A Lenape among the Quakers: The Life of Hannah Freeman

Introduction

Introduction On July 28, 1797, Hannah Freeman, an elderly indigent Lenape woman, stood before Moses Marshall, Chester County’s newly appointed almsman, and delivered a brief account of her life; two hundred years later one anthropologist credited it as a Native American biography “that predates by nearly one hundred years the earliest Native American story now known.”1 But few historians note her existence as anything more than incidental to the larger narrative of Pennsylvania history and eighteenth-century indigenous-white relations. However, Hannah Freeman’s story plays a critical role in the popular construction of Pennsylvania’s past on a regional level and provides a portal to examination of the complex dynamics of indigenous-white relations in eighteenth-century North America more generally . A careful study of Hannah Freeman gives us an opportunity to critique the colonialist memorials to her life spent among the Quakers but, more important, her life merits attention because it is a story of Lenape survivance that demonstrates the means by which she and other indigenous peoples found new ways to live in their historic homelands despite the enormous pressures of colonization.2 The story of Hannah Freeman is an imperfect history. The paucity of primary documentary evidence and the generational layers of oral accounts, family histories, and intentional silences make the endeavor of unearthing her story all the more daunting . The effort is worth it because Hannah Freeman’s experiences as a Native American woman living deeply entrenched 2 Introduction in a colonial settler community challenge our understanding of Indian-white interactions beyond the borderlands, frontiers, and middle grounds that are usually addressed in scholarship. Her experiences and the accounts by those who knew her offer an alternate history of a colonial community during a century of upheaval and transformation that enveloped all who lived through it. Hannah Freeman’s life story provides a valuable perspective on several levels of Pennsylvania, colonial, and women’s history . Her role as the “last of her kind” in southeastern Pennsylvania gave regional historians critical proof that indigenous peoples in Pennsylvania vanished with her death.3 This belief held sway in the region from a generation after her death to the present . The power of this communal memory, the extent to which the region’s residents continue to protect, commemorate, and preserve that story, begs to be reevaluated since it conceals dayto -day realities of others like Hannah who refused to abandon their homelands and their indigenous identities. The complexities of interdependencies, obligations, and kinshiplike adaptations are made visible in a close study of the intimate exchanges between Hannah Freeman and her neighboring Quakers. Further, analysis brings to light the ways in which her Quaker neighbors, despite their most benevolent and pacifist intentions, dispossessed Native peoples of their lands. Subsequently, construction of this founding myth, which lauded William Penn’s “peaceable kingdom,” erased Hannah Freeman and the histories of other Native peoples, who were hiding in plain sight. The peaceable kingdom was, after all, a violent place. Today Pennsylvania remains one of the few states in the nation lacking a federally recognized tribe. On a broader national scale, a reexamination of Lenape diplomatic strategies from the period that predates William Penn’s arrival until Hannah’s lifetime reveals a history of complex and initially successful tactics that ultimately failed the larger Lenape community in the face of the Quaker colonial regime and the Introduction 3 demographics of European colonization. Both the Walking Purchase Treaty (1737) and the Paxton Massacre (1763) stand out as violent and coercive exceptions to the mythologized “peaceable kingdom,” often making their way into historical narratives as tragic anomalies in the colony’s history.4 At first glance these violent episodes suggest a less than peaceful indigenouswhite experience in colonial Pennsylvania, but most often they are explained away as dark stains on an otherwise pacific past of Native-white relations. Both occurred in Hannah’s lifetime and played some part in her personal life as well as in the destiny of her people. The experiences of Hannah and her family in the largely Quaker community in which they resided shed new light on the problematic nature of even the most benevolently intentioned colonial systems. Hannah’s story ultimately broadens our understanding of the gendered experience of Native Americans in colonial Pennsylvania and offers testimony of the economic transformation of women’s labor in southeastern Pennsylvania that initiated the exclusion of marginalized...