Justice Is Served – the Quaker Edition
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Justice is Served
Every American has heard the story of Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims and Puritans came here seeking a place away from religious persecutions in England. Eventually they died out before the Indians stepped in and taught them how to survive. The Pilgrims and the Indians came together for a huge feast to celebrate the first successful harvest. These people according to two-fifths of Americans are the founding fathers of the Nation. Two-fifths privilege the Jamestown settlers (a.k.a. people like John Smith and Pocahontas) with the same title. The remaining one-fifth is undecided. Should it be the Quakers with their plain dress or should it be the Scottish-Irish because of their large population most ponder. Notice the common pattern, most contemporary Americans believe the founders of their nation to have made peace with the Native Americans. However, if they were to dig a little deeper most would find that this is not the case. Although the Pilgrims/Puritans, Jamestown Settlers, Scotch-Irish, and Quakers had common reasons behind going to the new world, the Quakers, differ from the rest through treatment of Native Americans, women, and the tolerance of other religions.
While many of the “founding fathers” were thought to have treated the natives with respect, the only group which actually did was the Quakers. Often times Virginians (Jamestown Settlers) would kill or tortured Indians, as author Howard Zinn (A Peoples History of the United States 1429-Present) anecdotes Edmund Morgans description from American Slavery, American Freedom “The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did… So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority, in spite of your failures,” (Zinn 25). The reasoning behind these killings is simply unjust. While massacring Indians is not ideal, the thought of fights between small bodies of troops over land is all the more devastating. Richard F. Welchs Life in Early America: The Scotch-Irish portrays the Scottish-Irish doing just that, “The conflicts on the Indian frontier led to the first Scotch venture into politics… The frontiersmen, who bore the brunt of (and sometimes instigated) the skirmishing with Indians…” (Welch41-42). None the less the Pilgrims and Puritans were thought to be allied with the natives turned on them with the slightest hint of rebellion, “… Colonial authorities reacted to rumors of pending native rebellion with humiliating interrogations and increasingly severe rules and restrictions…” (Davidson etc. 99). The Quakers actually bought the Natives lands instead of just taking it completely through war or torture. Leader William Penn even learned the language of the natives surrounding the western half of the colony