Separate Paths

Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). In the 1670s, Quaker men and women sought to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Through epidemics that ravaged Lenape communities and the introduction of slavery to the colony, Quakers defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict and equality of everyone before God. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers, and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey.