A Treaty of Almosts: White Eyes, Indigenous Slavery, and the Articles of Nationhood in the Delaware Treaty of 1778

In the fall of 1778, a faction of the Delaware, the Lenape nation, represented by Koquethagechton (White Eyes), Gelemend (John Killbuck, Jr.), and Konieschquanoheel or Hopocan (Captain Pipe), met with diplomats on behalf of the newly formed United States Continental Congress to negotiate the first peace treaty between an Indian nation and the United States. Due in part to the death of Capt. White Eyes—killed by American militia, though the exact cause of his death continues to be speculated on—the treaty was never presented to Congress and thus never fulfilled. The articles that lie inside its pages, specifically their conditions related to the slave economy, leave traces of intricate international relations, a burgeoning national identity, and a flourishing slave-based economy that ensnared Indigenous peoples in its pursuits for capital.

This poster will present what details are known about White Eyes’s life, including those insights provided by Moravian Missionary David Zeisberger to depict the dynamic relationships between Indigenous nations. It will illustrate the Delaware and surrounding regions as both belonging to Indigenous nations and being claimed by British and French colonists to explore the grounds for Article 5’s allowance for Indian nationhood. Moreover, it will investigate the slave trade as it pertains to White Eyes's role as an Indian trader and the context as well as conditions for Article 4 of the Delaware Treaty. Through this combination of biographical narrative, textual analysis, and economics-based historical analysis, this poster will illustrate the link between conditions for nationhood and the slave trade, particularly the Indian slave trade, in the context of diplomatic negotiations.

Taken together, Articles 4 and 5 of this treaty attempt to deal with issues of sovereignty and economics for the sake of peacemaking, teeing up both matters for the later events of a civil war, rather than a revolutionary one. While the Delaware Treaty is a matter of American and Indian relations, rather than that of a divided American North and South, it provides a lens, through the lives of individuals like White Eyes, to better understand the Indian slave trade, American diplomacy, and issues of tribal sovereignty today.