PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE of HISTORY and BIOGRAPHY Vol
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Conojocular War: The Politics of Colonial Competition, 1732–1737 N JANUARY 1765, CHARLES MASON took a break from his work draw- ing a boundary line between Maryland and Pennsylvania to visit ILancaster, Pennsylvania, the site of the 1763 Paxton Boys’ massacre of the Conestoga Indians. He did so, he wrote, out of “curiosity to see the place where was perpetrated last winter; the horrid and inhumane murder of 26 Indians: men, women, and children, leaving none alive to tell.” What he found was hardly what he expected. Lancaster was not a lawless frontier outpost but a bustling and vibrant port on its way to becoming the largest inland city in British North America. It was “as large as most market towns in England,” Mason observed.1 Disappointed in his efforts to learn about the massacre, Mason soon “fell in company with Mr. Samuel Smith,” who told him a story of a dif- ferent, earlier conflict. In 1736, Smith recounted, Pennsylvania was “in open war” with Maryland “on the river Susquehannah.” Smith, who had been serving as sheriff of Lancaster County at the time, recalled how at the height of hostilities, a Pennsylvanian force laid siege to the home of the leader of the Marylanders, one “Mr. Cresap.” In the ensuing melee, Cresap’s house was engulfed in flames, one Marylander died, and the Pennsylvanians captured and jailed Cresap and many of his men as they tried to flee the fire.2 The raid on Cresap’s home served as the violent denouement of a nearly decade-long and costly conflict between these two neighboring colonies. Previously, the Crown, an ocean away and more concerned with The author would like to thank Daniel Richter and Michael Zuckerman for reading and comment- ing on numerous drafts of this article, which began as a hundred-plus-page dissertation chapter. Roderick McDonald, Jeffrey Kaja, and the audiences at the Pennsylvania Historical Association and the McNeil Center's Graduate Student Conference provided additional helpful feedback. The sug- gestions of the anonymous reviewers of this article strengthened its argument. Laura Spero com- mented on every draft and provided additional support that made the research and writing possible. 1 Charles Mason, diary, Jan. 10 and Jan. 17, 1765, MG614, Papers Regarding the Paxton Boys and Conestoga Massacre, LancasterHistory.org, Lancaster, PA. 2 Ibid. PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY Vol. CXXXVI, No. 4 (October 2012) 366 PATRICK SPERO October its mercantile affairs than with its expanding colonial empire, had paid lit- tle attention to the escalating tensions on the banks of the Susquehanna River, then the westernmost outpost of the British Empire in the middle colonies. The extreme violence exhibited in the raid, however, forced the Crown to act; it set in motion a series of hearings and a protracted court case that eventually ended with Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon sur- veying the boundary between these two colonies. That Mason did not know of this war—a conflict that had led to his current endeavor—shows how little those in imperial circles knew of this episode. That Smith thirty years later continued to brag about the “open war” between the colonies shows that the event retained a prominent place in the memory of those living in the area. Like Charles Mason, almost all historians of early America today know of the Paxton massacre, an event that highlights the failure of William Penn’s vision of intercultural peace in his woods. The Conojocular War, the name of the “open war” Samuel Smith described, remains largely untold today. Only three recent articles have dealt with the conflict directly. In 1986, Paul Doutrich published a thorough article demonstrating how important the dispute was for securing Pennsylvania’s expansion west. Charles Dutrizac, in an article published five years later in this journal, used four episodes from the hostilities to analyze how par- ticipants’ “ideas about localism and authority informed their actions.” In the same issue, Thomas Slaughter examined the border dispute in light of other crowd actions in colonial America. In books and monographs on Pennsylvania’s history, the episode has received scant attention. Alan Tully’s book William Penn’s Legacy examines the conflict in its opening pages as an example of the effectiveness of Pennsylvania’s government. His more synthetic work Forming American Politics does not discuss it. In that book, he instead focuses on the politics of Philadelphia and the assembly to describe the political culture of Pennsylvania. Similarly, the two best syntheses of Pennsylvania history, Colonial Pennsylvania, writ- ten by Joseph Illick in the 1970s, and the more recent and more expan- sive Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth, overlook the event entirely. Synthetic analyses of colonial Pennsylvania thus treat the Conojocular War as an irrelevant event—as a self-contained episode rather than a significant chapter in the story of Pennsylvania’s development.3 3 Paul Doutrich, “Cresap’s War: Expansion and Conflict in the Susquehanna Valley,” Pennsylvania History 53 (1986): 89–104; Charles Dutrizac, “Local Identity and Authority in a 2012 THE CONOJOCULAR WAR 367 That is not to say historians have always ignored the conflict. To the contrary, an earlier generation of historians knew the story well, although for them it was merely a matter of antiquarian interest. Robert Proud, author of the first history of Pennsylvania written after Independence, wrote of the “uneasiness and trouble” the Marylanders gave Pennsylvanians. In the first history of Lancaster County, published in 1811, I. Daniel Rupp described Cresap as “a restless, quarrelsome indi- vidual” and the Marylanders as “invaders.” Later in the nineteenth century, a time of pronounced state identity and allegiance, the war caused feuds between contending historians from Pennsylvania and Maryland. Marylanders claimed Penn won through fraud and deception, while Pennsylvania historians attacked the legitimacy of Maryland’s claims. One Pennsylvania historian called Cresap a “pliant” tool of Baltimore and cast Maryland’s actions as an attempt “to colonize” Pennsylvania. Conversely, Maryland historians have praised Cresap for his “hospitality” and portrayed the Pennsylvanians as intransigent. One Marylander even dedicated a chapter of his dissertation on the controversy to an analysis of William Penn’s character (it was not a kind assessment). Another Marylander who defended his colony’s actions deemed his Pennsylvania contemporaries “worthless.”4 The conflict deserves greater analytical attention than it has thus far received. The Conojocular War reveals an important, though often over- Disputed Hinterland: The Pennsylvania-Maryland Border in the 1730s,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 151 (1991): 35–63. In the same issue, Thomas examines the border dispute in light of other crowd actions in “Crowds in Eighteenth-Century America: Reflections and New Directions,” 3–34. Alan Tully, William Penn’s Legacy: Politics and Social Structure in Provincial Pennsylvania, 1726–1755 (Baltimore, 1977), and Forming American Politics: Ideals, Interests and Institutions in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1994); Joseph Illick, Colonial Pennsylvania: A History (New York, 1976); Randall Miller and William Pencak, eds., Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth (University Park, PA, 2002). 4 For earlier histories of Pennsylvania that contained stories of the conflict, see Robert Proud, The History of Pennsylvania, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1798), 204–16; I. Daniel Rupp, History of Lancaster County (Lancaster, PA, 1844); 266–69; Franklin Ellis, History of Lancaster County (Philadelphia, 1883); William Egle, An Illustrated History of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA, 1876), 822–25; Charles Keith, Chronicles of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1917), 2:757–68; H. Frank Eshleman, “Cresap’s War: The Lancaster County Border Struggle,” Papers Read before the Lancaster County Historical Society 13 (1909): 237–54; Matthew Andrews, History of Maryland: Province and State (New York, 1929), 229–33; and Charles Tansill, “The Pennsylvania- Maryland Boundary Controversy” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1915). Tansill’s final chapter, “The Character of William Penn,” amounted to a diatribe against Penn’s “duplicity,” “mas- querading,” and “self-aggrandizement.” Nicholas Wainwright recounted this latter historiographical attack in “The Missing Evidence: Penn v. Baltimore,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 80 (1956): 227–28. 368 PATRICK SPERO October looked, aspect of the political culture of those living outside Philadelphia. Whenever two colonies competed for land, as they did in the Conojocular War, they relied on the allegiance of local settlers to bolster their claims to legitimacy. Competition created opportunities for colonists to use their shifting loyalties to win the best terms they could from colonial govern- ments. Settlers often conducted these negotiations directly with a propri- etor or one of his agents, and studying this contest for settler allegiance exposes a common political behavior in such remote areas. Indeed, for those in politically underrepresented western counties, whose homes often fell outside the purview of the assembly in a colonial capital, com- petition between colonies was more important to their politics than the institutional, urban-based politics that historians have most often analyzed. The Conojocular War also sheds light on the history of Pennsylvania’s expansion west