Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations: The Treaties of 1736–62 (review)

Some might miss this relative latecomer to the myriad publications surrounding the tercentenary of Benjamin Franklin's birth, and that would be unfortunate. Susan Kalter, an associate professor of American literature at Illinois State University, has done students of early America a service, not only providing the first annotated edition of the fourteen treaties printed and sold by Franklin since Julian Boyd's 1938 volume but also welcoming the opportunity to employ the theoretical and methodological advances of the intervening decades.

Citing "a sea change in the approach to tribal–colonial relations and the interpretation of written records of Native American speech" since 1938, Kalter seeks to apply the fields of literary theory and Native American studies to "a complete reconsideration of the treaties in both general and intellectual history" (ix). Native American studies, Kalter argues, driven by Native intellectuals and activists, has restored to the scholarly imagination the geopolitical reality that Franklin's eighteenth-century North America was Indian Country. This in turn underpins a new interpretation of the treaties, not as "merely concrete artifacts bearing witness to historical events" or "uncomplicated vehicles for the rhetorical eloquence of Native leaders" (ix), but as "complex, intercultural instruments that demand recognition of how both colonial politics and Native American politics shaped them" (x).

Kalter contextualizes the treaties historically and culturally with a discussion of the Iroquois League, Covenant Chain alliance, and colonization of the mid-Atlantic region through the Seven Years' War. But her heavy reliance on the work of Francis Jennings and Barbara A. Mann excludes other scholarship on the Iroquois; one particularly surprising omission is the work of Daniel K. Richter. Consequently, Kalter's Iroquois-focused introduction results in a deceptively oversimplified account that presents the Six Nations as would-be protectors of Pennsylvania Indians such as the Lenapes, Shawnees, and Conoys, and she implies that if men like Thomas Dongan, John and Thomas Penn, and James Logan had not continually betrayed or misled the Iroquois, Native Pennsylvanians would not have been subjected to so many duplicitous land grabs.

Richter's analysis would have helped reveal a more complicated view of Iroquoia that avoids romanticizing the Six Nations as the staunch defenders of Indian Country and examines the ways in which they too wheeled and dealt to protect their lands and sovereignty—even at the expense of the nations they claimed owed them allegiance. Starkly juxtaposing the Iroquois as dupes and the Europeans as swindlers obscures the complex intercultural encounters expressed in these treaties. Incorporating recent works by Jane Merritt and James Merrell that explore the intricacy—and, often, the intimacy—of Native/Euro-American relations on the Pennsylvania frontier would have further strengthened Kalter's synthesis.

One aspect of her introduction of particular interest to JER readers is a sympathetic discussion of the theory that the Iroquois League was the basis for the confederated democratic form of government of the United States. Advocates will appreciate Kalter's analysis, but she may not have done enough to convert skeptics.

Kalter could have enhanced her emphasis on recovering the social and cultural contexts of the creation of these documents by more thoroughly examining Franklin's role in printing them. He is more prominent, however, as the central promoter of a confederated form of government based on his familiarity with the Iroquois League. After observing that Franklin considered the treaties to be "one of the first native American literary forms" (x) and that he appreciated certain aspects of Native cultures, Kalter focuses her discussion of Franklin on his selection of the treaties, which, she contends, "suggest[s] that he early had his finger on the pulse of the Penns' dishonesty" (15), and since "it is quite possible that he . . . had some idea of the shenanigans in which the Penns were engaged" (17) that he planned as early as 1736 to circulate the treaties in the interests of his own...