Definition
Seawan (also spelled seawant, sewant, or sewan) refers to the shell beads used by Algonquin and other northeastern North American Indian peoples as a medium of exchange. The term denotes what is more commonly known as wampum — small, polished cylindrical beads worked from shell, strung or woven together and circulated as currency in trade between Native peoples, and extensively between Native peoples and European colonists throughout the seventeenth century. In colonial legal and commercial contexts, seawan functioned as recognized currency, accepted in settlement of debts and sanctioned by colonial statute in several jurisdictions during periods when hard money was scarce.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Wampum; small beads made from polished shells.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Shell beads used by North American Indians as currency; wampum.
The common and legal meanings here are closely aligned, but the legal significance goes beyond the object itself. In colonial-era law, seawan was not merely decorative or ceremonial — it was a legally recognized medium of exchange, subject to statutory regulation, set exchange rates, and at times tender in satisfaction of debts. The gap between the common understanding (decorative beads) and the legal understanding (currency with regulated value) is the essential distinction a researcher must keep in mind.
Why It Matters in Research
Seawan is a term of almost exclusively historical legal significance. Its appearance in legal sources is concentrated in colonial North American records, particularly those of New Netherland (Dutch colonial New York), New England colonies, and later English colonial administration in the mid-Atlantic region during roughly 1620–1700.
Researchers working in colonial land transactions, probate records, debt instruments, and trade agreements may encounter seawan or its variant spellings as a unit of value or a specified medium of payment. Colonial statutes in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Netherland, and New York at various points fixed the legal exchange rate between seawan and English currency, regulated the quality of acceptable beads (distinguishing between more valuable dark or purple beads worked from quahog shell and lesser white beads from whelk), and sometimes voided tender in seawan altogether as the supply of hard money increased.
Spelling variation is a significant trap. Early modern documents render this term inconsistently: seawan, seawant, sewant, sewan, siwan, and zeewant (Dutch) all appear. A researcher using a narrow search string will miss relevant documents. The Dutch zeewant is especially important for New Netherland records held in the New York State Archives and comparable repositories.
The term also intersects with the legal history of Native property rights, treaty negotiation, and colonial-era contract law. Payment in seawan appears in early land deeds between colonists and Native sellers — documents whose legal validity and interpretation have been the subject of significant historical and legal scholarship. Understanding seawan as currency rather than as mere artifact changes how those instruments must be read.
Black's Law Dictionary includes seawan primarily as a definitional gloss, not as a developed legal concept. Its brief entries signal that the term was considered sufficiently technical to warrant inclusion but was already receding from active legal use by the time major American legal dictionaries were compiled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary carry identical entries: "The name used by the Algonquin Indians for the shell beads (or wampum) which passed among the Indians as money," citing Webster. The entries are brief and purely definitional, contributing no analysis of the legal contexts in which seawan operated. Neither edition addresses statutory regulation, exchange rates, or the term's significance in colonial debt and property law.
The reliance on Webster rather than on colonial legal sources reflects the marginal status of seawan in late-nineteenth-century American legal practice. By that point the term was a historical curiosity rather than a live legal concept. This means that the historical dictionaries, while accurate as far as they go, are inadequate guides to seawan's actual legal life in the colonial period. Researchers should not treat the Black's entry as a sufficient account of the term's legal operation.
No significant divergence exists between the two Black's editions on this term — the second edition reproduces the first without revision.
Jurisdictional Note
Seawan's legal significance was geographically concentrated in the northeastern colonies: New Netherland (present-day New York and New Jersey), Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Dutch colonial records are particularly rich in seawan-related legal material. By the early eighteenth century, seawan had effectively ceased to function as legal tender in colonial law, and the term disappears from statutory and judicial sources accordingly.