Lenape Country: The Delaware Valley before William Penn by Jean R. Soderlund (review)

For many historians, the seventeenth-century Delaware Valley has long been a blank space on the map, a terra incognita in the heart of early America. Though located midway between Virginia and New England, the region’s sparse population of Swedish, Finnish, and Dutch colonists left few marks, making it all too easy to ignore until 1681, when the new colony of Pennsylvania swiftly transformed the Valley into one of the densest sites of European settlement in North America. Soderlund’s Lenape Country fills this empty canvas with a dynamic picture of a Native-controlled region, where Lenapes—the people later known as Delawares—built a stable set of alliances with neighbors and maintained their independence for decades after the colonial arrival. Countering a long-standing “portrayal of the Lenapes as a powerless people,” Soderlund argues that Lenapes’ political “primacy” defined the region’s early colonial history (5). Although the Swedish, Dutch, and English empires each claimed the Delaware as their own until the 1680s, Soderland sees a shared society taking shape, crafted by Native interests as much as European ones.

Soderlund’s chronological narrative highlights the region’s comparatively peaceful character. With the exception of the Sickoneysincks’ massacre of several dozen Dutch colonists living at the mouth of Delaware Bay in 1631, no major frontier conflict ever erupted in the area, making it unlike neighboring regions along the coast. In her interpretation of that 1631 attack, Soderlund argues that the sudden destruction of the small outpost was meant to prevent further colonial incursions, making it “a rational act in a violent world” (48). The creation of “New Sweden” in 1638, which was only slowly populated by a mixed Finnish and Swedish population, led to new ties between neighbors, as some colonial men married indigenous women. A Swedish clergyman would later claim that “ours are as one people” and that Lenapes “in their language call these Swedes their own people” (65). The core of Soderlund’s thesis is that the Lutheran ideals of these Nordic colonists had a kinship with the communal egalitarian ethos of Lenapes, as “ethnic diversity and alliance among the Swedish nation and Lenapes created a culture committed to personal freedom, religious liberty, shared use of resources, opposition to centralized authority, and focus on economic gain that remained distinctive of Delaware Valley society into the eighteenth century” (141).

Soderlund makes a compelling case, if not an entirely convincing one. Lenape country also lacked a central high-profit commodity that served as a root cause of colonial population spikes and frontier conflicts, in the way that tobacco farming intensified settlement on the Chesapeake and the wampum trade led to political and economic instability in New Netherland and New England. Nonetheless, Soderlund finds evidence that at every tense moment throughout the century that could have easily spiraled out of control, cooler heads prevailed, demonstrating a shared commitment among colonial and Native leaders to reconciliation. Whether this political culture of mutual toleration could have endured in a different regional economy or with a larger European population is anyone’s guess.

Drawing from Swedish, Dutch, and English sources, Soderlund’s methodological toolkit is decidedly that of a traditional historian. Although her thinking is clearly informed by ethnographic work on Native societies, most of Soderlund’s interpretation relies on weighing multiple sources against each other, considering comparative historical regions, and reading against the grain. She includes images of archaeological finds, such as pipe fragments, Susquehannock-made combs, and other trading goods, but these artifacts serve only as illustrations, not sources of evidence (29, 50–51). Her interpretation touches on questions of cultural change, gender, religion, and linguistics, but, at its core, it remains a traditional historical narrative concerned with events and their causes.

Lenape Country is not, nor does it claim to be, a model of interdisciplinary inquiry. But Soderlund adds new depth to our understanding of the beginnings of the Middle Colonies, telling a surprising story of...