First City. Gary B. Nash

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FIGURE 7. Great Belt of Wampum, HSP. The famous belt, fashioned from quahog shell beads and leather, shows a European with a broad hat, typical of Quaker garb, clasping hands with a Native American. At Philadelphia’s 1864 Great Central Fair to raise money for wounded Civil War soldiers, the Wampum Belt was conspicuously displayed in the creation of a “William Penn Parlor” along with a cup said to have been presented to Penn by a Lenape chief at the Shackamaxon treaty gathering.

      These words were recalled at a meeting of the Historical Society in 1859, when John Granville Penn, the great-grandson of the founder, presented a handsome belt of wampum to the Society. Just as for Europeans a deed finalized a land exchange, the wampum belt for Indians signified a sealed agreement. Indians and Europeans also used simple shell beads or wampum (literally, “white string”) as a medium of exchange. The wampum belt (Figure 7) is the Historical Society’s most famous and asked-about possession because it reverberates hauntingly in the public consciousness as a reminder of what might have been in the tragic history of European exploitation of native peoples. Today, when peace studies programs have replaced military history, most school textbooks include an illustration of this famous wampum belt.

      Acquiring the wampum belt occasioned unusual excitement at the Historical Society. Regarded as “one of the jewels in our cabinet of curios,” as a later society president expressed it, its value “historically and sentimentally” was nearly unsurpassed. When John Granville Penn came from London to Philadelphia to contribute what would become a nearly holy relic and explain at length its authenticity, Historical Society leaders spared no ceremony to sanctify the icon, even though an earlier inquiry cast doubt that Penn ever met with Lenape chiefs to conclude a treaty of peace. Even an ex-president, Martin Van Buren, was enlisted to send a letter, and his words could not have been better chosen to evoke the spirit of an earlier day. The gift of the wampum belt, wrote Van Buren, “secures to Pennsylvania an historical monument of peculiar value” and vouches for Penn’s “own noble resolution, taken at the outset, and never departed from, to found his Commonwealth ‘on deeds of peace.’” The founder’s great-grandson then gave what seemed an unassailable account of how the Penn family had acquired the belt and how it had remained in the family for nearly two hundred years. His great-grandfather, he related, had pressed a roll of parchment pledging a treaty of friendship into the hands of the chief sachem and implored him and other attending chiefs to “preserve it carefully for three generations, that their children might know what had passed between them, just as if he [Penn] had remained to repeat it.” Solemnly, the Indians reciprocated, “according to their national custom,” by giving Penn the wampum belt “with the record of a treaty of peace and friendship woven in its centre.”¹⁸

      Though modern scholars have searched hard, no proof has been found that the peace treaty meeting took place. It is even possible that the Belt of Wampum was made after William Penn’s death in 1717. The belt depicts a portly European (presumably Penn) clasping hands with an American Indian, but in 1682 Penn was not portly at all; he was athletic enough to run races with some of the young Lenape men. Yet this modern-day sleuthing, while inconvenient for continuing to tell a story nearly as venerable as that of the landing at Plymouth Rock, has not tarnished the belt’s iconic status. People create legends to preserve essential truths as they understand them, and nothing has served Quaker values better (now widely shared in the post-Cold War era in the case of their peace testimony) than the touching gift of the wampum belt to Penn. Penn did carry through on his extraordinary promise in his letter to the Indian kings in 1681 by creating a mechanism for resolving any disputes between the settlers and the Lenape. “[I]f in any thing any shall offend you or your People,” he promised, “you shall have a full and Speedy Satisfaction for the same by an equall number of honest men on both sides.”¹⁹ Such intercultural arbitration, also implemented in the West Jersey colony across the Delaware River, though only briefly, was unprecedented.

      If the Lenape did not string shells into a ceremonial wampum belt in 1682, the impulse to do so may not have been far from their intentions. Whatever the case, the early Historical Society councillors—and a great many non-Quakers since—have drawn tremendous sustenance from the wampum belt fable. Granville Penn certainly believed that a treaty of friendship was drawn up at Shackamaxon (present-day Kensington) just after Penn’s arrival in the fall of 1682 and that it had been sealed by the great Belt of Wampum. He cited as authority Thomas Clarkson’s 1813 Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William Penn and many documents mentioning the “old first treaties of friendship.” If the treaty of friendship meeting never occurred and the wampum belt was made many years later, we can appreciate how history is manipulated to fit the sensibilities of those living many years after a supposed event. Historians of public memory have mostly castigated the management of remembrance because the preservationist movement of the last century foisted many fables on an unsuspecting public. But the origins of the wampum belt legend, while doubtless reflecting the desire of nineteenth-century leaders to glorify as benign a previous Philadelphia elite from which they were descended, were buried deep in the hope of perpetuating the Quakers’ pacifist principles that had led to intercultural cooperation in a world of intercultural conflict.