Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first
cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the
Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). Lenape men and women welcomed
their allies, the Swedes and Finns, to escape more rigid English regimes
on the west bank of the Delaware, offering land to establish farms,
share resources, and trade. In the 1670s, Quaker men and women
challenged this model with strategies to acquire all Lenape territory
for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Though
the Lenapes remained sovereign and "old settlers" retained their Swedish
Lutheran religion and ethnic autonomy, the West Jersey proprietors had
considerable success in excluding Lenapes from their land. The Friends
believed God favored their endeavor with epidemics of smallpox and other
European diseases that destroyed Lenape families and communities.
Affluent Quakers also introduced enslavement of imported Africans and
Natives--and the violence that sustained it--to a colony they had
promoted with the liberal West New Jersey Concessions of 1676-77. Thus,
they defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their
principles of peaceful resolution of conflict, equality of everyone
before God, and the golden rule to treat others as you wish to be
treated. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers,
and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military
conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch
in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey. Still, in alliance with
old settlers, Lenape communities survived in areas outside the focus of
English colonization, in the Pine Barrens, upper reaches of streams, and
Atlantic shore.
