1700-1860: learning resources

The making of an American myth: Benjamin West, Penn's Treaty with the Indians

Key points

• Benjamin West’s Penn’s Treaty with the Indians illustrates a popular legend about the founding of Pennsylvania Colony. In this story, although he had been granted the rights to the land by King Charles II, Penn followed Quaker ideals and met peacefully in 1682 to trade with the leaders of the local Lenni Lenape peoples.
• This painting mythologizes the relationship between colonizers and local Native peoples. Painted about 100 years later, it was intended to establish the moral and ethical claims to this territory by illustrating the mutual benefits of this exchange of gifts for land. The painting was also meant to bolster the reputation of Thomas Penn, who had been less fair in the fraudulent Walking Purchase of 1737, and whose king-like authority made him unpopular in the Revolutionary War era.

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Thomas Cole, The Oxbow

From quills to beads: the bandolier bag

Key points

• Referred to as the Delaware by European colonizers, the Lenni Lenape were one of the first Native North American groups to have contact with Europeans in the early 1500s. Originally residing along the Delaware and Hudson River valleys, by the time this Bandolier Bag was made in the 19th century, they had been relocated: first into Pennsylvania and the Ohio River valley before moving again to reservations in Kansas and Oklahoma.
• Bandolier bags were made by different Native American nations. Early versions were buckskin that was decorated with quillwork, but later forms were made with imported calico and glass beads. With calico coming from England or India, and beads and tinklers manufactured in Europe, these bags were part of 19th-century global trade networks.
• Bandolier bags were dynamic in their design. The beaded motifs are both geometric and organic, one of many dualities suggested in their balance of positive and negative space. Made by women and worn by men, the bags would have produced sound and reflected light as they moved with the wearer.

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Picturing Spanish conquest in an era of U.S. expansion

Key points

• Painted in 1851, Rothermel’s De Soto Raising the Cross reveals more about mid-19th century politics than about Spanish conquests of the 16th century. Proposed for the U.S. Capitol rotunda as part of a series depicting America’s history before the Revolutionary War, this painting presents a sanitized and deeply racist narrative of progress and civilization.
• Completed shortly after the Mexican-American War and the annexation of vast amounts of territory by the United States, Rothermel positions De Soto’s campaign as a historical prototype for American westward expansion.
• The subject of this painting, Hernando de Soto, led the first European expedition in the present-day United States from 1539-42. Although Rothermel suggests a peaceful transformation, de Soto’s military conquest devastated the Mississippian network of Native American towns, cities, and communities. This painting creates an American mythology rather than depicting historical fact.

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Blythe, Justice

Key Points

• The rise of immigration in the mid-nineteenth century led to an anti-immigration backlash and the political party, the Know-Nothings. This group engaged in violent acts of intimidation and suppression and their membership included prominent politicians and community leaders.
• Although the artist, David Gilmour Blythe, had anti-immigrant sympathies, he also distrusted the judiciary and the press. It is difficult to decipher his position in this painting. His courtroom is dark and shadowy, his immigrants are unidealized, his judge seems aloof and biased. There is a sense of uneasiness and vulnerability, but little indication that justice will prevail.

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