Interviewees:
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David Brigham
- President and CEO, Historical Society of Pennsylvania
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William Ewald
- John J. O’Brien Professor of Comparative and International Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School
The Lenni Lenape had lived in the Delaware Valley long before Penn's arrival, and his treaties had made Pennsylvania's early Native relations notably peaceful. By 1776, however, that peace was strained by decades of land loss. In December 1776, Chief White Eyes of the Delaware nation traveled to Philadelphia and addressed Congress, offering an alliance. Congress promised ten thousand dollars in goods and, remarkably, a sovereign Lenape state in Ohio with full representation in Congress. The Fort Pitt Treaty of 1778 formalized the alliance, and White Eyes's people fought alongside American forces in the Ohio country. The promises were never honored. White Eyes died in 1778 under suspicious circumstances, officially of smallpox but, his people believed, murdered by American militiamen. His speech survives in the papers of Jasper Yeates, one of the only direct addresses from a Native leader to the Continental Congress.
