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• 1 2020-11-25T10:31:50-08:00 Primary Source Sets and Ghost River 6 Ethan Reczka image_header 2020-11-25T10:55:52-08:00 This primary source set can be used in a history class engaging analysis of primary sources and attention to bias in those sources. This specific set uses the primary sources in Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga (Red Planet Books & Comics) in tandem with the interactive digital edition. Videos, images, and contextual essays offer useful perspectives on how the creative team behind the graphic novel, in consultation with historians and community members, create their own sources. The Paxton massacres offer a glimpse into the complicated relationship between Native Americans and colonists in the context of both Philadelphia and Pennsylvania history. Using the Ghost River primary sources, students will identify and trace how the perceptions of Native Americans and Quakers changed over time, how the creative team translated historical primary source materials into an historically-grounded graphic novel.
  
  Lesson Objectives:
  • Students will be able to identify the events that led to the creation of primary sources.
  • Students will be able to analyze the artistic decisions of the Ghost River creative team.
  • Students will be able to analyze racial and religious prejudices in the primary sources.
  
  Essential Questions:
  • What decisions go into creating a primary source record? How do these decisions affect how we evaluate primary sources?
  • Why should historical events be analyzed from multiple perspectives? 
  • How might the Paxton events affect the lives of Native Americans (and Quakers) today?
  
  Grade Level: Grades 9-12
  
  Pennsylvania State Standards:
  • Secondary Standards 9-12: Historical Analysis and Skills Development
    • 8.1.12.B. Evaluate the interpretation of historical events and sources, considering the use of fact versus opinion, multiple perspectives, and cause and effect relationships.
    • 8.1.12.C. Analyze, synthesize, and integrate historical data, creating a product that supports and appropriately illustrates inferences and conclusions drawn from research.
  • Secondary Standards 9-12: Pennsylvania History
    • 8.2.12.A. Evaluate the role groups and individuals from Pennsylvania played in the social, political, cultural, and economic development of the US and the world.
    • 8.2.12.B. Evaluate the impact of historical documents, artifacts, and places in Pennsylvania which are critical to U.S. history and the world.
    • 8.2.12.D. Evaluate how conflict and cooperation among groups and organizations in Pennsylvania have influenced the growth and development of the US and the world. (Ethnicity and race, working conditions, immigration, military conflict, economic stability).
  • Secondary Standards 9-12: United States History
    • 8.3.12.A. Evaluate the role groups and individuals from the U.S. played in the social, political, cultural, and economic development of the world. 
    • 8.3.12.B. Evaluate the impact of historical documents, artifacts, and places in U.S. history which are critical to world history.
    • 8.3.12.D. Evaluate how conflict and cooperation among groups and organizations in the U.S. have influenced the growth and development of the world. (Ethnicity and race, working conditions, immigration, military conflict, economic stability)
  
  Historical Background:
  
  The relationship between Native Americans and European colonists contains many tragedies, including the Paxton massacres. These incidents occurred in December 1763 in Lancaster County when a mob from Paxtang Township murdered 20 Conestoga Indians (hence the name "Paxton Boys"). As a result of their attacks, Lenape and Moravian Indians were taken into Philadelphia for protection. Vowing to "inspect" those Indigenous peoples, the mob marched toward Philadelphia, where they were stopped just north of the city in Germantown. While the the situation "physically" diffused there, the argument continued in print, with the Paxton leaders arguing that they were justified in their attack on the Conestoga people. Prominent colonial leaders produced many primary source documents available today as print and manuscript records. Today, we know that the Paxton vigilantes murdered the Conestoga people in a white supremacist campaign that began in the Seven Years' War (also known as the French and Indian War)
  
  Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga is a modern retelling and reinterpretation of the Paxton massacres. Editor Will Fenton, author Lee Francis IV, and artist Weshoyot Alvitre created this graphic novel to tell the story from point of view of the Indigenous peoples at the center of the story. The book is grounded with historical primary source documents, secondary contexts from leading historians, and interviews with surviving Indigenous peoples in Lancaster County. In re-centering this historical incident on the Conestoga people, Fenton, Francis, and Alvitre recast them not as victims but spouses, parents, children, and friends.
  
  Materials:
  1. Benjamin West, The Indians Giving a Talk to Colonel Bouquet in a Conference at a Council Fire (1766).
  2. General Forbes, Letter to Israel Pemberton (August 18, 1758).
  3. James Claypoole, Franklin and the Quakers (1764).
  4. D.A. Henderson, Account of the Indian Murders (December 27, 1763).
  5. James Claypoole, An Indian Squaw King Wampum Spies (1764).
  
  In addition to the sources above, consider these videos integrated in the digital edition:
  1. Video on p.29
  2. Video on p.35
  3. Video on p.40 (with Weshoyot Alvitre)
  4. Video on p.45
  5. Video on p.57
  
  Discussion Questions:
  1. How are Native Americans represented in primary sources? (Sources #1, #3, #5) 
  2. What type of adjectives are used to describe Native Americas, Quakers, and the Paxton vigilantes? 
     1. Are they positive or negative? 
     2. Note the author of the source. 
     3. Does the source support the Paxtons?
     4. Are they anti-Quaker? (Sources #2, #4; Videos #1, #2)
  3. What choices do the creative team make using these sources to create their graphic novel, and how do primary sources appear in Ghost River? (Videos #3, #4, #5)
  4. How is Benjamin Franklin represented?
     1. How does Franklin's representation compare to how you have seen him before?
     2. How does the creative team view his role in the Paxton massacres? (Source #3)
  5. How were local sites (Lancaster and Philadelphia) incorporated into Ghost River and to what end? (Video #4)
  
  Teaching Activities:
  1. All of these events took place near Philadelphia. Teachers could bring students to key sites from the graphic novel (e.g. the Fulton Theater in Lancaster or the historical marker of Conestoga Indiantown). These sites hold a special place in the hearts and minds of survivors and their kin and couple help students forge an emotional connection with the story. Teachers can also take advantage of local primary source resources by arranging a class visit to the Library Company of Philadelphia.
  2. As indicated by the creators, Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga challenges typical narratives in history textbooks. Think about other narratives and how those might be challenged if you were taught from a different perspective. Specifically, research into other events involving Native Americans and European colonists. For example, how did Europeans “buy” Manhattan from the Lenape? Where did the $24 narrative originate from? How have primary sources reenforced this narrative? How have the Native American perspectives been marginalized by textbooks? For this assignment, write a proposal for a book similar to Ghost River with a different event.
  
  Related Teaching Sources:
  • "Document Analysis Worksheets," National Archives, December 18, 2018.
  • John Dunbar, ed. The Paxton Papers. The Hague: Martinus Nighoff, 1957
  • Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
  • Kristin Shanabrook, "Unmolested and Unidentified": The Paxton Boys Rebellion and the changing systems of power in eighteenth century Pennsylvania. Seminar paper and lesson plan, December 10, 2012.
  • Alison Olson, "The Pamphlet War Over the Paxton Boys." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 123 (1999): 31-56.
  • "Paxton Boys uprising," Encyclopaedia Britannica, May 13, 2015.
  
  You may also download a printable version of this lesson.
• 1 2019-08-25T07:28:41-07:00 The Ghosts of Wampum 6 Ernestine Heldring, Will Fenton image_header 2019-10-02T10:49:22-07:00 Students will compare and contrast the representation of wampum in different types of historical sources to analyze the gap in understanding of reciprocity between the settler colonists and the Conestoga people from different historical perspectives.
  
  Although wampum has often been portrayed as a form of Native American decoration, it played an integral role in colonial diplomacy. Wampum signified "the importance or the authority of the message associated with it. As such, treaties and other such agreements would have a large amount of wampum that had been loomed into a ‘belt' for them" (Ganondagan).
  
  The 1763 Paxton massacres occurred in the context of rising tensions between those who sought accommodation, associated with the exchange of wampum belts, and those who sought ethnic cleansing, articulated in printed materials that conflated wampum with disregard for settler colonists in the borderlands.
  
  Lesson Objectives:
  • Students will evaluate visual primary and secondary sources, including a contemporary graphic novel and an eighteenth-century political cartoon.
  • Students will learn how contemporary historians are working to integrate previously underrepresented voices and stories.
  • Students will use their background knowledge to evaluate sources and create an argument about the symbolism of wampum.
  • Students will compare and contrast arguments using a structured academic controversy.
  • Students will revise arguments and select appropriate evidence.
  • Students will reinterpret the Paxton massacre and learn about settler colonialism.
  
  Essential Questions:
  • What role does reciprocity play in relationships between different peoples?
  • How and why do relationships between groups of people change over time?
  • How do symbols embody change or continuity in relationships?
  • What did Native peoples in colonial Pennsylvania expect from their relationships with the settler colonists? How do we know?
  • What did the settler colonists expect from their relationships with the Native peoples? How do we know?
  
  Grade Level: Grade 11
   
  Standards:
  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.WH.6-8.1: Support claim(s) with logical reasoning and relevant, accurate data and evidence that demonstrate an understanding of the topic or text, using credible sources.
  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12: Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, connecting insights gained from specific details to an understanding of the text as a whole.
  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.2: Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary that makes clear the relationships among the key details and ideas.
  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.8: Evaluate an author's premises, claims, and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other information. 
  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.9: Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources.
  
  Historical Background:
  • Historians use a wide range of artifacts, including wampum belts, to explore Native American history (which has limited, extant written primary source records).
  • Native peoples' understanding of reciprocity was enacted through the exchange of wampum.
  • Wampum belts are connected and represent a relationship, whereas individual wampum beads are a form of currency. For example, the Treaty of Shackamaxon wampum belt given to William Penn in 1682 (featured in Ghost River), which is on exhibit at the Philadelphia History Museum, "was said to be given to William Penn by the Lenape tribe at the time of the 1682 treaty. The belt, donated in 1857 to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania by a great-grandson of Penn, is made of white wampum with darker accent beads and depicts two figures holding hands, often interpreted as a sign of friendship and peace."
  • The tension between the settler colonists (and their increasing desire to move away from accommodation to thorough occupation of the land) and London's continued desire for reciprocity and accommodation was reflected in the pamphlet war, both during and after the Paxton massacre.
   
  Materials:
  
  Reading packet:
  • Excerpts from Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 203. pp. 201-206.
  • Excerpts from Lee Francis, Weshoyot Alvitre, and Will Fenton, Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga. Albuquerque: Red Planet Books and Comics, 2019.
  • James Claypoole, An Indian Squaw King Wampum Spies.
  • Penn Wampum Belt (1682 Shackamaxon treaty).
  • Guiding questions (printed or projected on smartboard)
  
  Background readings:
  • Ganondagan
  • Haudenosaunee Guide for Educators (pp. 6 & 7)
  • NativeTech: Native American Technology & Art
  
  Optional readings:
  • Lee Francis, Weshoyot Alvitre, and Will Fenton, Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga. Albuquerque: Red Planet Books and Comics, 2019.
  • Digital Paxton
  • Author, Artist, and Editor bios
   
  Procedure:
  
  Pre-work: Have students read the homework packet on wampum and the Paxton massacres.
  
  Classroom Activities (75 minutes)
  
  1. Play this excerpt from the musical Chicago as students come in:

  Ask any of the chickies in my pen
  They'll tell you I'm the biggest mother hen
  I love them all and all of them love me -
  Because the system works;
  the system called reciprocity!
  
  Got a little motto
  Always sees me through
  When you're good to Mama
  Mama's good to you!

  
  2. Ask students to free write on "reciprocate." Students may write a list, letter, scene, poem, or draw a sketch that they associate with the word.
  
  3. Students talk in pairs: what did you write or draw, and why?
  
  4. As a class, generate a working definition for "reciprocate" and write it on the board.
  
  5. Class or small-group discussion: why is it important to reciprocate in relationships? Segue to thinking about ways of symbolizing reciprocity in relationships. How do I communicate my relationships with people or organizations? (e.g. a wedding ring shows marital status).
  
  6. Homework recap/ mini lecture on reciprocity, accommodation and wampum in the 1600s and 1700s. Ask students to retrieve/recall how wampum represented based on what they read for homework (ex. to Native people wampum belts represented reciprocity in treaties with the British. Wampum was not money or decoration).
  
  7. Split students into two groups to examine the Reading Packet:
  • Group One examines Ghost River excerpts with Penn Wampum Belt.
  • Group Two examines Ghost River excerpts with Indian Squaw King.
  
  8. Both groups address their respective guiding questions and draft a thesis statement about what wampum meant to the settler colonists and Conestoga people.
  
  9. As a class, compare both groups' thesis statements.
  
  10. Finish by examining the full cartoon (Indian Squaw King) and explaining the role of pamphlets in the aftermath of the Conestoga Massacres. Stress to the students that Native people were still engaging in centuries-old ideals of reciprocity, whereas the settler colonists were increasingly intent on acquiring more land. Settler colonists were also frustrated that the metropolis (Parliament in London) did not unconditionally support them.

  The Paxton crisis, as Thomas Penn predicted, was a war of words and images fought by Paxton critics and defenders who debated Pennsylvania's future by inflaming the passions and misleading the judgement of many in the colony. Yet, in a war sparked by violence against Indians, it is surprising how absent or misrepresented the Conestogas were in these discussions. Few texts acknowledged the Paxton murders. Instead, most works, including political cartoons, either denied the Conestogas' agency by portraying them as helpless dependents of the colony and its Quaker merchants, or by stereotyping them as either cunning, half-naked savages or hatchet-wielding warriors, images popularized during the Seven Years' War. With no native voices to argue on behalf of the Conestogas, the Paxton debates document the colonial narrative of the crisis. They also capture a turning point in the history of the Pennsylvanian colony, away from acknowledgement and negotiation and towards the whole scale displacement and dispossession of indigenous peoples

  (Judith Ridner, Passion, Politics, and Portrayal in the Paxton Debates)
  
  Assessment and Extensions:
  
  Assessment: Write a thesis statement that addresses one or more of these questions. State what two pieces of evidence best support your thesis.
  • What did Native peoples in colonial Pennsylvania expect from their relationships with the settler colonists? How do we know?
  • What did the settler colonists expect from their relationships with the Native peoples? How do we know?
  
  Extension: What additional resources would you need to better understand the significance of wampum to different groups of people? What else do you know, need to know, or want to learn? 
  
  Homework: Read and annotate Ghost River. Select one page you want to close-read and discuss in class.
  
  This lesson was created during the 2019 Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Teacher Seminar, "Native Peoples, Settlers, and European Empires in North America, 1600-1840" (July 28-August 3, 2019). You may also download a printable version of this lesson.
• 1 2019-08-26T11:34:23-07:00 Interpreting Conflict through Political Cartoons 6 Peter Gaynor image_header 2019-10-02T10:51:38-07:00 This lesson will examine the An Indian Squaw King Wampum Spies political cartoon and then begin to extrapolate the schisms between the Paxton Boys, Native Peoples, and Pennsylvania Government, and by extension British Crown. This lesson will help students connect the Proclamation of 1763 and Pontiac's War to the growing mistrust between colonial settlers and their government as we head into the Revolutionary Era.
  
  Lesson Objectives:
  • Students will read through and contextualize an 18th century political cartoon.
  • Students will use the document to connect existing historical ideas they have learned.
  • Students will create their own political cartoon that they think most accurately portrays their understanding.
  
  Grade Level: Grade 8
  
  Standards:
  • D2.His.1.6-8: Analyze connections among events and developments in broader historical contexts.
  • D2.His.6.6-8: Analyze how people's perspectives influenced what information is available in the historical sources they created.
  
  Historical Background:
  
  Excerpt from Will Fenton, "Introduction."

  In December 1763, a mob of settlers from Paxtang Township murdered 20 unarmed Susquehannock Indians in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. A month later, hundreds of ‘Paxton Boys' marched toward Philadelphia to menace and possibly kill more refugee Indians who sought the protection of the Pennsylvania government. While Benjamin Franklin halted the march just outside of Philadelphia in Germantown, supporters of the Paxton Boys and their critics spent the next year battling in print.
  
  The Paxton Boys accused the Conestoga Indians of colluding with the Ohio Country Lenape and Shawnee warriors who were attacking Pennsylvania's western frontier, a charge that had no basis in fact. Their opponents accused the Paxton Boys of behaving more savagely than the Indians they had killed.
  
  The pamphlet war that followed in 1764 was not so different from the Twitter wars of today. Pamphleteers waged battle using pseudonyms, slandering opponents as failed elites and racial traitors. At stake was much more than the conduct of the Paxton men. Pamphleteers staked claims about colonization, peace and war, race and ethnicity, masculinity and civility, and religious association in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania.

  
  Excerpt from Jane Merritt, "Paxton Boys." Colonization and Settlement, Third Edition, 2017.

  The Paxton Boys mostly came from the Scots-Irish immigrant communities established along the Pennsylvania frontier in the 1720s. Some had ties to local militia groups in Lancaster County and Northampton County, west and north of Philadelphia, and many fought Indians during the 1750s when hostile Delaware and Shawnee attacked isolated frontier plantations that had been built on disputed territory claimed by both cultures. After the Seven Years' War Scots-Irish settlers feared the continued presence of Native Americans in the region and, making no distinction between allies and enemies, took out their anger on a peaceful Indian community nearby. The initial attack came on December 14, 1763, when a group of armed men from Paxton township in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, marched on Conestoga Manor, killing and scalping six of the Christian Indians living on the small reserve of land. A few weeks after the original attack, 50 or 60 armed men on horseback attacked the surviving Conestoga Indians who had been placed under protective custody in the jailhouse at Lancaster.
  
  The Pennsylvania governor and other Pennsylvania leaders, including Benjamin Franklin, condemned the actions of the Paxton Boys as being more ‘savage' than those of the Indians they hated. The colonial government did not criticize the brutal murder of Indian people but instead worried that poor white frontier inhabitants had challenged their authority and feared that they would continue to do so. Indeed, by early 1764 nearly 250 "Paxton Volunteers," as they called themselves, gathered and headed for Philadelphia intending to kill several hundred Indians under the protection of the Moravians and Pennsylvania government. Benjamin Franklin and a small militia force stopped the group in Germantown, just short of their goal, but a pamphlet war quickly ensued that explicated the grievances of the frontier inhabitants. Through satirical verse, cartoons, and pointed prose the largely Presbyterian Scots-Irish group questioned the loyalties, morality, and masculinity of politically powerful Quakers in the provincial assembly. Matthew Smith and James Gibson, the most vocal of these pamphlet authors, complained that the largely Quaker assembly had refused to help frontier settlers during the war with funds for a militia and protective forts. Instead, those in power had used public monies and private donations to assist Indians, such as the Delaware, who, with Quaker support, claimed rights to land in eastern Pennsylvania. Still, the Paxtons' ultimate complaints revolved around issues of relative political power and their own place within the British Empire. They contended that frontier inhabitants in the western counties of Pennsylvania had less political representation in the provincial assembly than did the smaller eastern counties and that the legal justice system did not extend into their isolated communities. The Paxtons, demanding that the British treat them as equal subjects, took out their anxieties on the Conestoga Indians, who they thought did not deserve recognition or protection from the Pennsylvania government.
  
  Whether or not the Paxton Boys' actions came from a nascent nationalism, the massacre and its aftermath set a precedent for Indian-white relations on the American frontier. After 1763 the level of "Indian-hating" dramatically increased. Other groups of frontier vigilantes, patterned on the Paxton Boys, attacked peaceful Indian communities in the Ohio Valley during the Revolutionary War. In turn, very few Native American groups allied themselves with colonists against Great Britain.

   
  Materials:
  • Historical Background (above)
  • James Claypoole, An Indian Squaw King Wampum Spies
  • Lee Francis, Weshoyot Alvitre, and Will Fenton, Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga. Albuquerque: Red Planet Books and Comics, 2019.
  • Political Cartoon Graphic Organizer (Handout)
  
  Procedure:
  1. For homework, have students read the Historical Background (above).
  2. At the start of class, ensure that the students have a framework for the political cartoon.
     1. In small groups, have students put events in chronological order.
     2. As a class, have students discuss their annotations.
     3. Individually, have students read an excerpt from Ghost River to help frame or better understand the events associated with the historical Background.
  3. Introduce political cartoons as primary source documents. Reinforce the understanding that this cartoon was engraved in the context of the 1764 pamphlet war.
  4. Project An Indian Squaw King Wampum Spies and open the transcription.
     1. Have students to list what they see. Record observations on the board.
     2. Break students into small groups and provide the link to the transcription 
  5. Provide students with the Political Cartoon Graphic Organizer and have them to fill it out as best as they can.
  6. After students finish, review their interpretations.
  7. Have students discuss the power dynamics between the groups living in Pennsylvania and the English Crown.
  
  Assessment and Extensions: Ask students to create their own cartoon that they feel accurately portrays the conflict in Pennsylvania in 1764.
  
  This lesson was created during the 2019 Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Teacher Seminar, "Native Peoples, Settlers, and European Empires in North America, 1600-1840" (July 28-August 3, 2019). You may also download a printable version of this lesson.
• 1 2019-06-03T18:43:39-07:00 Passion, Politics, and Portrayal in the Paxton Debates 5 Judith Ridner image_header 2019-06-04T00:54:23-07:00 "Of all Disputes in the World, political and polemical ones have been found most apt to inflame the Passions, and mislead the Judgement," wrote Pennsylvania's proprietor, Thomas Penn, sometime between 1759 and 1760. Little did Penn know how accurately he would forecast the passionate, politicized public debates that would rage a few years later with the Paxton crisis. Throughout 1764, many men, including Penn, took up their quill pens and commissioned printing presses or engravings to sharply criticize or defend the Paxton vigilantes.
  
  Today, such a debate might unfold as "tweet storm," which we would react to and share via our smartphones, tablets, or computers. During the eighteenth century, however, paper, ink, and printed type were the technologies that people used to shape public opinion. The Paxton crisis thus took a physical form as hand-written letters or printed works, such as pamphlets, newspaper accounts, single-sheet broadsides, and political cartoons. These human-created artifacts, or material culture, conveyed the ideas that drove the Paxton debate. Yet their physical forms affected readers' senses and perceptions and their status as consumer goods influenced how people acquired, exchanged, and shared materials. Colonists felt the texture of hand-made paper and the impressions of the typeface as they read these printed accounts; they experienced the effects of the weather when they stood on the street outside a printer's shop in Philadelphia to examine cartoons posted in a shop window; and they felt the rise of emotions, and perhaps the effects of alcohol or coffee, as they debated these events and their implications with friends, acquaintances, and strangers in the intimate public spaces of Pennsylvania's taverns and coffeehouses.
  
  There was much for colonists to consider, thanks to the remarkable range of texts produced during this crisis. All of these works, however, shared significant similarities. First, their authors used the Paxton crisis to debate other pressing issues facing the colony, including the status of native peoples, the defense of backcountry settlers, and the political power of non-English immigrant groups. Second, although their communication style varied, these texts were polemics (verbal or visual attacks) authored by writers or drawn by artists who sought to influence public opinion through the most extreme language and inflammatory content, including visual stereotypes that we today would perceive as racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic.
  
  Writing anonymously or under pseudonyms, authors traded insults and used name-calling, sarcasm, and satire to ridicule opponents. Paxton critics such as Benjamin Franklin, who authored the first published attack of the debate, condemned the Paxton men and all Scots-Irishmen as "CHRISTIAN WHITE SAVAGES" who had murdered peaceful Conestogas in cold blood. His goal was primarily to condemn his Scots-Irish political opponents in the colony rather than to defend the Conestogas, the victims of their violence. Other authors followed Franklin's lead. They mostly ignored the Conestogas, instead employing anti-Irish stereotypes to ridicule the Scots-Irish as drunkards, or to parody their distinctive dialect as evidence of ignorance; some even fed upon anti-Catholic prejudice by asserting that these Protestant colonists were really Catholics in disguise.
  
  Paxton apologists employed comparably incendiary tactics. Their goal was to defend the Scots-Irish and other immigrant groups in the colony, such as the Germans, while undermining the authority Philadelphia-centered power brokers. They derided Franklin, an increasingly important politician in the colony, as a self-interested double-dealer and stereotyped all Indians, even the peaceful Conestogas, as inherently violent, traitorous savages. Wealthy and influential Quakers were their favorite targets, however. Distinctively plain forms of Quaker dress and speech, such as broad-brimmed hats and Quakers’ use "thee" and "thou" idiom made them easy to mock.
  
  Political cartoons offer a rich documentary record of such tactics. In Benjamin Franklin and the Quakers, the Quaker merchant Israel Pemberton, donning the traditional broad-brimmed hat, distributes hatchets to a group of half-naked, highly-stereotyped Indian men; Pemberton instructs them to "Exercise them [use them] on the Scotch Irish & Dutch [Germans]," suggesting that the Quakers' greed for profits from trade drove Indian violence against backcountry settlers such as the Paxton men. Franklin, depicted in the foreground, holding a bag of money, confirms that "this is the way our Money goes." But the Indians have their own designs, as well. As a Quaker man in the right corner of the cartoon cavorts with a young, bare-breasted Indian woman, she secretly reaches into his pocket to steal his pocket watch, raising questions of who controlled the colony and whether Indians, the Quakers, or Franklin profited most from the trade.
  
  The German bleeds & bears ye Furs followed similar themes but shifted the setting to the backcountry to highlight the consequences of such greed. Here, a Quaker (broad-brimmed hat) and Franklin oversee a scene of death and destruction. The Quaker, who appears to be in control, rides on the back of the Scots-Irishman with a half-naked, hatchet-carrying Indian and a blindfolded German yoked to his arm; Franklin watches from the sidelines. As the verses below the cartoon confirm, the Quaker – not Franklin or even the Indian – bears responsibility for the burning cabins and dead colonists that surround them. Franklin, the verses note, may have offered the "help at hand," but it was the Quaker "broad-brims," the colony's oppressive "Lords," whose desire for profit stoked dependence, violence, and misery in Pennsylvania. Quakers were not the humble Christians and pacifists they claimed; rather, as the wearers of masks that disguised nefarious intentions, Quakers were, as pro-Paxton writers asserted, the root of strife in the colony.
  
  The Paxton crisis, as Thomas Penn predicted, was a war of words and images fought by Paxton critics and defenders who debated Pennsylvania's future by inflaming the passions and misleading the judgement of many in the colony. Yet, in a war sparked by violence against Indians, it is surprising how absent or misrepresented the Conestogas were in these discussions. Few texts acknowledged the Paxton murders. Instead, most works, including political cartoons, either denied the Conestogas' agency by portraying them as helpless dependents of the colony and its Quaker merchants, or by stereotyping them as either cunning, half-naked savages or hatchet-wielding warriors, images popularized during the Seven Years' War. With no native voices to argue on behalf of the Conestogas, the Paxton debates document the colonial narrative of the crisis. They also capture a turning point in the history of the Pennsylvanian colony, away from acknowledgement and negotiation and towards the whole scale displacement and dispossession of indigenous peoples.
  
  This essay draws upon research Judith Ridner performed for her book, The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018). For more about Judith Ridner, visit the Credits page.
  
  Further Reading
  • Benjamin Bankhurst, “A Looking-Glass for Presbyterians: Recasting Prejudice in Late Colonial Pennsylvania,” PMHB 133.4 (October 2009): 317-348.
  • T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
  • Cynthia Falk, Architecture and Artifacts of the Pennsylvania Germans: Constructing Identity in Early America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).
  • Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (Benjamin Franklin Papers (1751): Vol 4: 225).
  • Scott Paul Gordon, "The Paxton Boys and the Moravians: Terror and Faith in the Pennsylvania Backcountry," Journal of Moravian History 14.2 (Fall 2014): 119-152.
  • Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
  • Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  • Krista J. Kesselring, “Gender, the Hat, and Quaker Universalism in the Wake of the English Revolution,” Seventeenth Century 26.2 (October 2011): 299-322.
  • J. A. Leo Lemay, “The American Aesthetic of Franklin’s Visual Creations,” PMHB 111.4 (1987): 465-499.
  • Henry Melchoir Muhlenberg, Account of the march of the Paxton Boys against Philadelphia in the year 1764. (Philadelphia: John Pennington and Henry C. Baird, 1853).
  • John Smolenksi, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
  • Michele Lise Tarter, “Quaking in the Light,” in A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, eds. Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
• 1 2017-03-29T05:58:43-07:00 Unfriendly Exchanges 3 plain 2017-03-29T06:02:16-07:00 An early thread of the Pamphlet War was the critique of Quaker native diplomacy during the Seven Years’ War. Critics charged that Friends were opportunistic, or, worse, immoral, in their dealings with natives. Perhaps most egregious was the fact that some Friends enlisted in a militia to defend the Philadelphia from the Paxton marchers. Given the Society’s resistance to the organization of a militia during the Seven Years’ War, critics charged that the Quakers would take up arms to defend the colony’s natives, but not their fellow settlers.

  The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, The Address of the People Called Quakers (Philadelphia, 1764).

  In this letter to the governor, the Philadelphia Yearly meeting warned that Smith’s pamphlet would agitate “the inconsiderate Part of the People” against the Society. Those fears proved well-founded as Paxton apologists conflated Quakers with the warring Indians that they claimed had precipitated the march.

  
  David James Dove, A Battle a Squirt; Where No Man is Kill'd, and No Man is Hurt! (Philadelphia, 1764).

  This pro-Paxton pamphlet was published anonymously, but later attributed to David James Dove, the infamous satirist, Paxton sympathizer, and headmaster of the Germantown Academy. (The printer included an unflattering engraving of the doctor.) Dove counters Address by mocking Friends’ superficial adherence to the peace testimony, which he argues they relinquished all too quickly stymie the Paxton men during their march to Philadelphia. He describes the Paxtons, meanwhile, as the “worthy bleeding Men of Paxton,” whom acted to prevent Indian treachery.

  James Claypoole, An Indian Squaw King Wampum Spies (Philadelphia, 1764).

  In this pro-Paxton political cartoon intended to accompany Battle, a Quaker merchant identifiable as Israel Pemberton (“King Wampum”) cavorting with a partially undressed native woman who is stealing his money. A bespectacled Franklin watches from the right.