CHAPTER XXII.
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 for 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 dissistrous 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;[1] 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![2]
- ↑ Missionaries, especially the Jesuits, and the English in the South Sea Islands, form the only exceptions, and these partially. The Jesuits, though they did not commonly bear arms, taught the use of them, and led, in fact, the most effective troops to battle in Paraguay. The South Sea missionaries form the strongest exceptions: they are, indeed, but guests, and not the governors; but, their conduct is admirable, and we may believe will not alter with power.
- ↑ Mr. Bannister, in an excellent little work (British Colonization and the Coloured Tribes), just published, and which ought to be read by every one for its right-mindedness and sound and most important views, has regretted that William Penn did not take a guarantee from the British crown, in his charter, for the protection of the Indians from other states, and from his own successors. It is to be regretted; nor is it meant here to assert that the provisions of his government were as complete as they were pure in principle. Embarrassments of various kinds prevented him from perfecting what he had so nobly begun; yet the feeling with which his political system is regarded, must be that of the following passage:—
"Virtue had never perhaps inspired a legislation better calculated to promote the felicity of mankind. The opinions, the sentiments, and the morals, corrected whatever might be defective in it. Accordingly the prosperity of Pennsylvania was very rapid. This republic, without either wars, conquests, struggles, or any of those revolutions which attract the eyes of the vulgar, soon excited the admiration of the whole universe. Its neighbours, notwithstanding their savage state, were softened by the sweetness of its manners; and distant nations, notwithstanding their corruption, paid homage to its virtues. All delighted to see those heroic days of antiquity realized, which European manners and laws had long taught every one to consider as entirely fabulous."—Raynal, vol. vii. p. 292.