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Chapter 8 "No Savage Should Inherit": Native Peoples, Pennsylvanians, and the Origins and Legacies of the Seven Years War
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Chapter 8 “No Savage Should Inherit”: Native Peoples, Pennsylvanians, and the Origins and Legacies of the Seven Years War The global war that began nearly three‑ quarters of a century after William Penn wrote his letter— the war whose origins the Delaware leader Teedyus‑ cung struggled both to explain and bring to an end when he negotiated with Pennsylvanians in the 1750s— has usually been called the “French and Indian War.” Native peoples certainly would not have used that term. How could they, when few recognized more than a uneasy alliance of convenience with the French king and none could deny deep differences among the many com‑ munities that Euro‑ Americans lumped together as “Indians”? And who was their enemy? Europeans and Euro‑ Americans in general? The Pennsylvania governors they called, in memory of the founder, by the council title Mi‑ quon or Onas? The Virginians usually referred to as Shemockteman or “Long Knives”? The British Crown as represented by the invading army of Major General Edward Braddock? The Scots‑Irish and German squatters who, often without the consent of any European government, lived in ever‑ greater num‑ bers along the Susquehanna and to the west? Or were the Indians’ real en‑ emies the Native people who collaborated with the Europeans, who somehow continued to believe that the continent could be shared with the invaders? Few things were simple or clear‑ cut, at least not in 1754, at the beginning of the conflict many historians prefer to call by its European name, the “Seven Years War.” Teedyuscung had a better name for these times. He called them “gloomy and dark days.”1 Despite the gloom, at least two things were clear, however. First, while long‑ standing imperial rivalries between Britain and France 156 European Power and Native Land provided an overarching structure for the conflict, the immediate origins of the Seven Years War lay in the disputed territory known as “the Ohio coun‑ try,” radiating westward from the confluence of the Monongahela and Al‑ legheny Rivers at the site of modern‑ day Pittsburgh. Second, these North American roots of the global conflict are inseparable from the breakdown in relations between Native peoples and the province of Pennsylvania in the generation before the 1750s. With the benefit of historical hindsight, a third thing also becomes clear. The crisis in Native‑ Pennsylvania relations established a pattern that would endure throughout the next half‑ century, during which British colonists would declare their independence and create a republic in which they would envision no permanent place for independent Native peoples. The vision of a continent reserved for descendants of Europeans pre‑ dated the Declaration of Independence and was hardly unique to settler colonizers. In 1755, when the Irish‑ born and English‑and Dutch‑ trained Braddock began his doomed march to try to dislodge the French from the Ohio country, he met with six Native chiefs. One of them, the Delaware Shingas, recalled several years later that the Indians had “applied to General Braddock and Enquired what he Presque Isle The Ohio country, 1748–1760. Map by Philip Schwartzberg. 4 GMT) The Seven Years War 157 intended to do with the Land if he Could drive the French and their Indi‑ ans away. To which General Braddock replied that the English Shoud Inhabit and Inherit the Land, on which Shingas asked General Braddock whether the Indians that were Freinds to the English might not be Permitted to Live and Trade Among the English and have Hunting Ground sufficient To Support themselves and Familys as they had no where to Flee Too. . . . On which Gen‑ eral Braddock said that No Savage Should Inherit the Land.”2 * * * Whoever would inherit its land, the Pennsylvania that Native people knew in the 1750s was very different from the place that William Penn had envisioned. Yet the same kinds of controversies over real estate that shaped the colony’s early relations with Indians drove much of the transformation. The founder left North America for the last time in 1701, suffered a stroke in 1712, and remained in poor health until his death in 1718. During this period, he exercised little influence over what transpired in his province. His second wife, Hannah Cal‑ lowhill Penn, and after her death in 1726, their sons John, Thomas, and Richard (none of whom, as converts to Anglicanism, shared their parents’ commitment to Quaker values) struggled to pay the family’s huge debts. The three sons also had to counter challenges to their authority from...