This seems undisputable...not even the Popular Quaker Front would argue this.Ken wrote: ↑Thu Jan 11, 2024 6:28 pm Well, I would suggest that what William Penn really did was more like eminent domain. The government coming in and telling you they were going to take your land for some other purpose but that they would negotiate a "fair" settlement for your property.
The King of England granted William Penn title to all of Pennsylvania in exchange for debts the king owed to Penn's father.
William Penn then negotiated with the various tribes already on the land to vacate and move further west to make room for William Penn to carve out landholdings to then sell to European settlers.
This seems to ignore the early history of other contemporaneous colonies like Plymouth. The Pilgrims and the Puritans didn't use massacre or gunpoint either. The land they settled initially had already been depopulated from an inter-Native war and survivors from local tribes welcomed the newcomers as potential allies. Violence occurred of course later down the line, at the founding though it was really quite amicable. Jamestown seems to be one of strife and violence almost from the get go.
This is simply your opinion and is belied by both facts and a little bit of logic. The Lenapi could have refused and fought. What would Penn have done then? Do you really think he and his merry band of radical pacifists would have used violence to make their way? The Lenapi were weak relative to the Iroquois but they still numbered 5000 compared to the 300 or so that came across on that first ship; and that was just the Lenapi. You assume and elide quite a bit when you suggest that the relationship was one of the strong (English) condescending to the weak (Natives).
One year before his trip across the Atlantic Ocean, Penn had written a letter to the “Kings of the Indians,” explaining that he was coming to settle in their land. He regretted the “unkindness and injustice” that Indians had experienced from other Europeans and promised that Pennsylvania would be different. Because God commanded his people to love others, his colony would treat the Indians with honesty, fairness, and peace.
Having arrived, Penn worked on bringing his plans to fruition. The Quakers refused to take any land unless the Indians agreed to it. During the first couple of years, Penn purchased land from the Lenape and Susquehannock leaders, including large areas along the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. As he stood side by side with the Indian leaders and signed the purchase contracts, he may have felt a measure of pride that his land was being honestly bought rather than stolen from the Indians. However, he did not realize that these peaceful transactions were being aided by forces beyond his control. Since Europeans had arrived in the New World, disease and war had reduced the Lenni Lenapes to a mere five thousand people. Their alliance with the English thus provided much-needed protection from their rivals, the Iroquois League, the most powerful Indian alliance in the region, and contributed to their willingness to sell their land.
Ken wrote: ↑Thu Jan 11, 2024 6:28 pm By the standards of his time he was a pretty good guy. By 21st century standards, not so much. Imagine the outcry if some current government said: "We are going to take Ohio and dedicate it to settlement by foreign immigrants." All you Ohioans are going to have to pack your bags and go. We will negotiate fair settlement for your lands but you have to leave and move to Missouri or Washington or someplace further west. That part is non-negotiable.
Really was Penn willing to use violence to achieve his ends?
This was not an emptying out of Eastern Pa to make space for "White People". The Lenapi continued to live on their land, they simply and willingly sold parts of it to the incoming Quakers.
For people who profess devotion to the rightness and justice of the mass migration of peoples, to also claim that this doesn't pass the smell test by 21st Century standards, is absurd. Penn, the immigrant showed up on the border, without being invited and then got to work befriending his neighbors and legally buying his land that he hoped to inhabit. The only difference from his actions and those of the current illegal immigrants is that he had the courtesy to send correspondence and establish friendly relations a year before his arrival.