The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century

Epilogue: From Logan to Franklin

201 EPILOGUE FromLogantoFranklin Pehr Kalm had traveled the road to Germantown once before. His guide then, in September 1748, had been Peter Cock, a Swedish-born merchant who lived in Philadelphia. During their autumn ride, Kalm had marveled at the farms that lined the wooded road, each boasting an orchard thick with fruit and cornstalks “six to ten feet high . . . covered with fine green leaves.”1 On this journey in February 1750 the forest was cold and barren, and beyond the trees broad, muddy fields sprouted weeds. A few months earlier Kalm had learned that his merchant friend was dead, and it had affected him “deeply.”2 Now his riding companion was Benjamin Franklin and their destination was Stenton, the country manor of James Logan. The elderly Quaker gentleman had made his name as a politician, scholar, and scientist, but Kalm had come to know him as something else—an inveterate adversary of Pennsylvania’s “ancient settlers,” Kalm’s fellow Swedes.3 Now retired from a long and controversial career in politics and trade, Logan had conducted studies in astronomy, optics, and botany. During the 1730s fellow Quaker Peter Collinson, a merchant and scientist based in London , helped to build Logan’s reputation abroad by publishing his research in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions.4 Another admirer was Kalm’s mentor, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who wrote to Collinson to praise “the ingenious Mr. Logan’s experiments made in North America upon the sex of plants.” In 1738 Linnaeus sent his compliments directly to 202 the conteSt for the delAwAre vAlley Logan, who was then serving as Pennsylvania’s chief justice and its acting governor. These offices were merely his latest—Logan had begun his long career in 1699 as William Penn’s personal secretary.5 Long ago Franklin had written to Logan about Kalm’s arrival in Philadelphia , and since then Logan had wondered why the naturalist had not come to see him. He had doubts about the Swede’s true intentions, confiding to Collinson, “I know not what to make of him.” The young professor had already traveled to Canada, where over five months he had “dined many times at the Governors at Quebec,” but during his time in Pennsylvania the only notable men whom Kalm had sought out were Franklin and John Bartram, the famed botanist.6 These men formed a friendly yet competitive circle, and Logan felt left out. Franklin and John Bartram had corresponded with Collinson since the early 1730s, Logan had introduced Bartram to Linnaeus’s classification system in 1736, and two years later he recommended Bartram’s botanical investigations to Linnaeus.7 A decade afterward Collinson provided Kalm with a letter of recommendation addressed to “Friend Franklin” in which he described Kalm as “a Sweed per Nation” who had come to “Improve himself in all Natural Inquiries” and to “make Observations on your Parts of the World.”8 Since his arrival Kalm had sought out Franklin’s assistance but not Logan’s. Instead, he had spent “the whole last winter . . . at a Swedish Woman’s House near Newcastle.” Now Kalm was talking of “returning to Canada again,” Logan wrote, “but on what business I cannot learn.”9 The naturalist seemed to prefer the company of Quebecois and common Swedes to Logan’s own learned conversation. Following Kalm’s belated visit, Logan was inspired to give Collinson a brief imperial history of the seventeenth-century Delaware Valley. “The Swedes had a Colony Sent in this River under Christina their Queen, but because they were neglected by their own People at home, they were obliged to Surrender to the Low Dutch,” he wrote. Yet the Dutch were not long secure in their possession, “being attack’d by an English Fleet and army,” and forced to surrender to them in 1664. The “Same Lowlanders” were able to recover “the Countrey” but then had to “resign all their pretensions to it to the English” a year later. “This Delaware was called the South River, and the Dutch in it built the town of Newcastle,” he concluded. For Logan there seemed to be little else to relate. By this time the Swedish community along the Delaware River was more than a century old, yet Logan saw little in its history that was worth com- epilogue: from logAn to frAnklin 203 memorating. “The Swedes are not much encreased and in my time here (now above...