Dangerous Spirits: How the Indian Critique of Alcohol Shaped Eighteenth-Century Quaker Revivalism

Abstract

‘‘Dangerous Spirits’’ argues that Papunhank, a Munsee religious leader from Wyalusing, shaped Pennsylvania Quaker reform through his critiques of the colonial-Indian alcohol trade. Papunhank allied himself with Quakers during the era of Pontiac’s War, a time when racial animosities in the region, stoked by years of frontier warfare, threatened to pull Indians and colonists farther apart. Papunhank and Quakers found common ground in the experience of religious revivalism and the language of sobriety. The relationship also helped Quaker reformers develop a powerful moral critique of colonialism. Papunhank’s influence on Quakerism challenges the scholarly tendency to emphasize the Euro-American Christian influence on Indians, and not the other way around.