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157 chapter 7 One Head and One Heart MIGRATION, COALESCENCE, AND PENN’S IMAGINED COMMUNITY ON THE LOWER SUSQUEHANNA Between 1676 and 1710, Native peoples from the mid-Atlantic, the upper country, and South Carolina coalesced in colonial Pennsylvania. Indian migrants saw it as a refuge for oppressed people well before European immigrants redefined it as “the best poor man’s country.” William Penn certainly promoted their understanding of his colony. In 1701, while negotiating a treaty with the Susquehannocks, Penn hoped that Indians and colonists might live “as one head and one heart.” Penn’s repeated promises to defend the rights of Native peoples must have resonated with migrants from borderlands that had been remade by warfare, slavery, and vigilantism . Pennsylvanians assured Indian migrants of their safety by passing “a law to prevent any injuries to them from the Christians, and laying greater punishments on those that should commit them, than if they were done to the English themselves.”1 Fourteen years later, in a council meeting held at Philadelphia, the Delaware leader Sassoonan recalled Penn’s vision. Sassoonan desired “that they should be joyn’d as one, that the Indians should be half English & the Indians make themselves as half Indians.” Sassoonan described “how hard [it] was upon them, for that they knew not what they were to expect for their goods, and that they could scarce purchase ours.” Sassoonan hoped to restore fairness to the Indian trade, but he did so by evoking the kinship terms first articulated by William Penn. A generation of Indian people had been raised in the belief that Pennsylvania stood apart from the other English colonies, particularly Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. Sassoonan ’s metaphors reflected his desire to enjoy the religious and ethnic pluralism championed by William Penn. However, by 1715, the limitations of Penn’s vision became impossible to ignore. The economics of the Indian trade revealed the ethnic and cultural limits of Penn’s peaceable kingdom.2 158 / THE LONG HISTORY OF REMOVAL At least initially, Penn and the officials he appointed attempted to marry the radical reformation to their economic ambitions. As a member of the Society of Friends, Penn subscribed to the notion of the Inner Light, that every person, regardless of gender, social rank, or race, had access to “direct revelation from God.” Such radical egalitarianism caused innumerable conflicts for Penn after October 1682, when he founded the proprietary colony of Pennsylvania. In that year, at a council with Native Pennsylvanians, he expressed his ardent wish that he “intend[ed] to order all things in such manner, that we may all live in Love and peace one with another.” Penn strove to apply Quaker principles in his government’s dealings with American Indians. His first experiment in reconciling his ideals to the realities of making a colony began with Native migrants attached to the diplomatic center of Conestoga, in southeastern Pennsylvania . In 1690, Penn proposed founding a city on the Lower Susquehanna that would serve as the hub for the Indian trade in the mid-Atlantic. Penn knew that the Susquehanna River’s strategic importance would enable him to wrest control of the Indian trade from New York and that the Iroquois were central to the success of his plans. He recognized that many Iroquois hunters had grown tired of hauling furs and skins via overland routes to Albany. Many preferred the Lower Susquehanna and the allwater routes it made possible.3 Penn inspired thousands of Indian people to migrate to Pennsylvania in the first three decades of its existence by linking the Indian trade to metaphors of kinship and security. New York’s governor, Thomas Dongan, responded decisively to their migrations. He viewed Penn’s ambitions as a threat to the very survival of New York. Dongan used his alliance with the Iroquois to check Penn’s ascendancy. Acting in concert, the Iroquois and the New Yorkers tried to compel Indian migrants to answer to their imperatives. Dongan and Penn struggled for control of the Susquehanna Valley in London and the mid-Atlantic. In 1683, Dongan signed an agreement with the Iroquois for all of the lands surrounding the Susquehanna River. Dongan reasoned that the land was the Iroquois’s to sell, by right of conquest. The Iroquois had sold Susquehannock lands from under their feet.4 Penn ultimately triumphed over Dongan, but not before challenging the Iroquois and the hierarchies of power that connected vast numbers of Indian people to British North America. First, in...

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