Conrad Weiser, 1696-1760, Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (review)

BOOK REVIEWS39 One's pleasure in reading it is tempered only by the realization that the fruitful collaboration which produced it has been terminated by the passing of Charles M. Andrews. Leónidas Dodson University of Pennsylvania Conrad Weiser, 1696-1760, Friend of Colonist and Mohaivk, by Paul A. W. Wallace. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945. 648 pp. $5.00. ?G?? INDIANS called him Tarachiawagon—"ïLo\der of the Heavens"— highest name in the Iroquois pantheon. Colonial authorities looked to him as their chief ambassador to the Six Nations. Conrad Weiser was more than a mere interpreter; he was a statesman of wisdom and discretion, thoroughly conversant with the elaborate protocol of forest diplomacy, sympathetic with Indian psychology, yet loyal to the Proprietors and people of Pennsylvania. To his consummate skill in faceto -face dealing with the shrewd Iroquois chieftains was actually due a large measure of the success which William Penn's "peace policy" managed to achieve under the administration of the Founder's less capable and far-seeing sons. A pious Lutheran after a brief monastic interlude at Ephrata, Conrad Weiser remained, in spite of his important rôle in public affairs, one of the "plain people" of the Pennsylvania back country. He was, however, no pacifist; "his strategy," we are told, "was to keep the Six Nations strong [as a buffer against the French]. Whether it was good tactics to use the war hatchet or the peace belt to that end, the exigencies of a developing situation would have to determine" (page 230) . In treating the Indian relations of colonial Pennsylvania, the author of this massive biography is traversing controversial ground—ground which has been fought over by generations of pro- and anti-Quaker historians from the time of Charles Thomson's Enquiry into the Causes of the Alienation of the Delaware and Shawanese Indians (1759) and William Smith's Brief State of the Province of Pennsylvania (1755) to our own day, when Isaac Sharpless and Rayner Kelsey have defended the Quaker policy, and Julian Boyd and Theodore Thayer (to mention only the most recent) have attacked it. Like Weiser, Paul A. W. Wallace is no pacifist, but he avoids bitter partisanship and steers a judicious middle course between extremes of historical interpretation. He admits that the "Walking Purchase" of 1737 was "a nasty business," but adds that "it was not as wicked as the political enemies of the Proprietors made it out to be" (p. 97). He feels that Friends were taken in by the egregious Teedyuscung, bibulous king of the Delawares, and he appears to agree with Weiser "that 'land fraud' was little more than a convenient slogan which the French and the Quakers used to incite the Delawares against Pennsylvania's Governor and Council" (p. 528). He pictures Israel Pemberton, leading spokesman Vol. 35, Spring 1946 40 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION of the "Friendly Association," as "self-righteous, censorious, and impatient of any light but his own" (p. 485). Perhaps there is truth in these charges. What they suggest to this reviewer is the need for a new study of Quaker-Indian relations in Pennsylvania which shall be done with the same thorough scholarship that is exhibited in this book, but with a genuine understanding of the motivation that lay behind the efforts of the "Friendly Association." Wallace's book is a redoubtable piece of research. Drawing upon hundreds of new manuscript sources, he has put together a portrait which is more detailed than any other biography of a colonial Pennsylvanian that comes to mind except Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin. Sometimes the details get out of control, and the reader has a hard time keeping the main outlines in view in the deluge of facts. But the book is kept from lapsing into dullness by Wallace's unfailingly lively and literate style. No one can henceforth discuss the Indian relations of eighteenthcentury Pennsylvania without having mastered the facts in this important biography. Frederick B. Tolles Civilian Public Service Pioneer Sketches of the Upper Whitewater Valley, Quaker Stronghold of the West by Bernhard Knollenberg. Indianapolis, Indiana Historical Society, 1945. 171 pp. 75 cents. T-1HIS volume is precisely described by its title...