SETTLEMENTS, TREATIES AND PROMISES

The 17^th September has a strong American flavour about it.  On the 17^th September, 1630, the city of Boston was founded by the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This was an English settlement on the East Coast of North America in the area that is now referred to as New England. The territory administered by the colony included much of present-day central New England, including portions of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Territory claimed but never administered by the colonial government extended as far west as the Pacific Ocean. The owners and investors in the Massachusetts Bay Company, after a first failed venture, established a successful colony from 1628 with about 20,000 people migrating to New England in the 1630’s; hence, the cities of Boston and Salem. The population was very Puritan and its governance was dominated by a small group of leaders strongly influence by Puritan religious principles. They were not so very tolerant of other views on religion. But they remained and together with other groups of colonists forged a new nation in 1776.

That nation, the United States of America, entered into its first written treaty with an American Indian tribe on the 17^th September 1778. The treaty was the Treaty of Fort Pitt, a treaty with the Delawares, known as the Lenape. A formal document was signed at Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania (a site that later grew into the city of Pittsburgh) on the 17^th September by White Eyes, Captain Pipe (Hopocan) and John Kill Buck (Gelelemend) for the Lenape, and Andrew Lewis and Thomas Lewis for the Americans. Witnesses to the treaty included Brigadier General Lachlan McIntosh, Colonel Daniel Brodhead and Colonel William Crawford.

Hopocan

Andrew Lewis

The Treaty recognised the Delewares as a sovereign nation and guaranteed their territorial rights. It has been suggested (surprise, surprise) that the authors of the treaty were knowingly dishonest and deceitful. The treaty gave the United States permission to travel through Delaware territory and called for the Delawares to afford American troops whatever aid they might require in their war against Britain, including the use of their own warriors. The United States was planning to attack the British fort at Detroit, and Lenape friendship was essential for success. In exchange, the United States promised "articles of clothing, utensils and implements of war", and to build a fort in Delaware country "for the better security of the old men, women and children ... whilst their warriors are engaged against the common enemy." Although not part of the written treaty, the commissioners pointed out the American alliance with France and intended that the Delaware would become active allies in the war against the British.

McIntosh

Crawford

Within a year the Delaware Indians were expressing grievances about the treaty. A delegation of Delawares visited Philadelphia in 1779 to explain their dissatisfaction to the Continental Congress, but nothing changed and peace between the United States and the Delaware Indians collapsed. White Eyes, the tribe's most outspoken ally of the United States, was murdered by frontiersmen, and soon afterwards the Delawares joined the British in the war against the United States. So much for the United States’s first formal treaty.

What makes this so appalling, in my view, is that nine years later, on the 17^th September 1787, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania formally adopted the Constitution of the United States, which begins “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The Treaty of Fort Pitt was clearly an inauspicious beginning for the establishment of Justice, ensuring domestic tranquillity, providing a common defence, promoting welfare and securing the blessings of liberty.