The Delaware Interregnum
WHEN William Penn landed at Philadelphia, the Delaware Indians lived in a loose confederation of villages scattered over New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania. The impact of European settlement sundered them geographically, reduced them numerically, and demoralized them culturally. Their role in historical events has usually been described as more or less passive, until it altered with dramatic suddenness in the French and Indian War. There is reason to believe, however, that the Delawares were not so much passive as suppressed, and that their eruption in 1755 was not a sudden thing, though its dramatic qualities made it seem so; rather, the Delaware warfare against Pennsylvania was something that had been in the making, gradually acquiring force and implacability, for decades. To visualize this development requires close attention to certain seemingly innocent and sometimes tedious details. One community of the Delawares had a special relationship with the government of Pennsylvania. This was the community living on the upper Schuylkill River, to whom the name "Unami" was later applied. William Penn had treated with one of their chiefs, the