, and desired him and the other Sachems to preserve it
carefully for three generations, that their children might know what
had passed between them, just as if he himself had remained with them
to repeat it.
“The Indians in return, made long and stately harangues, of which,
however, no more seems to have been remembered, but that ‘they pledged
themselves to live in love with William Penn and his children as long
as the sun and moon shall endure.’ Thus ended this famous treaty, of
which Voltaire has remarked with so much truth and severity, ‘That it
was the only one ever concluded which was not ratified by an oath, and
the only one that never was broken.’
“Such indeed was the spirit in which the negotiation was entered into,
and the corresponding settlement concluded, that for the space of more
than seventy years, and so long indeed as the Quakers retained the
chief power in the government, the peace and amity were never violated;
and a large and most striking, though solitary, example afforded of
the facility with which they who are really sincere and friendly in
their own views, may live in harmony with those who are supposed to be
peculiarly fierce and faithless. We cannot bring ourselves to wish that
there were nothing but Quakers in the world, because we fear it would
be insupportably dull; but when we consider what tremendous evils daily
arise from the petulance and profligacy, and ambition and irritability
of sovereigns and ministers, we cannot help thinking it would be the
most efficacious of all reforms to choose all those ruling personages
out of that plain, pacific, and sober-minded sect.”
There is no doubt that Penn may be declared the most perfect Christian
statesman that ever lived. He had the sagacity to see that men, to be
made trustworthy, need only to be treated as men;—that the doctrines
of the New Testament were to be taken literally and fully; and he
had the courage and honesty, in the face of all the world’s practice
and maxims, to confide in Christian truth. It fully justified him.
What are the cunning and the so-called profound policy of the most
subtle statesmen to this? This confidence, at which the statesmen of
our own day would laugh as folly and simplicity, proved to be a reach
of wisdom far beyond their narrow vision. But it is to be feared
that the selfishness of governments is as much concerned as their
short-sightedness in the clumsy and ruinous manner in which affairs
between nations are managed; for what would become of armies and
navies, places and pensions, if honest treatment should take place of
the blow first and the word after, and of all that false logic by which
aggression is made to appear necessary?
The results of this treaty were most extraordinary. While the Friends
retained the government of Pennsylvania it was governed without an
army, and was never assailed by a single enemy. The Indians retained
their firm attachment to them; and, more than a century afterwards, and
after the government of the state had long been resumed by England,
and its old martial system introduced there, when civil war broke out
between the colonies and the mother country, and the Indians were
instigated by the mother to use the tomahawk and the scalping-knife
against the children, using,—according to her own language, which
so roused the indignation of Lord Chatham,—“every means which God
and Nature had put into her power,” to destroy or subdue them,—these
Indians, who laid waste the settlements of the colonists with fire, and
drenched them in blood, remembered the treaty with the _sons of Onas_,
AND KEPT IT INVIOLATE! They had no scruple to make war on the other
colonists, for they had not been scrupulous in their treatment of them,
and they had many an old score to clear off; but they had always found
the Friends the same,—their friends and the friends of peace,—and
they reverenced in them the sacred principles of faith and amity. Month
after month the Friends saw the destruction of their neighbours’ houses
and lands; yet they lived in peace in the midst of this desolation.
They heard at night the shrieks of the victims of the red men’s wrath,
and they saw in the morning where slaughter had reached neighbouring
hearths, and where the bloody scalp had been torn away; but their
houses remained untouched. Every evening the Indians came from their
hidden lairs in the woods, and lifted the latches of their doors, to
see if they remained in full reliance on their faith, and then they
passed on. Where a house was secured with lock or bolt, they knew that
suspicion had entered, and they grew suspicious too. But, through all
that bloody and disgraceful war, only two Friends were killed by the
Indians; and it was under these circumstances:—A young man, a tanner,
had gone from the village where he lived to his tan-yard, at some
distance, through all this period of outrage. He went and came daily,
without any arms, with his usual air of confidence, and therefore in
full security. The Indians from the thickets beheld him, but they never
molested him. Unfortunately, one day he went as usual to his business,
but carried a gun on his arm. He had not proceeded far into the country
when a shot from the bush laid him dead. When the Indians afterwards
learned that he was merely carrying the gun to kill birds that were
injuring his corn, “Foolish young man,” they said; “we saw him carrying
arms, and we inferred that he had changed his principles.”
The other case was that of a woman. She had lived in a village which
had been laid waste, and most of the inhabitants killed, by the
Indians. The soldiers, from a fort not far off, came, and repeatedly
entreated her to go into the fort, before she experienced the same
fate as her neighbours. For a long time she refused, but at length fear
entered her mind, and she went with them. In the fort, however, she
became wretched. She considered that she had abandoned the principles
of peace by putting herself under the protection of arms. She felt that
she had cast a slander on the hitherto inviolate faith of the Indians,
which might bring most disastrous consequences on other Friends who yet
lived in the open country on the faith of the Indian integrity. She
therefore determined to go out again, and return to her own house. She
went forth, but had scarcely reached the first thicket when she was
shot by the Indians, who now looked upon her as an enemy, or at least
as a spy.
These are the only exceptions to the perfect security of Friends
through all the Indian devastations in America; for wherever there
were Friends, any tribe of Indians felt bound to recognize the sons of
Father Onas: they would have been ashamed to injure an unarmed man,
who was unarmed because he preserved peace as the command of the Great
Spirit. It was during this war that the very treaty made with Penn was
shewn by the Indians to some British officers, being preserved by them
with the most sacred care, as a monument of a transaction without a
parallel, and equally honourable to themselves as to the Friends.
What a noble testimony is this to the divine nature and perfect
adaptation of Christianity to all human purposes; and yet when has
it been imitated? and how little is heard of it! From that day to
the present both Americans and English have gone on outraging and
expelling the natives from their lands; and it was but the other day
that the English officers at the Cape were astonished that a similar
conduct towards the Caffres produced a similar result. How lost are
the most splendid deeds of the Christian philosopher on the ordinary
statesman! But the Friends are a peaceable people, and “doing good
they blush to find it fame.” If they would make more noise in the
world, and din their good deeds in its ears, they would be never the
worse citizens. The landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in America is
annually celebrated in New England with great ceremony and eclat.
It has been everywhere extolled by those holding similar religious
views, and has been eulogised in poetry and prose. The landing of the
Friends in Pennsylvania was a landing of the Pilgrim Fathers not less
important: they went there under similar circumstances: they fled from
persecution at home—a bitterer and more savage persecution even than
befel the Puritans—to seek a home in the wilderness. They equalled
the good Roger Williams in their justice to the Indians—they bought
their lands of them—and they far exceeded him and his followers in
their conception of the power of Christianity, and their practical
demonstration of it. They are the only people in the history of the
world that have gone into the midst of a fierce and armed race, and
a race irritated with rigour too, without arms;[41] established a
state on the simple basis of justice, and to the last hour of their
government maintained it triumphantly on the same. Their conduct to the
Indians never altered for the worse; Pennsylvania, while under their
administration, never became, as New England, a slaughter-house of the
Indians. The world cannot charge them with the extinction of a single
tribe—no, nor with that of a single man!
It is delightful to close this chapter of American settlements with so
glorious a spectacle of Christian virtue;—would to God that it were
but more imitated![42]