Teedyuscung

(1700-1763)

Delaware chief

Teedyuscung (Teddyuscung) grew up in the "Forks of the Delaware" region, where the Lehigh River flows into the Delaware's main stream. As a young man he witnessed the conferences between Pennsylvania's Proprietaries and Delaware Indian landowners in which John and Thomas Penn swindled the Indians out of the so-called Walking Purchase lands in what is now Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Teedyuscung's Delaware parents were dispossessed in consequence, and when a Moravian colony settled on their former lands, they protested. The Moravians were at first willing to compensate the Indians, but then became fearful that an outright purchase would be at odds with the Penns' arrangements and draw down the powerful brothers' wrath.

Perhaps it was Moravian goodwill that made Teedyuscung a temporary convert (he even adopted a new name, "Gideon"), but he chafed under mission discipline and soon left. He emerged to historical notice when the Seven Years' War broke out. In 1755, an assembly of scattered Delaware bands—Teedyuscung called them "five nations"—resenting the degree of control the Iroquois League had over their affairs, chose Teedyuscung as their chief. At about the same time, they raided isolated European homesteaders, especially in the territories that had been taken by fraud.

Pennsylvania's pacifist Quakers were alarmed that the Indians had become hostile, and arranged a conference to placate them. At this time, Teedyuscung emerged into view as a tall, portly man with a commanding presence, who had by this time become addicted to rum, which he could consume in great quantities. The Quakers' intervention had angered William Johnson, who demanded exclusive management of all Indians as Royal Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department. Proprietary Thomas Penn was also angered, for fear that the fraudulent Walking Purchase deal might come to light as the cause of Delaware hostilities and prompt the British crown to revoke his charter of propriety.

The Quakers persisted in trying to negotiate peace with the Indians, against all the objections of Johnson and Penn. The two men then attempted to minimize the Delawares' grievances by asserting that Teedyuscung was merely a stupid drunk being used by the Quakers to smear Penn. If, in fact, there was any "using" going on, Teedyuscung was the perpetrator: he understood perfectly how valuable the Quakers were to his cause.

In April 1756, Iroquois chiefs tried to discipline the wavering Delawares but were rebuffed by Pennsylvania Indians' new spirit of independence. Saving face, they formally recognized Teedyuscung's position of leadership and authorized him to negotiate with Pennsylvania for his own people. Pennsylvania's provincial council accepted the chief in that capacity also, pairing him with the Seneca leader Newcastle to represent the Iroquois. At this point historical records become deliberately misleading, with Penn's partisans alleging that Teedyuscung, upon Newcastle's death, put himself forward as "king" of the Iroquois—a death sentence for the Delaware chief, had it been true. In fact, Teedyuscung was careful to consult regularly with the Iroquois chiefs.

Meanwhile, Johnson, now Sir William Johnson, a baronet, tried in June to shunt Teedyuscung aside by "recognizing" a feeble old man named Nutmus as Delaware "king," but the Delawares would have none of it.

In November, Quaker leaders forced the provincial governor to confer with Teedyuscung at Easton, Pennsylvania, where Teedyuscung blurted out that "this very land has been taken from me [i.e., the Delawares] by fraud." Thus the secret of the Walking Purchase was exposed; thereafter it became a hot issue in provincial politics. Opponents of Thomas Penn blamed his policies as the cause of Indian attacks. His defenders tried to discredit Teedyuscung. Meanwhile, Teedyuscung explored options. He looked in on the French commander Captain Pierre Pouchot at Niagara but discovered few available resources of arms and food, so he turned back to the English, whose promises to redress grievances prompted him to make peace with them on behalf of the eastern Delawares.

Despite Teedyuscung's reconciliation, the Delawares of the "Ohio country" remained fiercely on the warpath. French officers at Fort Duquesne, at the forks of the Ohio River, incessantly instigated raids by these western kinsmen, and Teedyuscung, sensing disaster, attempted to mediate. If successful, he would have become a very great chief indeed. But his wampum belts inviting the Ohio group to counsel were diverted by pro-French Senecas, and the western Delawares remained hostile. When the western group sent delegates Pisquetomen and Keekyuscung to Teedyuscung in 1758, they were met, by coincidence, by two emissaries from Philadelphia, Frederick Post and Charles Thomson. Post and Thomson persuaded the diplomats to come to Philadelphia directly and begin peace negotiations without Teedyuscung.

There the provincial governor and secretary gave a peace message to the Ohio visitors, Pisquetomen and Keekyuscung, who were well known to the secretary, Richard Peters. Post returned west with them as a sort of validation for the message, Peters having blocked Teedyuscung's efforts to insert himself into the proceedings. The upshot was a great treaty signed at Easton in 1758, whereby the previously hostile Delawares agreed to abandon their French sympathies in return for a promise of a firm boundary between Indians and Englishmen. The French, thus abandoned, withdrew from Fort Duquesne and burned it, but the English boundary promise was not kept.

In 1762, Sir William Johnson negotiated with Teedyuscung about the Walking Purchase. After much disputation, Johnson talked to the chief "in the bushes"—away from the scribes. In return for a cash compensation, paid by Thomas Penn, Teedyuscung would withdraw his charge of fraud, and Penn would keep his province. (Ironically, Benjamin Franklin had first proposed this cash purchase six years earlier.) Teedyuscung also extracted a promise for houses to be built for his people in the Wyoming Valley of the Susquehanna River's north branch, and Quaker builders fulfilled that promise. Unfortunately, this agreement was also short-lived. The Susquehannah Company of Connecticut claimed the land, and Teedyuscung died when unknown persons set fire to his cabin less than a year after it had been built.

See also Delaware; Iroquois Confederacy.

Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988); Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700-1763 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949).

Francis Jennings
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill