Evan Haefeli | The Revolt of the Long Swede: Transatlantic Hopes and Fears on the Delaware, 1669 | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.2

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Evan Haefeli | The Revolt of the Long Swede: Transatlantic Hopes and Fears on the Delaware, 1669 | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.2 | The History Cooperative

The Revolt of the Long Swede: Transatlantic Hopes and Fears on the Delaware, 1669

In the fall of 1669, when New York ruled the Delaware River valley but most of its colonists had come from Sweden, fears of a conspiracy to restore the area to Swedish rule filled the court at New Castle. The contention, confusion, and downright ignorance that have surrounded the incident ever since are reflected in the lack of agreement on its name. Variously called (in more or less chronological order) the Intended Insurrection of the Long Swede, the Insurrection in Delaware, the Uproar Among the Swedes, and the Long Finn Rebellion, it remains a virtually unknown event from an obscure corner of colonial American history. Few are the people who even know that it happened. It has inspired a highly fanciful work of early American literature, James Kirke Paulding's Koningsmarke, the Long Finne: A Story of the New World, but little historical analysis.¹ There is not even a proper narrative of what happened, when, or why. Using the few available fragments, this article provides a plausible account of the incident and argues for its significance to both the early history of the Delaware Valley and the broader colonial American experience. I deliberately label it the Revolt of the Long Swede (even though the main actor may have been a Finn) to draw attention away from prevailing concerns with ethnicity and towards the more relevant issue of transatlantic political loyalties.	1
The controversial idea that not all of the Swedish colonists on the Delaware welcomed the transition to English (and thus proto-American) rule may explain why, when the event has been mentioned, it is usually dismissed as not terribly serious. Already in 1669 a colonial New York official investigating the incident called it a "silly intention of an Insurrection amongst the Finns at the Delaware."² In the mid-eighteenth century, Israel Acrelius, the noted Swedish missionary to and historian of the colonial Swedes, described the "Uproar Among the Swedes" as a "great disturbance" in which an "impostor by the name of Königsmark came among the Swedes ... and found many followers, especially among the Finns." Acrelius worried that the "impostor" had "wellnigh brought his countrymen, who were innocent, into evil report and suspicion" had not their "honesty" been established by "many proofs before."³ Notice that Acrelius devotes about as much prose to exonerating the Swedes as to describing what happened.	2
The emphasis on the loyalty of those who did not support the Long Swede rather than the cause he may have stood for continued into the early twentieth century. The Swedish American scholar Amandus Johnson, whose two-volume history of New Sweden remains the authoritative account of the colony, gave the events of 1669 only a few lines in an unpublished manuscript. In his words, some "of the 'better Swedes' ... did not join the 'insurrection,' as it was called, and apparently notified" the English authorities. As with Acrelius, his emphasis is on Swedish loyalty, not the event itself. The rebellious elements are an embarrassing mixture of Finns and Swedes of a lesser sort.⁴	3
The one positive assessment of the "rebellion" merely presents the flip side of this coin. In their book arguing for the important Savo-Karelian Finnish influence on American backwoods society, Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups see the incident as part of a pattern of "repeated mutiny and insurrection," running from 1653 to at least 1709, when "the provincial council of Pennsylvania still categorized the Swedes as 'exceedingly Insolent' in their dealings with the government and given to 'Invective language.'" A group of seventeenth-century Finns, they argue, bequeathed to later generations of Americans not just the log cabin, but also "individualism," "disregard for government and law," a penchant for mobility, and other such traits. They celebrate what Acrelius and Johnson disdain without advancing our understanding of what happened or why.⁵	. . .

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