Nicole Eustace. Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021. Illustrations. xiv + 447 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-63149-587-8.
Reviewed by Timothy Shannon (Gettysburg College)
Published on H-Early-America (February, 2023)
Commissioned by Patrick Luck (Florida Polytechnic University)
In February 1722, a Seneca Indian named Sawantaeny died after a violent confrontation with two Pennsylvania fur traders, brothers John and Edmund Cartlidge. Although several Native Americans and colonists witnessed the altercation, it occurred in a backcountry region far away from the colonial authorities who investigated the incident. Sawantaeny’s death threatened to disrupt Pennsylvania’s longstanding peace with not only the Native community at Conestoga in the lower Susquehanna Valley but also the much more populous and powerful Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) confederacy further north. The ensuing effort to get to the bottom of Sawantaeny’s death involved a wide range of Native and colonial actors who possessed divergent notions of how guilt and restitution should be determined.
Previous historians have written about Sawantaeny’s death, but Nicole Eustace is the first to give it a book-length treatment.[1] The result is more than just a finely detailed reconstruction of a colonial crime and its aftermath. As with any good microhistory, Eustace does not so much peel back the layers of an onion as build out from its core an ever-widening narrative about human relationships in a particular time and place. On the colonial side of this story, various Pennsylvanians tried to advance their own political and economic interests while extending the jurisdiction of their laws and authority over Native neighbors. On the indigenous side, leaders from Conestoga and the Iroquois confederacy insisted that the rupture caused by Sawantaeny’s death be repaired according to Native values and customs. This book’s value rests in Eustace’s careful explication of that impasse and two very different meanings of justice.
The facts of Sawantaeny’s death were fairly straightforward. The Cartlidges and their servants arrived at Sawantaeny’s home looking to trade. The parties drank rum together until an argument escalated and Sawantaeny grabbed his musket. Edmund Cartlidge wrestled the musket away and used it to crack Sawantaeny’s skull while John Cartlidge assaulted him with his fists. Sawantaeny’s wife, Weenepeeweytah, took her badly injured husband back inside their home, where he uttered, “My friends have killed me” (p. 57). The Cartlidges left the scene while Sawantaeny was still alive, but word of his death soon spread. To complicate matters, friends of the deceased buried the body before any kind of official inquiry got under way.
Eustace’s argument hinges on Sawantaeny’s last words. His description of the Cartlidges as his “friends” conveyed not only the social intimacy of this violence but also a host of other relationships connecting Native and colonial peoples in the lower Susquehanna Valley. British officials may have seen Sawantaeny’s death as an economic transaction fatally soured by excessive alcohol consumption, but to the Conestogas, trade was only one dimension of a broader, multidimensional relationship that knit them together with their colonial neighbors in mutual bonds of obligation and reciprocity. The fact that the Cartlidges were not strangers to Sawantaeny made all the difference: his death was a matter to be resolved by diplomacy rather than war. But for that to occur, colonial authorities needed to cover his grave properly by engaging in condolence ceremonies and gift giving with those who grieved his loss.
Unfortunately, the colonial Pennsylvanians did not comprehend this Native way of administering justice. Rather than assuaging grief, they were far more concerned with assigning culpability and meting out punishment. Acting in conjunction with his councilors, Pennsylvania governor Sir William Keith assured the Conestogas that justice would be served promptly and impartially according to the colony’s laws. Keith had the Cartlidges arrested and imprisoned in Philadelphia, while he and his subordinates launched their investigation. Despite his promises of impartiality, Keith in fact had a number of political and private interests already in the scales. John Cartlidge was a prominent figure and the governor shared business interests with him in acquiring land in the Conestoga region. Keith also had to deal with his Quaker opponents, who controlled the Pennsylvania Assembly and questioned his administration of Indian affairs. And while Pennsylvania had a long history of dealing peacefully with the Conestogas, relations with the Iroquois confederacy were more tenuous; mishandling this case could lead to warfare and disruption of trade along the mid-Atlantic borderlands.
Keith’s efforts to contain the fallout from Sawantaeny’s death led to a series of diplomatic encounters that illustrated Native and colonial methods of justice. Eustace uses the speeches of the Conestoga leader Taquatarensaly (also known as Captain Civility to the colonists) to explain the Native expectation of “restorative healing” rather than “punitive justice,” but Keith kept doubling down on his promises to have the Cartlidges executed if they were found guilty of murder (p. 12). Not actually wishing to see that come to pass, the governor massaged testimony from eyewitnesses to identify Sawantaeny as the instigator of the confrontation, thereby turning a potential capital case of murder into a more politically manageable one of manslaughter.
Eustace’s reconstruction of these events culminates not in Conestoga or Philadelphia but in Albany, where a Pennsylvania delegation traveled in the fall of 1722 to negotiate with the Iroquois at an intercolonial conference. It was here that Keith finally got it right, making a speech and giving the appropriate condolence presents to cover Sawantaeny’s grave. With the Iroquois and Conestogas at last placated, he freed the Cartlidges on the legal grounds that the body had never been recovered: “No corpse, no case” (p. 318).
What finally put this affair to rest, then, was not so much a mutual coming to terms over the meaning of justice as some intercultural realpolitik: Keith recognized Iroquois authority over the Native peoples of the lower Susquehanna Valley, and the Iroquois opened a new path of trade and diplomacy to Philadelphia. The Conestogas received their wish to have the Cartlidges released from prison, but their underlying desire to have Keith recognize them as autonomous neighbors deserving of mutual respect and reciprocity went unfulfilled, as evidenced by the governor’s negotiations with the Iroquois in Albany for land cessions in the Susquehanna Valley.
In this well-wrought tale, Eustace places much emphasis on Keith’s meeting with the Iroquois in Albany. In the opening and closing pages, she holds up this treaty as a model of intercultural cooperation, describing it as “the oldest continuously recognized treaty” in American history and law (pp. 3, 337). This is a curious designation that raises the question, “recognized by whom?” The Pennsylvanians’ treatment of the Conestogas only became more high-handed after 1722 and ended in the bloody violence of the Paxton Boys massacre in 1763. With no state or federal Indian reservations within its borders since American independence, the state of Pennsylvania maintains no treaty relationships with Native nations. Nor do colonial era treaties figure in modern federal jurisprudence. As Eustace notes, the 1722 Treaty of Albany was published and circulated among interested parties in Philadelphia and Britain, but as a literary and political text, it did not achieve the readership or reputation of more famous treaties from the colonial era, such as the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster and the 1758 Treaty of Easton.
The 1722 Treaty of Albany, while certainly significant in colonial Pennsylvania’s relations with the Iroquois confederacy, did not alter either side’s conception of justice. Eustace has illuminated indigenous and colonial worlds, but the twain do not meet. Keith may have finally delivered a culturally appropriate response to Sawantaeny’s death, but his actions did not reshape how either side thought about or did business with the other in the years that followed.
Note
[1]. See, for example, Paul Douglas Newman, “The ‘Four Nations of Indians Upon the Susquehanna’: Mid-Atlantic Murder, Diplomacy, and Political Identity, 1717-1723,” Pennsylvania History 88 (Spring 2021): 287-318; John Smolenski, “The Death of Sawantaeny and the Problem of Justice on the Frontier,” in Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania, ed. William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 104-28; and James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 115-27.
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Citation:
Timothy Shannon. Review of Eustace, Nicole, Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America.
H-Early-America, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2023.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58429
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