[Americana] [French and Indian War] Manuscript Document, signed

Manuscript Document, signed
Newtown (Newton), (New Jersey), November 16, 1757. Single sheet, 9 1/4 x 7 1/2 in. (235 x 190 mm). One-page manuscript document, attesting that Isaac Titsoort was sent in December 1755 to “parley or Hold a Treaty with the Indians” and “Hath never returned & By Report was near about that Time killed”. Signed by Sussex County residents Henry Simson, Joseph Byram, John Anderson, Thomas Woolverton, and Joseph Parry, on behalf of Titsoort's estate and widow, and suggesting their eldest son be appointed heir and estate administrator. Creasing from contemporary folds, small separations along same at edges.

At the height of the French and Indian War and two years after British General Edward Braddock's disastrous defeat at the Battle of Monongahela, tensions between the Delaware Valley’s Native American tribes and British colonists in the frontier regions of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York had erupted into violence. At the end of November 1755, the threat that these tribes would invade New Jersey led New Jersey Governor Jonathan Belcher to deploy 250 New Jersey militia to the Pennsylvania border to form a defensive barrier and patrol the region against raids. In May 1756, native tribes sent several raiding parties across the Delaware River into Sussex County killing and capturing settlers, and in June, New Jersey, for the first and only time in its history, made a declaration of war, against the Lenni Lenape.

Many of the troops sent to defend the border served under Colonel Abraham van Campen (1698-1767) and Colonel Jacob Ford (1704-77), including Isaac Titsoort (1690-1757), to whom this document relates. A resident of Sussex County, New Jersey, Titsoort had evidently traveled with Van Campen and Ford to the “front tears” in an attempt to negotiate a treaty with Native Americans in Pennsylvania, but had never returned. He was presumed to have been killed. This document, signed by several prominent members of Sussex County, advocates on behalf of Titsoort's bereaved widow, and suggests that Titsoort's son, Lenard Titsoort (1721-1801), be appointed heir and administrator of his father's estate.

Violence along the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border would increase over the next year, only subsiding after the signing of the Treaty of Easton, in October 1758, when New Jersey officially made peace with the region's surrounding native tribes. In exchange for hunting grounds in the Ohio River Valley and financial compensation, native tribes pledged to cease attacks on English settlements and surrendered all claims to New Jersey land.

Another copy of this document, addressed “Your Honor”, appears in the Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey (First Series, Vol. XXXII, p. 326).