A Cunning Man's Legacy: The Papers of Samuel Wallis (1736–1798)

Abstract

ONE SEARCHES FOR AN ADEQUATE identification of Samuel Wallis: birthright Quaker, aspiring merchant, bankrupt, debt collector, agent, partner, surveyor, pioneer settler on the Pennsylvania frontier, land speculator, unyielding combatant, spy, con-spirator, lay judge. All of these labels are at least partially accurate, but none of them completely captures a complicated and elusive figure whose contemporaries found him a puzzling personality, even as they repeatedly turned to him for help. Robert Morris, lodged in debtors' prison at the time of Wallis's death in 1798, condemned him for malice and duplicity, as also, in more guarded terms, did John Battin, Wallis's upstate Pennsylvania neighbor and fellow Quaker, who had written to Wallis two years earlier, during a controversy pending between them about title to land: "I acknowledge thou art a very Cunning man, but I believe thee will find thee has been too Cunning for thy Self in these matters."
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