“An Extream Bad Collection of Broken Innkeepers, Horse Jockeys, and Indian Traders”: How Anarchy, Violence, and Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania Transformed Provincial Society A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History of the College of Arts and Sciences by Brandon C. Downing M.A. Slippery Rock University May 2009 Committee Chair: Wayne Durrill, Ph.D. ~ Abstract ~ This dissertation considers how an anarchic and violent backcountry provided the setting for both Native Americans and backcountry farmers to resist the control of imperial and colonial institutions in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, which ultimately transformed provincial society. Rural insurrections plagued Pennsylvania, but the causes and outcomes of these events are often only recorded by elite discourse. By contrast, this dissertation seeks to recover the various methods that backcountry yeoman farmers and Native Americans used to attain their goal of land possession and independence from the metropole. It examines the complex tasks of managing vast new spaces and resources, administering an army, and assimilating the Indian population within their broader social and cultural contexts through the analysis of archival sources, petitions, Indian treaties, and newspaper reports. The various perspectives of writers, traders, missionaries, diplomats, and interpreters enable us to recover the voices of the frontier. Pennsylvania’s provincial officials tried to contain backcountry defiance by suppressing mobilization, guiding population relocation, enforcing justice, and securing boundaries between Euro Americans and Native Americans. The proprietary government also repeatedly sought to incorporate yeoman farmers and Indians into the political, economic and cultural orbit of Philadelphia. The tactics used to control the backcountry, however, further irritated relations between the government and frontier populations. The driving force behind these policies was the fear of insurrections, and violence that could descend upon the capital if not controlled. This dissertation illuminates both the culture of backcountry insurrections and the British periphery in eighteenth-century North America. Furthermore, it argues that the radical and ii anarchic characteristics of backcountry Pennsylvania contributed to the coming of the American Revolution, in contrast to historians’ overemphasis on the role played by the eastern seaboard cities in the break with Britain in 1776. iii iv ~ Contents ~ Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..ii Illustrations……………………………………………………………………………………...vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1 “Many thousands of Foreigners”: The Formation Pennsylvania’s Backcountry Identity.……………………………...15 Chapter 2 “Powers had brake loose from their center” and “Hell itself is transplanted hither”: Violence, Anarchy, and Resistance in Backcountry Pennsylvania………………...42 Chapter 3 “The Drum is beating to Arms, and Bells ringing & all the people under Arms”: White-Native Violence in the Pennsylvania Backcountry………………......……108 Chapter 4 “Most people in this Country would advize the killing of every Savage young, & Old”: America’s Culture of Violence…………………………………..155 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..183 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...203 v ~ Illustrations ~ 1. Thomas Holme, A Mapp of ye Improved Part of Pennsilvania in America, Divided into Counties, Townships, and Lotts (London 1685), LCP……………………..18 2. “A Map of parts of the Provinces of Pennsilvania and Maryland with the Counties of New Castle, Kent, and Sussex on Delaware according to the most exact Surveys yet made drawn in the year 1740,” produced by the Penns for the Crown to prove their case. NV-064, series 7, Penn Family Papers, HSP, http://digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/8535.....................50 3. “The Retreat of Washington,” from: http://www.us-roots.org/colonialamerica/main/timeline.html...........................................67 4. Pennsylvania with the Connecticut claim across the northern part of the state. Map from Sydney George Fisher, The Making of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: JB Lippincott Company, 1896)…………………………………………………………...…91 5. “Map of Fort Granville, Mifflin County, Near Lewistown,” William A. Hunter, Forts on the Pennsylvania Frontier, 1753-1758 (Harrisburg: The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1960), 605...……………………………………134 6. The “Kittanning Destroyed Medal”…………………………………………………….142 vi ~ INTRO ~ Almost universally, historians agree that the United States has always been an extremely violent nation and that violence usually redounds to the ultimate advantage of those who control the levers of power.1 -John Buenker, The Encyclopedia of Violence What is impressive to one who begins to learn about American violence is its extraordinary frequency, its sheer commonplaceness in our history, its persistence into very recent and contemporary times, and its rather abrupt contrast with our pretensions to singular national virtue.2 -Richard Hofstadter, “American Violence” Increasingly, Americans are a people without history, with only memory, which means a people poorly prepared for what is inevitable about life-tragedy, sadness, moral ambiguity-and therefore a people reluctant to engage difficult ethical issues.3 -Elliott Gorn, “Professing History” n a way, the grievances of backcountry inhabitants in the British North American colonies are well-known. What led the leaders of backcountry settlers like Thomas Cresap, I Lazarus Stewart, and others like them to violently resist the Pennsylvania provincial government was a lack of protection from Indian attacks, securing land titles, protesting quit- rents or taxes, and curbing the activities of land speculators. All of which were supported by William Penn and his descendants. Proprietary officials actively ejected squatters, raised rents, protected large, fertile stretches of land in the forms of manors and estates, sold premium 1 John Buenker, “Overview of Violence Theories: History,” in R. Gottesman, ed., The Encyclopedia of Violence in America, v. 3 (New York: Scribner, 1999), 314-15. 2 Richard Hofstadter, “Reflections on Violence in America,” in Richard Hofstadter and m. Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary Hurry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 7. 3 Elliott Gorn, “Professing History: Distinguishing Between Memory and Past,” Chronicle of Higher Education (April 28, 2000): B4, 5. 1 property to connected and influential men, and supported a Quaker-dominated Assembly, which claimed pacifist principles when explaining their indifference to the safety of backcountry inhabitants. Since enforcing the laws of the province along the frontier proved nearly impossible because of distance, settlers often took the law into their own hands performing violent actions such as murder, arson, kidnapping, and resisting government officials such as justices of the peace, sheriffs, and sometimes judges, lawyers, and jailers. Violence in Pennsylvania’s backcountry centered mostly on the availability of property and the opportunity to possess it. By the middle of the eighteenth century, making an improvement upon the land such as dwellings, outbuildings, or even planting crops characterized the basic fundamental goal of rural families trying to survive off of their possessions, legally or illegally. Most of the immigrants funneling in from Europe imported the “homestead ethic,” but it grew more significantly in the Americas where landholding was far more widespread.4 Indeed, the famous North Carolina Regulator, Herman Husband, explained it as that “peaceable Possession, especially of back waste vacant Lands, is a Kind of Right” – a right interwoven with “the common Method” of settling the land “time out of Mind,” from “New England to Georgia”: the practice of “the Poor…always countenanced and approved of…to move out, from the interior Parts to the back Lands, with their Families and [to] find a Spot, whereon they might build ‘a Hut’ and make some Improvements.’”5 Two violence-prone regions are studied here as a comparison: the backcountries of Pennsylvania and Kentucky. In Pennsylvania’s backcountry, violence defined the eighteenth 4 Richard Maxwell Brown, “Backcountry Rebellions and the Homestead Ethic in America, 1740‐1799,” in Richard Maxwell Brown, ed. Tradition, Conflict, Modernization: Perspectives on the American Revolution (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 77. 5 Herman Husband, An Impartial Relation of the First Rise and Cause of the Recent Differences in Public Affairs (1770), reprinted in William S. Powell, James K. Huhta, and Thomas J. Farnham, eds., The Regulators in North Carolina: A Documented History (1971), 223. 2 century as border clashes with Maryland and Connecticut, and imperial conflict during the Seven Years’ War dominated Pennsylvania’s political and cultural landscape into the nineteenth century, whereas, in frontier Kentucky, the period from the Revolutionary War era to the War of 1812 endured episodes of violence with Indians, land speculators, and the Virginia court system. In each case, similar trends emerge: mass emigration, lack of security, dispersed farm settlement, great distance to political and cultural institutions, and the use of violence to resolve conflict. There were many differences, to be sure, but the development of both places had many structural