My theme for this week of Advent is "Striving to find unity and peace with all the people of the world".
One way I love to do that is by learning about the traditions and beliefs of people throughout the world. In years past I've studied Germany and Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Italy, and Mexico.
This year I decided to continue my research into the Native Americans who lived where my ancestors settled in this land, particularly the Lenape, who lived in East New Jersey - home of the Slocum family as early as 1670, ancestors of my mother's mother's mother, Mary Ellen Slocum Lambert.
Agenda:
1. Write about my ancestors
2. Write about the Lenape people
3. Write about slavery in East Jersey
4. Celebrate a Quaker Christmas?
1. Write about my ancestors:
I have enjoyed studying my ancestry over the years, but I'm well aware of the inherent white privilege of this study. I continue to ask myself the question, "Are there ways for white people to act as anti-racist allies while exploring our own white ancestry?"
I know that I had ancestors who participated in settler colonialism, deliberately replacing native peoples with new settlers. I also know many of my ancestors benefited from the Homestead Act, in which the U.S. government transferred to them the land stolen from indigenous peoples. And some of my ancestors owned slaves.
I intend to find out whose traditional territory my ancestors took, learn more about the people, history, and contemporary concerns of these indigenous communities, and share that information with my family, because this is one way I can dismantle the systems of racism.
The Slocums and other families mentioned here are all ancestors of my great-grandmother, Mary Ellen Slocum Lambert.
My ancestor Giles Slocombe was born in Old Cleeve, England, in 1623. He married Joanna Cook when he was 18, and had his first child a year later, in England. Giles and Joanna emigrated to New England sometime before 1648, probably because they had radical religious beliefs.
Upon immigration, Giles changed his name to Slocum. Giles and Joanna first went to Taunton, in Plymouth Colony, then removed to the town of Portsmouth, Rhode Island; there, Giles purchased 30 acres of land, for which he paid £3. Giles and Joanna acquired land over the next 40 years in Portsmouth, Taunton, and Dartmouth; Giles was a very energetic and prosperous man, and he possessed the characteristic English desire for a large landed estate.
Giles and Joanna had a son, Nathaniel, born in Portsmouth on October 25, 1652.
Giles and Joanna were members of the First Baptist Church of Newport, Rhode Island, for over 20 years, until October 1673, when they were excommunicated, because they had joined the Quakers. (That was a period of political turmoil in Rhode Island, when Baptists and Quakers were at odds). Later it was recorded that Giles figured prominently as “a Quaker, loyal to his beliefs even under duress.”
Son Nathaniel Slocum moved to Shrewsbury Township, East New Jersey, before 1679, where his older brother John Slocum lived. Nathaniel was a young man, and unmarried. He purchased lands at Portipeck Neck, in September, 1680 (a name taken from the Lenape word putpeka, “deep still water or bay”, and which is now a neighborhood in Oceanport, New Jersey. Several other grants of land were made to "Nathaniel Slocum, planter of Srewsbury", including one of 163 acres "on the Long Branch Neck" on January 22, 1687. These grants, with his other acquisitions, made him a large landed estate.
Nathaniel and his brother John started a large family of Slocums, some of whom still live in Monmouth County, East Jersey.
2. Write about the Lenape people:
The Indians who inhabited New Jersey when Europeans came called their country Scheyechbi and themselves Lenni-Lenape, meaning "Original People." (The Colonists called them the "Delaware," because most of them lived along the river named the Delaware by the English, in honor of Sir Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, the governor of Virginia.)
The Lenni-Lenape belong to the general group of Algonkian Indians in northeastern United States and eastern Canada. The Lenape may have come originally from southern Canada, but arrived in New Jersey a few centuries before the first Europeans. Possibly there were 10,000 Lenape in New Jersey when European colonization began.
The Lenape were seasonal dwellers; during the proper seasons they camped near their favorite hunting and fishing grounds, and quarries. The entire State was honeycombed with well-defined trails to these places, and connecting the larger villages. (Since Colonial roads largely followed the earlier trails, it is possible to trace many of these today.)
Although the Lenape were known as relatively peaceful tribes who were sometimes called upon by other tribes to mediate or judge disputes, they nonetheless occasionally resorted to violence. The Dutch fought two limited wars again the Lenape in the land that would become New Jersey: the Governor Kieft’s War (1643 to 1645) and the Peach Tree War in 1655. Although the Dutch were primarily interested in trade with the Lenape, they soon began to establish patroonships on Native lands and attempted to assess taxes on them in return for protecting them from the hostile Mohawk and Mohegans to the north. The Lenape resented the tax since they claimed that they had never sought protection.
The Monmouth Patent
On April 8, 1665, the English deputy-governor of New Amsterdam, Colonel Richard Nicolls, granted 12 white men, mostly Quakers from Long Island, the “patents” for a triangular parcel of land called the Monmouth Patent, which would later become Monmouth County, New Jersey. Before issuing the patent, Governor Nicolls asked to hear personally from the Lenape sachems that this was an amenable arrangement and that they had been paid in full. Accordingly, a group of the would-be patentees and sachems went to New York City to meet with the governor. After receiving the assurances he desired, Governor Nicolls was prepared to grant the patent.
From an article in "This Day in Monmouth County History":
The official position of the tribe today is: Our ancestors were asked to sign treaties giving up the land, but they had no idea that they were actually selling land any more than you would think someone could sell air. The belief was that all land was put here by the Creator for use by his children, and that you should not be stingy with it. The Lenape of those days thought they were granting the Europeans the use of the land for a while. They in turn received gifts for the use of the land, like rent. Only later did they come to understand the European concept of private land ownership.
Did the English know that the Lenape approached the deal with a fundamentally different understanding of the terms of the contract? In other words, did Nicolls et al. ... deal in bad faith?
The answer is complicated. While native tribes typically did not recognize individual ownership of land, the concept of individual property ownership rights had existed for millennia. For example, horses belonged to one tribe member only and were often a sign of status. Blankets, knives, and even slaves were considered exclusive personal property of native tribe members at this time.
The English at that time looked upon the Indians as pagan savages, a lower class of humans, who were perceived, inaccurately, as not developing or improving the land. One of the chroniclers of the Plymouth Plantation settlement said that “it is lawful now to take a land which none useth and make use of it.” And the other sentiment that proved to be especially insidious over time was expressed by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1628: “If we leave them [enough land] sufficient for their use, we may lawfully take the rest, there being more then [sic] enough for them and for us.”
In 1665, the Lenape dominated the land of East Jersey, despite the Swedes and Finns along the river, the Dutch and English town of New Castle, and the Quaker villages of Middletown and Shrewsbury closer to the shore. During the first few years of settlement many small sloops shuttled back and forth from Gravesend, Newport and elsewhere bringing colonists and household goods. The incomers selected lots, cleared land, and erected log houses. As many as eighty families arrived in the first year. Purchasers at Middletown and Shrewsbury paid £3 or £4 for 120 acres, with additional increments allowed for wives and children, and 60 acres for each servant.
A Slocum Family Legend
Back to the Slocum family: In 1665, my ancestor Nathaniel lived in Rhode Island, with his parents, being only 13 years old. But his older bother, John Slocum, was among those early settlers of East Jersey, in the Shrewsbury area. A Slocum family legend (also cited in the 1940 Long Branch city-bio book, Entertaining a Nation) tells of a wrestling contest between Nathaniel’s brother, John, and a Lenape of East New Jersey.
In May, 1668, five associates of the Monmouth Patent, including John Slocum, sought to resolve a land acquisition dispute, and apparently chose John because he was "of large size and very athletic". Starting at dawn at a spot near today’s North Broadway in Long Branch, Slocum engaged in a “two falls out of three” wrestling match with Lenape tribe member Vow-a-Vapon. Under the terms, if Slocum won he could buy all the land that he could walk around in a day's time. If he lost the group left with nothing.
According to the legend, Vow-a-Vapon greased his limbs with goose grease, but Slocum easily won the match. Slocum got that part of Long Branch territory extending from the sea to Turtle Mill Brook and embracing all lands north of the main road from the sea to Eatontown and between these points to the South Shrewsbury River, excepting Fresh Pond and Snag Swamp. It is stated that he built his cabin on the part of Long Branch known as Parker's Neck, where the Metropolitan, Coopers, and Atlantic hotels stood in the 1860's (the area of East Jersey shore once known as the “Brighton of America”), and he included in his favorite territory Slocum's Island in Pleasure Bay.
The Lenape today
The most devastating blow to the Lenape population came through the rapid spread of contagious disease, particularly smallpox. As their numbers fell, the remaining Lenape gradually developed accommodations with the new white settlers over land claims, and attempted to create trading relationships to maintain their traditional pursuit of trapping.
In 1758, at the urging of the Reverend John Brainerd, a minister and missionary who had established a school for Lenape children and sought to convert them to Christianity, New Jersey became the first colony to establish an Indian reservation at Brotherton in Burlington County, but there were only a few hundred Indians remaining and only 200 came to live at the reservation. Brainerd organized the reservation and helped the residents to set up grist and sawmills, which led to naming of the nearby village as Indian Mills.
The first treaty that was signed by the United States government, after its Declaration of Independence, was with the Lenni-Lenape in 1778 during the Revolutionary War. The revolutionary government promised that if the Lenape helped their fight against the British, they would be given statehood in the future... a promise that was not kept. (By the time of the American Revolution, the numbers of Lenape in New Jersey fell from 10,000 to fewer than 60.)
The Lenape (of New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere) were increasingly pushed westward in the 18th century by the military alliance of the British and the Iroquois Six Nations. A turning point in this history was the defeat of an intertribal coalition that included the Delaware and Shawnee, among others, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1796 (in Ohio, Northwest Territory). After Fallen Timbers, the largest group of the Delaware were settled in Indiana, and from there were dispersed into northeastern Kansas, where they remained in the first half of the 19th century. In 1866, the federal government relocated most of the Kansas group in the Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma Territory), leaving a tiny contingent in Kansas that had agreed to give up its Delaware membership.
In 1979, the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs revoked the tribal status of the Lenape living among Cherokee in Oklahoma. They began to count the Lenape as Cherokee. The Lenape had this decision overturned in 1996, when they were recognized by the federal government as a separate tribal nation.
Today, Lenape communities are found in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Ontario, and New Jersey. Since 1982, New Jersey has officially recognized the state’s Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribe, and its hometown of Bridgeton is called “Indian Town.”
The Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribe established a tribally governed 501(c)3 non-profit community benefit agency, "The Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Indians of New Jersey," which is chartered exclusively for educational, social, and cultural purposes, to promote the welfare of Native Americans who reside in the Delaware Valley; to extend charity in all forms to those Native Americans in need, giving priority to Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Indians residing in the Delaware Valley; to establish cultural and instructional facilities; to improve health and welfare, housing, human rights, and economic security; to acquire and preserve land and water areas in a natural scenic or open condition consistent with the heritage of the Native Americans who reside in the Delaware Valley.
3. Write about slavery in New Jersey:
The article in "This Day in Monmouth County History" also has a discussion of how the Monmouth Patent of 1665 essentially established slavery as the basis for economic development of the region of New Jersey.
The [patent] document also required settlers to maintain “an able Man servant or two such weaker Servants,” and additional acres were granted to settlers with more servants. The government’s intent was to develop the land, not merely transfer title. Servants were needed to help build homes, clear land, cut wood, plant and harvest crops, tend livestock, forage for food, and so on.
Finding white Europeans to fill these servant roles was considered all but impossible. ... colonists early on advertised in Europe for workers, but often found that indentured servants ran away before the end of their contracts. ... And, indentured servant contracts of that era were typically a commitment of about 6-7 years, while slaves were bonded laborers for life. Some Indians were enslaved, but over time, Black Africans were increasingly violently exploited as the main labor force in a practice of enslavement that continued in Monmouth County for 200 years.
The Monmouth Patent reveals the conflicting values of colonial settlers seeking a better life, and these early residents have been celebrated ever since as our area’s founding fathers. Less well appreciated is the human price paid by others, specifically by Blacks and Indians, whose forced sacrifices were crucial to the success of the new settlement.
According to the wills I've read, at least some of my Quaker ancestors in New Jersey were slave owners. Nathaniel's son John Slocum's will was proved December 10, 1736, in Shrewsbury. His inventory was listed at £299.11.6, and included a “loom and tackling, white servant, £15, and negro boy, £40.” He left to his wife, Susannah (Hunter) Slocum “use of plantation; also negro Jo.”. It wasn't until 1776, when John Woolman spoke against slavery at Shrewsbury Meetinghouse, that New Jersey Friends agreed to not hold slaves.
4. Celebrate a Quaker Christmas?
In 1682 Nathaniel married Hannah Tucker, a Quaker of Dartmouth. Nathaniel and Hannah (Tucker) Slocum had two sons born in Shrewsbury Township who are both my ancestors - Samuel Slocum, born in 1682, and John Slocum, born in 1694. (The births of many of his children were recorded in the Meeting minutes.) Nathaniel was buried at the Friends Meeting House Burial Ground, Shrewsbury, New Jersey.
The predominant religious element in the early days of Shrewsbury was Quaker, and they established a meeting, which convened at various houses. Shrewsbury Meeting was New Jersey's first Friends Meeting and is New Jersey's oldest rural religious congregation. The first meetinghouse was built in 1672 and was visited that same year by George Fox, the founder of Quakerism.
From Quakers in Britain:
Early Quakers did not observe Christmas nor mark other 'times and seasons'. They believed that no day was more holy than any other, and believed that each day, and all of life, was sacred.
Today, as with so many things in the Quaker community, there is a full spectrum of practices and responses. There are those who do the full Christian event to mark the birth of Jesus with candles, carols, presents and Christmas pudding, and others who will observe simply and quietly. There are also those who will choose not to mark this Christmas season in any way, but who nonetheless give daily witness to their faith.
My own Earth-Quaker way of celebrating is to acknowledge and mark the changes of the season as they progress, throughout the year. The season of advent is when I celebrate the darkness, and the hope of returning light. I make a Christmas pudding and light it on fire, to salute the return of the light, and I bring as much attention to nature as I can, with decorations and traditions. My Christmas is simple in some ways, and abundant in others.
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