elm tree at Shackamaxon Creek, however, was real and when it fell many years later, in 1810, pieces of it were considered as good as gold.20
FIGURE 9. Jigsaw puzzle of Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, LCP. Jigsaw puzzles were a favorite card table game in nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class homes, so children probably gained more cognizance of the Penn treaty legend this way than from their school books. The Library Company dates the puzzle to about 1850 but has no record of how it was acquired.
Whatever its limitations as an accurate portrayal of Indian and early settler life near Philadelphia in 1682, West’s treaty painting probably influenced public memory more than any other artistic work except portraits of George Washington. It had to swim against the tide of westward migration as the idea of Manifest Destiny suffused popular feeling and made a virtue of fighting Indians. But by the 1850s manufacturers of household goods were using it on dishes, bed and window curtains, whiskey glasses, bed quilts, hand-painted trays, lamp shades, and jigsaw puzzles (Figure 9). American lithographers pumped a steady stream of copies into the market throughout the nineteenth century, including early copies by Currier and Ives, sometimes giving the treaty date in 1661. A Philadelphia member of the Historical Society purchased West’s famous painting in 1851 and allowed it to be exhibited at the city’s Great Central Fair in 1864. Millions viewed it at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago, where it was part of the Quaker-led Universal Peace Union exhibit.
The promise of a new era of intercultural comity lasted through Penn’s lifetime, but by the 1730s Penn’s open-door immigration policy had filled Pennsylvania with Scots-Irish and German immigrants who did not subscribe to Quaker pacifism and who hungered for land to the west of the largely Quaker settlements, lands still in the possession of native peoples.
Ironically, James Logan, Penn’s most trusted official from 1699 to the founder’s death in 1717, became a central figure in a new era of abrasive relations with the Lenape and other tribes. In 1735, when he was the colony’s largest land speculator, Logan produced what he alleged was a copy of an old deed signed in 1686 that ceded a huge area between the Lehigh and Delaware rivers to Penn. Although the Lenape chiefs challenged the validity of the document, allegedly copied from an original that Logan could not produce, the Indian leaders succumbed to the combined pressure of the Pennsylvanians and their Iroquois allies who held sway over the Lenape. Two years after the chiefs signed a confirmation of the alleged 1686 deed, Logan arranged to “walk off” the bounds of the Indian deed, which granted Penn’s heirs all the land from a specified point in Bucks County westward as far as a man could walk in a day and a half. Tishcohan (Figure 10) was one of the Lenape chiefs who learned to his dismay of the colonists’ trickery: two of Penn’s sons sent scouting parties through the woods to blaze a trail so that three specially trained woodsmen could average nearly four miles an hour in order to extend the Penns’ claim almost sixty miles into Delaware territory, or twice as far as anticipated by the Indian chiefs. This became known as the “Walking Purchase.” The voluminous papers of James Logan began reaching the Historical Society by 1840 and continued to arrive as late as 1984. Logan was so long lived and his interests so diverse—he was Pennsylvania’s first polymath—that his paper trail can be followed not only in the trove of his papers at the Historical Society but also in the collections of the Library Company, the Pennsylvania State Archives, the Philadelphia City Archives, and the American Philosophical Society.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Penn’s peaceful Indian policy was in tatters. The Seven Years’ War all but shattered it as the French and their Indian allies attacked Pennsylvania’s western settlements and set the frontier aflame. Philadelphia Quaker leaders quickly formed the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures in order to maintain the support of the Delaware (the term subsequently used for the Lenape)—an effort based not only on the hope of avoiding violence but also on the desire to maintain the Quakers’ lucrative trade with the Indians. To this end, Quaker leaders refreshed Indian memory by distributing to Indian sachems silver peace medals harking back to the William Penn era. From Quaker silversmith shops came large medals with King George II gracing one side and a Quaker and an Indian the other. The Quaker—William Penn—is shown extending a winged peace pipe across a campfire to an Indian who accepts the offer. Struck in 1757, the peace medal was the first of its kind made in the English colonies. In this cagy use of history Quaker silversmiths soon produced other silver symbols of peace: brooches, arm bracelets, pendants, and crosses.
FIGURE 10. Gustavus Hesselius, Tishcohan, oil, 1735, HSP. Tishcohan was one of the signators to the Walking Purchase deed. Hesselius (1682-1755) was a Swedish immigrant and Philadelphia’s only painter of note during the colonial period. Even the lack of competition did not give him full employment because most Quakers were still averse to displaying vanity through commissioning portraits and not enough affluent non-Quakers were available. Hesselius dressed Tishcohan with a trade blanket, a chipmunk-skin tobacco pouch with a leather thong, and a clay pipe of European manufacture.
By the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Quakers were under heavy attack in their own colony for their Indian peace policy, which, frontiersmen charged, drenched their farms with blood. In late 1763, Scots-Irish farmers from Paxton Creek, to become known as “the Paxton Boys,” massacred friendly and defenseless Conestoga Indians at Lancaster (where Penn had visited with Lenape leaders in 1700) and then marched to Philadelphia to demand that the legislative assembly protect the frontier (Figure 11). Franklin wrote a strongly worded pamphlet condemning the “white savages” for their unconscionable behavior, turning the election of 1764 into a scurrilous war of words. One part of the Quakers’ “Holy Experiment” was coming to an end.21
FIGURE 11. The Paxton Expedition, Inscribed to the Author of the Farce, LCP. This cartoon, distributed in 1764, is the first internal view of Philadelphia. The Court House at the center, built in 1707 on High (Market) Street, was the scene of annual voting for assemblymen. Voters mounted the stairs to cast their ballots in the central doorway The scene shows Philadelphians, with cannons and shouldered muskets, preparing to repel the advancing Paxton Boys. At the left is the Greater Meeting House, erected in 1754.
From the Lancaster Massacre and the Paxton Boys’ march on Philadelphia came America’s first political cartoons. Along with a barrage of election pamphlets, these cartoons helped politicize eligible voters. In the colony’s most heated election, Franklin lost his assembly seat—the only time he was to lose a political contest.
This deep fissure in late colonial society attracted the attention of the Library Company, which began collecting political pamphlets related to the Paxton Boys’ expedition and also a barrage of pamphlets leading up to the ferocious Philadelphia election of 1764. When the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 ignited intense argument over new British regulations, the Library Company gathered pamphlets sparked by the debate. Proud of this collecting policy, Franklin wrote in 1771 that libraries such as the one he founded “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defence of their privileges.”22 Over the waning years of the colonial era, the Library Company acquired a run of Philadelphia’s first newspaper, the American Weekly Mercury, many new scientific treatises and works of political thought, and museum objects such as fauna preserved in spirits, antique coins, fossils, Eskimo parkas, tanned buffalo skins, and a woman’s hand taken from an Egyptian mummy. But the Library Company’s special importance was in collecting printed materials related to every aspect of English
