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Chapter 1 The Importance of Place: CuItural Diversi ty in Three River Towns The Delaware River was the region's central corridor and integrated its three colonies and their inhabitants in numerous ways. While the river helped to connect the people along its banks, the three river towns scrutinized here also reveal important differences. The distances between them along a I30-mile run of the river meant that the local character of each town built upon distinct economic, demographic, and environmental conditions . The active seafaring economy of New Castle, Delaware, drew a heady laboring population of African Americans and Irishmen. Burlington was the most refined of the three towns, and its Quaker and Anglican leaders profited from easy access to nearby Philadelphia and rich New Jersey farmland. Unlike the older settlements on the lower river that were both colonial capitals, Easton, Pennsylvania, still faced frontier conditions in the late eighteenth century, and the classic colonial encounter there usually occurred between Native Americans and German speakers. Public life and politics in the colonial Delaware Valley were too multifaceted to be reduced to a simple logic of tripartite racial categories that supposedly separated whites, blacks, and native peoples into distinct and isolated groups. Instead, intersecting lines of religious, racial, and ethnic identity shaped how people understood themselves and their world. African Americans in New Castle provide strong evidence about black racial identity and its relationship to low-status Irishmen. Quakers in Burlington demonstrate the importance of religion as a category of profound difference that caused deep divisions among Protestants in early America. The strength of Pennsylvania German settlement in Easton showcases the cogency of ethnic identity in the Delaware Valley. This chapter introduces the reader to the diverse local character of each town and puts this definitive quality into motion by examining some of the critical interrelationships among these groups during the Seven Years' War. Examining how this war mobilized people reveals the salience of religious and ethnic identity, including such differences among Indians, in the multicultural Delaware Valley. Traditional historical accounts have often emphasized a close relationship between the Seven Years' War and 16 Chapter 1 the American Revolution, a connection also found here from the perspective of war's profound impact upon personal and group identity. AJourney Upriver: Meeting the People in Three River Towns Our introduction to the cultural diversity of the Delaware Valley begins with a trip up the river and a visit to each town. The Delaware River is among the eastern seaboard's largest waterways, and it hosted one of the major settlement regions in colonial British America. The river's course is most easily visualized as the political boundary that separates Pennsylvania and New Jersey. While its headwaters lie far into New York, the main river runs 330 miles to Delaware Bay and includes a watershed of nearly 13,500 miles. Taking ajourney upriver, New Castle, on the western shore, will be our first stop. Although it lies well inside the long funnel shape of Delaware Bay, looking out from New Castle, one still senses the ocean in the expanse of water that all but fills the horizon. Continuing north past Philadelphia to Burlington, on the eastern shore, the river has narrowed considerably but remains affected by ocean tides, and it was still too broad to be bridged during the period under study. Easton lies considerably farther upriver at the confluence with the Lehigh River, the Delaware's second largest tributary (after the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia), which gave rise to the identification of the immediate area as the "Forks of the Delaware." These locations represent a broad range of eighteenth-century settlement in the Delaware Valley. The varied physical setting of each place contributed to their significant differences, most importantly in the varied people who settled them. The European founding of each town reveals some of their distinctiveness from one another and reinforces the close relationship between local experience and geographic sctting.! New Castle's strategic location for the fur trade attracted Swedes, who negotiated with local Indians to purchase a large part of the shoreline in the 1630s, and by 1651 the Dutch had built a military fortification there.f Because its saltwater port remained open year-round without freezing, it developed an important commercial function . In the prerailroad era it enjoyed a privileged location as a transportation hub on the fastest north-south coastal route with packet ships on the Delaware and Chesapeake rivers and a rapid land crossing from New Castle...

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