Editor’s Letter

This April 3 marks the 75th anniversary of President Harry S. Truman’s signing of the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan. Pennsylvania native and former Army chief of staff George C. Marshall, Truman’s secretary of state, first articulated the need to rehabilitate the economic structure of Europe following the devastation of World War II in a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. He explained that “there can be no political stability and no assured peace” without “friendly aid” from the U.S. in drafting and supporting a program for Europe’s economic recovery. “Its purpose,” he said, “should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” In this edition, we commemorate the Marshall Plan with a feature article, “The Making of a Leader,” in which regular contributor Don Sarvey recounts Marshall’s Pennsylvania origins in Uniontown, his career in strategic military planning that led to success in two World Wars, and his role in promoting the postwar plan that would invigorate European economies and reactivate international trade.

The other two features in this issue are linked by the theme of war in Pennsylvania and its impact on the diverse people who lived here in their respective eras. The 36-volume diary that Elizabeth Drinker kept between 1758 and 1807 has served as a primary source of information on many aspects of daily living in 18th-century Philadelphia and is especially noted for its details of life in the city during the American Revolutionary War. As Quaker pacifists, Drinker and her husband Henry refused to take sides during the war and were subsequently regarded as loyalists by the shadow committees of safety reporting to the new Continental government. In “Elizabeth Drinker and the Quaker Exile,” Pennsylvania Military Museum curator Jennifer Eaton highlights extracts from Drinker’s diary, as well as her surviving correspondence, to describe the experience of a neutral woman when the Revolution arrives on her doorstep and threatens the security of her family.

Nearly 75 years of peace existed in Pennsylvania from its Quaker founding until the outbreak of a land dispute between France and Britain in 1754 over control of the area where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio River (now Pittsburgh), the center of an important commercial route. When tensions mounted and war erupted, both sides, each supported by various Native American nations, began to erect defensive forts across the colony’s frontier. Through time, the forts themselves deteriorated into the earth, including Fort Halifax, a temporary supply post built along the Susquehanna River by the 3rd Battalion of Pennsylvania Provincials (the Augusta Regiment) as they were preparing to construct the larger Fort Augusta further north at the forks of the river. In “Lost and Found: The Rediscovery of Colonial Fort Halifax,” archaeologist Joe Baker describes the two worlds of the regiment and the Native Americans who lived in close proximity to the fort. He then moves forward in time to give a first-hand account of the 2021 excavation at Fort Halifax Park that yielded the first definitive evidence of the fort’s defensive works in addition to numerous artifacts that give us clues about the lives of the people in and around the outpost during the conflict.

Kyle R. Weaver
Editor