Patrick Spero - Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania

Frontier Country

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Series editors
Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

FRONTIER COUNTRY

THE POLITICS OF WAR IN EARLY PENNSYLVANIA

PATRICK SPERO

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4861-6

For my teachers, past and present

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Early American Frontiers

In January 1765, as Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were busy surveying the line that now bears their names, a morbid curiousity led Charles to stop his work and take a journey to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As he later recorded in his diary, it was the place where was perpetrated last winter, the horrid and inhumane murder of 26 Indians: men, women, and children, leaving none alive to tell. Mason had to see the site of this depravity to understand it.

The brutal event that drew Mason to Lancaster is now known as the Paxton Boys Rebellion. It began in December 1763 when a group of colonists living outside of Lancaster massacred their neighbors, the Conestoga Indians, who resided on a nearby manor reserved for them by the Pennsylvania government. A couple of weeks after their initial assault, the Paxton Boys raided a building in Lancaster that housed the few surviving Conestogas, killing all alive. The murderers became rebels when hundreds of supporters joined them in a seventy-mile trek through the rough winter to Philadelphia, the colonial capital, to defend the Paxton Boys actions and protest what they saw as the governments overly benevolent policy toward Native people. The march was likely the largest political mobilization in the history of colonial Pennsylvania.

Mason was surprised by what he found when he visited. Lancaster was not some lawless frontier outpost, but instead a bustling and vibrant inland port. Its location a few miles from the Susquehanna River, a central artery that in 1763 connected the vast interior of North America to the Atlantic, meant that the town was an important waypoint for the British Empire as it expanded west across the Appalachian Mountains. Lancaster was as large as most market towns in England, Mason noted in his diary before leaving. He was right; it was the largest inland town in colonial America.

During this brief but eventful trip to Pennsylvania, Mason encountered the twin problems that plagued the British Empire on its North American frontiers in the years before the American Revolution: establishing social harmony within the empire, especially between colonists and Native Americans, and creating borders between the polities that composed the empire. While Mason and Dixon were in the midst of marking a line between colonies, imperial officials were trying to create clearer boundaries between colonial settlements and Indians. Throughout the 1760s, officers of the British Empire hoped to stabilize relations with the Indians by granting them specific territories and by opening a brisk trade with Native allies. These imperial officials envisioned a porous borderan open road was the catchphrase of the timethat would maintain a lasting peace by incorporating Native peoples into the empire economically while also granting them some political autonomy.

The policies meant to integrate Indians into the British Empire, however, only added to colonists growing frustrations. The Paxton Boys epitomized this viewpoint. After living through the Seven Years War (1754 to 1763) and Pontiacs War (1763 to 1765), colonists who had experienced this decade of strife saw Indiansall Indians, even their Conestoga neighborsas enemies rather than friends with whom they wished to trade. They viewed imperial policies, traders, and a colonial governing elite as disconnected fromeven hostile totheir needs. Where imperial officials stationed in London or the eastern seaports aimed to incorporate Indians into Britains mercantile system and increasingly global trade, many colonists on the frontiers of the British Empire wanted to exclude Indians from the rights and privileges of the imperial system and shift political power away from the east and to the west.

The Paxton Boys massacre of the Conestogas and subsequent march on Philadelphia was the first in a series of frontier rebellions that aimed to challenge these imperial regulations in the decades before the American Revolution. A few months after Masons venture to Lancaster, another group of colonists calling themselves the Black Boys launched a raid on a British fort near Fort Pitt, one of the most audacious attacks on imperial authority in colonial America. Three years later, another mobilization occurred to defend Frederick Stump, a man arrested for murdering a group of Indians in an attack eerily reminiscent of the Paxton Boys.

These colonial protests against their government in the 1760s were just as important to the coming of the American Revolution as such better-known urban revolts as the Stamp Act protests and Boston Tea Party. But the cause of the western discontent was far different from that of easterners. More than a decade of living on the frontlines of war transformed the worldview of colonists on the edges of Great Britains North American Empire. During the Seven Years War, the countryside they inhabited, once renowned for its peace and prosperity, turned into what was increasingly called a frontier country, an important description they had not used previously. During and after the war, people in western regions that had been called the back parts or back counties before the fighting began to refer to themselves as a frontier people who lived in frontier counties. Many wrote about the traumatic process of becoming a frontier, an event marked by profound fear, utter desperation, and an abiding hatred for those that caused these feelings. These self-described frontier people were civilians who had turned into unwilling combatants, and they looked to their government for the military protection they believed they deserved. When the government failed them, they looked to themselves and their neighbors for security. The perception of being a people ignored by their governments lingered after peace in 1763 and animated their actions in the years before independence.

When Mason fell into the company of Samuel Smith after investigating the Paxton Boys, he stumbled upon the second problem of imperial governance: establishing political borders in the empire. Masons lack of awareness of the border war that led to his current appointment suggests that few people outside of these contested areas were familiar with this type of intercolonial strife. For those living in the British Empires North American holdings, however, border conflicts between colonies were a common occurrence. From New Hampshire to the Carolinas, boundary controversies were a regular part of governing. Indeed, Smith and other combatants regaled visitors with stories of colonial conflicts decades after they occurred because they still mattered to colonists at the time, many of whom lived in similarly unstable areas.