Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

scouts and Indian fighters. And by pursuing a policy of peace and no armaments,
they found, mirabile dictu, that they had nothing to fear. They had
earned and gained the lasting respect of the Indians, and fair play met with
fair play in its turn. As in New Jersey, where Quakers were influential in
shaping Indian policy, there was no Indian war in the history of the colony so
long as the Quakers ruled.
The non-Quaker historian Herbert L. Osgood, paid high and eloquent tribute
to Quaker policy:
[The Quakers] would not make their religion, though Christian and Protestant,
a cause for war with either the heathen or the Catholic. It is true that they
based their views on literal reading of scripture texts . . . but beneath this
procedure lay a true consciousness of the essentials of humanity which transcended
all differences of color, race, nation, or creed. Quakers shared in the
movement westward . . so far as was a necessary consequence of the growth
of population. But with the artificial stimulation of these tendencies by
military and commercial exploitation, accompanied with the partial or complete
destruction of native peoples, they had no sympathy. ... to the great
majority of people in their time, this attitude seemed perverse and purely
obstructionist. But for the modern man it appears worthy of all honor as a
dim foreshadowing of what human relations should everywhere be. *
But as the eighteenth century wore on, the Quakers began to lose control of
Pennsylvania policy. We have seen the Ulster Scot propensity for indiscriminate
land grab and savagery toward the Indians. Furthermore, the new Anglican
proprietary was not interested in peace or fair dealing. In 1737, for example,
the proprietors engaged in chicanery in extending a tract bought from the
Delaware Indians in Bucks County at the junction of the Delaware and
Lehigh rivers ("the walking purchase"). The government then proceeded to
insist that the Indians leave the land they had settled, but the Quaker-dominated
Assembly refused to vote funds to allow enforcement of this outrageous
demand. But most serious was the eagerness of the proprietary party to participate
in the English aggression against the French and their Indian allies on
the other side of the Appalachians. For the French had explored and occupied
the Mississippi River and the Ohio Valley east of the Appalachians. Now
this extensive territory seemed ripe for the grabbing.
In 1739, England broke a quarter-century of European peace by going to
war with Spain, and then escalated the war to include France. The Penns and
their appointed governor, George Thomas, were eager to enter the fray.
Thomas urged the legislature to appropriate money for "defense"—the ageold
verbiage of the aggressor. The Assembly replied that the royal charter of
Pennsylvania permanently guaranteed freedom of conscience. A cardinal point
of the Quaker creed, they pointed out, was to be "principled against bearing
"Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century (Worcester,
Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958), 4: 49.
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