THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY VOLUME CXXXVI January 2012 NO. 1 THE MASON-DIXON AND PROCLAMATION LINES:LAND SURVEYING AND NATIVE AMERICANS IN PENNSYLVANIA’S BORDERLANDS Cameron B. Strang 5 FREE HEALTH CARE FOR THE POOR:THE PHILADELPHIA DISPENSARY William Pencak 25 THE EVOLUTION OF LEADERSHIP WITHIN THE PUERTO RICAN COMMUNITY OF PHILADELPHIA Ariel Arnau 53 NOTES AND DOCUMENTS: NEWLY AVAILABLE AND PROCESSED COLLECTIONS AT THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA Rachel Moloshok and HSP Archives Staff 83 BOOK REVIEWS 93 BOOK REVIEWS RICHTER, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts, by Peter Charles Hoffer 93 PARMENTER, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534–1701, by Daniel K. Richter 94 POLLACK, ed., “The Good Education of Youth”: Worlds of Learning in the Age of Franklin, by Keith Pacholl 95 LITTLE, Transoceanic Radical, William Duane: National Identity and Empire, 1760–1835, by Seth Cotlar 96 TAYLOR, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies, by R. William Weisberger 98 HARROLD, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War, by Stephen Rockenbach 99 FAULKNER, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, by Beverly Tomek 100 BIDDLE and DUBIN, Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America, by Andrew Diemer 102 BRODY, Remembering Chester County: Stories from Valley Forge to Coatesville, by Steven G. Gimber 103 KASHUBA, A Brief History of Scranton, Pennsylvania, by Martin W. Wilson 104 BROWN, Industrial Pioneers: Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the Transformation of America, 1840–1902, by Martin W. Wilson 104 SEACHRIST, Snow Hill: In the Shadows of the Ephrata Cloister, by Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe 105 COVER ILLUSTRATION: Puerto Rican Day Parade, 1970s, José and Ramonita Rivers Papers. For a discussion of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community lead- ers in the 1960s and 1970s, see Ariel Arnau’s article in this issue. Editorial Advisory Committee BETH BAILEY RICHARD N. JULIANI Temple University Villanova University DANIEL BARR WALTER LICHT Robert Morris University University of Pennsylvania SETH BRUGGEMAN GUIAN A. MCKEE Temple University University of Virginia ERICA ARMSTRONG DUNBAR SALLY MCMURRY University of Delaware Pennsylvania State University CAROL FAULKNER RANDALL MILLER Syracuse University St. Joseph’s University JOHN FEA CARLA MULFORD Messiah College Pennsylvania State University JUDITH GIESBERG JUDITH RIDNER Villanova University Muhlenberg College ANN N. GREENE DAVID SCHUYLER University of Pennsylvania Franklin & Marshall College JOHN HEPP ANDREW SHANKMAN Wilkes University Rutgers University, Camden Editor TAMARA GASKELL Assistant Editor RACHEL MOLOSHOK Editorial Intern CHRISTOPHER MUNDEN THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY (ISSN 0031-4587) is published each quarter in January, April, July, and October by THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107-5699. Periodicals postage paid at Philadelphia, PA and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to PMHB, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107-5699. Authorization for academic photocopying: For permission to reuse material, please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a nonprofit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of uses. Submissions: All communications should be addressed to the editor. E-mail may be sent to [email protected]. Manuscripts should conform to The Chicago Manual of Style. Electronic submissions are welcome. For submission guidelines, visit the PMHB web page (http://www.hsp.org). The editor does not assume responsibility for statements of fact or of opinion made by the contributors. Contributors ARIEL ARNAU is originally from the Bronx (and a die-hard Yankees fan). He came to Philadelphia to attend Temple University and never left. He obtained his BA in 1999 and his MA in 2006 while spending ten years working in the nonprofit sector in North Philadelphia. He now serves as an adjunct faculty member at Temple University. WILLIAM PENCAK is professor emeritus of history and Jewish studies at Penn State University and edits Pennsylvania History (the other journal). He is finishing a biography of WilliamWhite, the first Episcopal bishop of Pennsylvania. His collected writings were published in 2011 by Lehigh University Press: Contested Commonwealths: Essays in American History. CAMERON B. STRANG is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. He is coauthor and coeditor of The History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean, an award-winning online database, and is currently completing a dissertation on the history of science in the Gulf South. The full run of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography is available in electronic format on JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org). Information on both print and electronic sub- scriptions can be found at http://shop.hsp.org/catalog/publications/pmhb/subscription. Both sites can also be accessed from the journal’s website at http://www.hsp.org/node/2876. ERRATA: In the October 2011 issue, we left off Steve Hammond’s name from the lengthy list of contributors. Steve Hammond, a graduate of Muhlenberg College, is currently researching the history of the Twenty-seventh Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. The Mason-Dixon and Proclamation Lines: Land Surveying and Native Americans in Pennsylvania’s Borderlands N JANUARY 1765, Charles Mason visited Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during winter holiday from his work on the Maryland-Pennsylvania Iboundary line. “What brought me here,” wrote Mason, “was my curiosity to see the place where was perpetuated last Winter the Horrid and inhuman murder of 26 Indians, Men, Women and Children, leaving none alive to tell.” The dead were Conestoga Indians who had “fled to the Gaol” in Lancaster in a vain effort to escape the Indian-hating vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys. The Paxton Boys broke into the jail and bru- tally executed and dismembered the Conestogas, peaceful dependents on the Pennsylvanian government and erstwhile neighbors of the Paxtons. “Strange it was that the Town though as large as most Market Towns in England, never offered to oppose them, . no honor to them!” The Paxtons, it seems, were not alone in their anti-Indian sentiments.1 1 Charles Mason, The Journal of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, transcribed by A. Hughlett Mason (Philadelphia, 1969), 66. On the Paxton Boys, see Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (New York, 2009). THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY Vol. CXXXVI, No. 1 ( January 2012) 6 CAMERON B. STRANG January The astronomer Charles Mason and the land surveyor Jeremiah Dixon geodetically surveyed the long-disputed border between the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. This line would eventually become ingrained in the American consciousness as the symbolic boundary between North and South. Yet while Mason and Dixon were running their line, the geo- graphical partition that most concerned British officials and colonials was that between East and West, whites and Indians. This division, the Royal Proclamation Line of 1763, was part of Britain’s efforts to regulate com- merce and settlement in North America following the territorial acquisi- tions of the Seven Years’ War.2 Keeping their Indian neighbors happy was central to British policy during the 1760s, and whites were thus forbid- den to settle beyond the heads of rivers flowing into the Atlantic in hopes that “the Indians may be convinced of our . Resolution to remove all reasonable Cause of Discontent.”3 Although the Proclamation Line was initially intended to follow the Appalachian ridge, it was conceived from the start as a temporary boundary that would allow the British govern- ment to regulate westward expansion, not to prevent it altogether. However, even during the period from 1763 to 1768, the year when the treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labor moved the Indian boundary line further west, the Appalachian ridge was not a clear boundary. The region was a permeable borderland in which whites and Native Americans frequently interacted and engaged in a cycle of increasingly racialized violence.4 Mason and Dixon’s survey also encompassed these same years—1763 to 1768—and, as Charles Mason’s bleak observations on the Paxton Boys’ massacre suggests, their survey took place amid the ongoing bloodshed and power struggles of the mid-Atlantic borderlands.5 Considering the 2 On the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, see Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York, 2006); Jack M. Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775 (Lincoln, NE, 1961). 3 The Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763, By The King, George R. 4 On Indian hating and the development of racialized thought among both whites and Indians in the mid-Atlantic backcountry, see Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 190–97; Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 189–236. 5 On the violence and struggles for land, power, and empire in the eighteenth-century back- country, see Patrick Griffin,