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Show 9 Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, Vol. 2 ([1902] pp. 184-189), told that story, then continued: Many people suppose that Penn's conduct, in paying the Indians for the land which he occupied, was without precedent. There could not be a greater mistake. The Dutch settlers of New Netherland were careful to pay for every tract of land which they took, and New York writers sometimes allude to this practice in terms which imply that it was highly exceptional. But similar purchases by the Puritan settlers of New England occurred repeatedly. In the time of King Philip's war, Josiah Winslow, governor of Plymouth, said, in a report to the Federal Commissioners: 'I think I can clearly say that, before these present troubles broke out, the English did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indians.' So the lands of the Providence plantation were bought from Canonicus by Roger Williams; the island of Aquedneck was duly paid for by Hutchinson and Coddington; and Samuel Gorton obtained Shawomet by fair purchase. The first settlers of Boston found in that neighbourhood a solitary survivor of an Algonquin tribe extirpated by the recent pestilence, and they made a payment for the land to him. An Indian village at Beverly was afterward bought from its tawny occupants for £6 6s. 8d., equivalent to about $158, which was more than Minuit paid for Manhattan. In 1638 Davenport's company bought their New Haven lands for '12 coats of English cloth, 12 metal spoons, 12 hoes, 12 hatchets, 12 porringers, 24 knives, and 4 cases of French knives and scissors'; and in 1666 the pilgrims from the New Haven republic paid for the site of Newark in '50 double hands of powder, 100 bars of lead; of axes, coats, pistols, and hoes, 20 each; of guns, kettles, and swords, 10 each; 4 blankets, 4 barrels of beer, 50 knives, 850 fathoms of wampum, 2 anchors of liquor, and 3 trooper's coats.' So in 1610 Captain West bought the site of Richmond, in Virginia, from the Powhatan; in 1634 Leonard Calvert bought the Algonquin village on St. Mary's River; and in 1638 the Swedish set-lers paid for their land on the Delaware. It appears, therefore, that the custom of paying the Indians a price for their lands was not peculiar to Quakers, or to Quakers and Dutch. On the contrary, the European settlers on the Atlantic seaboard of the United States seem all to have entertained similar ideas on this matter. Felix S. Cohen's article "Original Indian Title," included in the book The Legal Conscience. Selected Papers of Felix S. Cohen |