14. The Paxton Boys

Hardly had the war ended when internal trouble as well as trouble with the Indians erupted in Pennsylvania. (It must be pointed out that the Quakers reaped the reward of their past policy: even the frontier Quakers were left untouched by the rampaging Indians.) In the midst of border fighting with Indians, a group of over fifty Scotch-Irish frontiersmen from Paxton in Lancaster County suddenly decided to take a leaf from the book of seventeenth-century Massachusetts and Virginia, and to massacre peaceful and friendly Indians. A tiny group of some twenty peaceful Conestoga Indians (seven men and the rest women and children) had long been settled in the county. It was easier for the brave lads to butcher these few Indians than to battle their enemies on the frontier. And so on December 14, 1763, the “Paxton Boys,” led by Matthew Smith and Lazarus Stewart, slaughtered and scalped eight of the defenseless Conestogas. Their only excuse was a vague suspicion that they might have been aiding the enemy. Governor John Penn asked for their arrest. In reply, the Paxton Boys murdered the remaining Indians, who had vainly been placed in jail to guard their safety.

Not content with this outrage, the Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia in pursuit of some peaceful, neutral, and Christian Moravian Indians who had gone there. The poor Moravians had been set upon several months before by a band of Scotsmen, and several men and women had been murdered. When the murderers were in their turn ambushed and killed, the entire Moravian Indian community was blamed and the Ulster Scots decided to annihilate these Indians. The terrified Indians fled to the Moravian town of Nazareth, but the Assembly decided to disarm them and move them finally and forcibly to Philadelphia. The one hundred and forty-odd Indians were, for their pains, jeered and cursed at every stop along their long march. At Philadelphia, soldiers successfully defied the governor’s orders and refused to admit the Indians to the barracks. Finally almost lynched by a mob, but protected by a cordon of Quakers, the Indians found a camp near the city. The Moravian Indians were shipped to New York by the frightened Philadelphians, but the governors of New York and New Jersey ordered the refugees out of their provinces, and the hapless Indians were forced to return once again to Philadelphia.

Now marching several hundred strong, the Paxton Boys thundered that they would slaughter not only all the Moravian Indians but also any Quakers who might stand in their path. Under such provocation, the Quakers of Germantown rose up in arms to block the invaders’ way and formed volunteer militia, again under Franklin’s aegis. Certainly the situation was enough to stretch absolute pacifism to the breaking point. While the Indians were successfully defended after several days on the brink of conflict, Franklin was treating the Paxton Boys rather as citizens to be forgiven, with grievances to be pondered, than as murderers. Furthermore, Governor Penn and the Council added to the climate of official complicity by placing a bounty on Indian scalps. The Paxton Boys disbanded and left for home, after unchecked terrorization and plundering of the citizens of Philadelphia. As for the Moravian Indians, they were forced to remain for a year in the Philadelphia barracks, while negotiations were being completed. There, a third of the Indians died from smallpox before they could finally return home.

Following the march of the Paxton Boys, there ensued a furious pamphlet war between the two sides. The Ulster Scots blamed Quaker pacifism for the colony’s troubles with the Indians, while the pro-Quaker writers noted that the peace policy with the Indians had succeeded for three-quarters of a century until seriously weakened by the government and by the excesses of the Ulster Scots.

One significant point of grievance, unrelated to the Indian affairs, was raised in the Declaration of Grievances, submitted to the government by two leaders of the Paxton Boys, Matthew Smith and James Gibson. This point, heading the list of grievances, was the underrepresentation in the Pennsylvania Assembly of the frontier counties relative to the older areas nearer Philadelphia. In a democracy, the natural, inherent tendency is to overrepresent older areas and underrepresent the new, unless there is, as in colonial Massachusetts, a built-in method for enlarging representation for the new areas. And then the older areas naturally wish to maintain their advantage, and explosive sectional conflict can ensue unless the apportionment is swiftly adjusted to the new pattern of population. This tendency had been borne out in Pennsylvania: the five western frontier counties (Lancaster, York, Berks, Northampton, and Cumberland) had an allotted representation of little more than one-third that of the eastern areas (Philadelphia City, Philadelphia County, Chester, and Bucks), whereas the representation according to the number of eligible voters should have been about equal. To a large extent, moreover, this meant overrepresentation of Quakers and underrepresentation of the Scotch-Irish.

The eastern counties had no intention of relinquishing their domination of Pennsylvania politics. One Quaker leader remarked with horror that the frontiersmen’s demands would “enable them to return a majority of the Presbyterian friends for representatives.” One of the Scot pamphlets summed up the eastern reaction as the resentment of men “who see their darling power endangered.” As the pamphlet agitation mounted, Philadelphia was again threatened with another Paxton-style invasion, and many Philadelphians were beaten up when traveling through western counties.

Two more events or trends of significance in early eighteenth-century Pennsylvania may here be mentioned. One was the withering away, as in Massachusetts, of mercantilist attempts to confer monopoly privileges on artisans of Philadelphia. While there had been attempts around the turn of the century to restrict competition by law in these trades, enforcement of the regulations broke down as the century progressed.

The second important event was the final settlement of a long-standing boundary dispute, stemming from charter conflicts between Pennsylvania and Maryland. After repeated aggressive attempts by Maryland to acquire Pennsylvanian territory, the Crown finally decided in favor of Pennsylvania in 1750, with the Penns also keeping proprietorship of Delaware against Maryland claims. The boundary line was surveyed and finally completed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in 1767, and ratified by the Crown two years afterward.