Reviewed by Jane T. Merritt | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Jane T. Merritt | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Jane T. Merritt, Old Dominion University

Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania. Edited by William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 357 pages. $65.00 (cloth), $22.95 (paper).
Gathering together some of the best and most recent scholarship on eighteenth-century race and cultural encounters, Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods is a testament to the dynamic state of early Pennsylvania history. Indeed, a plethora of submissions to a regional journal gave editors William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter the raw material to shape this volume around the work of thirteen historians, many of whom were nurtured in the academic community that thrives in the mid-Atlantic. This volume, then, is also a tribute to the stimulating scholarly discussions generated at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the rich archival sources found in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and other area repositories.	1
The editors frame the book with two iconic events, William Penn's original treaty with the Lenni-Lenape in 1682 and the massacre of Conestoga Indians by the largely Scotch-Irish Paxton Boys in 1763 (though several of the essays start before and go beyond these dates). For most people these are the only events that speak about Pennsylvania's emergence as a distinct region; mythic to a certain extent, they succinctly capture many assumptions about the peaceful nature of the colony's founder and the racial intolerance of the non-Quaker white immigrant population, yet oddly they distance readers from the perspective of native peoples. The volume's essays, though keeping these events firmly in mind, deal more subtly with the relations between Euro-Americans and the various Indian groups that preceded them on the Pennsylvania frontier. Neither completely benign nor blindly racist, colonists and Native Americans instead defined themselves in relationship with each other. Divided into three sections—"Peoples in Conversation," "Fragile Structures of Coexistence," and "Toward a White Pennsylvania"—the essays in Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods have many common threads that spill over these boundaries and as a whole "trace the collapse of whatever potential may have existed for a Pennsylvania shared by Indians and Europeans and its replacement by a racialized definition that left no room for Native people" (xvi–xvii).	2
"Peoples in Conversation" explores various meanings of the encounter between Native Americans and Euro-Americans, especially how misunderstandings shaped their common ground, both literally and figuratively. Michael Dean Mackintosh, in "New Sweden, Natives, and Nature," and James O'Neil Spady, in "Colonialism and the Discursive Antecedents of Penn's Treaty with the Indians," look at Swedish, Dutch, and English Quaker colonization and its relationship to natural resources and native inhabitants. They suggest that Native Americans and Europeans not only viewed land use in different ways but also perhaps purposefully misinterpreted each other in treaties to put a veneer of good will on their relationship. Indians agreed to let newcomers use available resources, but did not think they were alienating the ownership of land from themselves. Europeans, whose religion commanded them to subdue and take dominion over land and animals, saw their early encounters with Indians as agreements to transfer land title. Spady does a particularly good job of exposing the not-so-agreeable reactions to William Penn's renowned attempts to peaceably settle Quakers along the Delaware River. Penn touted his own fairness in purchasing land, even as he bullied Lenni-Lenape into accepting his terms. The Lenni-Lenape had little praise for Penn's form of benevolence, instead denouncing the Quakers and expecting regular payment for the continued English presence on their land.	. . .

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