Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn by Jean R. Soderlund (review)

A commonly held idea is that Quaker settlers led by William Penn established Delaware Valley society’s emphases on freedom, tolerance, and peaceful conflict. In Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn, however, Jean R. Soderlund demonstrates that these Delaware Valley hallmarks originated with the Lenape Indians and were the bases of Lenape economic and political dominance through successive waves of European colonization in the region. Soderlund states that the Lenapes were “amicable in large part from their own self-interest,” but also points out that the Lenapes’ value system was predicated on “a long-term commitment to personal freedom, religious liberty, political sovereignty, and peaceful resolution of conflict” that allowed Lenape and European communities to flourish (92, 196). Soderlund focuses on the period between 1615 and 1681, from the initial Dutch and Swedish colonies to Penn’s Quaker settlement. Soderlund convincingly argues that, until the 1730s, Europeans adapted to conditions that the Lenapes established for trade and land use and respected Lenape autonomy. In the seventeenth century, to ensure political stability in the region, the Lenapes “protected the Swedes and Dutch from each other because the competition among Europeans allowed the Natives to set prices and define the terms of trade” (75). Soderlund shows that the Lenapes determined where Europeans erected forts for trade and how much agricultural land they cultivated. Rather than permanently ceding their lands to Europeans, the Lenapes granted Europeans land-use privileges for which the Lenape received annual gifts from the settlers. Only once did settlers, the Dutch at Swanendael in 1631, circumvent the Lenapes’ terms. The Lenapes destroyed Swanendael, forcefully demonstrating that they preferred peaceful relations but would resort to violence to protect their sovereignty and maintain political dominance in the region.

Soderlund’s thorough examination of colonial documents yields evidence that the Lenapes, not the Europeans, dictated conflict resolution processes. An example Soder-lund provides is the Lenape mourning war tradition, whereby “family members of a murder victim either could accept compensation in wampum or other goods to ‘cover’ the death or could kill the perpetrator” (38). Significantly, Soderlund demonstrates that through mourning war the Lenapes redressed smallpox deaths that they attributed to Europeans, from whom the Lenapes expected and received appropriate compensation. Soderlund shows that the Lenapes sustained mutually beneficial, peaceful alliances with the Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and English while maintaining their autonomy and sovereignty in the region until the Quakers’ arrival in the 1680s.

The Lenapes outnumbered the Europeans until roughly 8,000 Quakers settled in the Delaware Valley between 1680 and 1685. Even though, as Soderlund states, “the Friends’ belief in religious liberty and commitment to friendly relations with Native Americans complemented [Lenape] cultural practices already in place,” Quakers also instituted a hierarchical political structure that privileged provincial investors who expected profits (149). The English and Quakers challenged the land usage of the Lenapes’ “Swedish” (Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and German) allies and levied taxes to generate proprietary income, actions that led Swedes to abandon the region. Soderlund painstakingly details the most devastating blow to Lenape sovereignty, the 1737 Walking Purchase. Soderlund argues that because Penn did not complete the treaty by paying the Lenapes in full or delineating the boundaries of his “purchase,” the resultant confusion enabled Penn’s heirs and Penn’s secretary of the province, James Logan, to defraud the Lenapes by seizing the vast majority of remaining Lenape land. Throughout her book, Soderlund asserts that the Lenapes identified themselves as “’a free people, subject to no one,’ and as a group had no interest in destroying the liberty of others” (198). Even in the midst of decline, Lenape commitment to liberty compelled the Pennsylvania assembly to ban the importation of Carolina Indian slaves to the Delaware Valley.

Soderlund’s Lenape Country provides an important corrective to Eurocentric myths about the evolution of Delaware Valley society. Lenape Country is meticulously researched and cautiously analyzed, qualities that strengthen Soderlund’s assertions for the primacy of Lenape influence in the formation...