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• 1 2016-08-20T13:26:20-07:00 Introduction 171 Will Fenton image_header 603803 2024-07-22T12:34:00-07:00 Welcome to Digital Paxton. This site isn't only a digital collection dedicated to a massacre, but also a window into colonization, print culture, and Pennsylvania on the eve of the American Revolution.
  
  The “Paxton” in Digital Paxton refers to a little-known massacre in colonial Pennsylvania.
  
  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.
  
  Digital Paxton began in Spring 2016 when Will Fenton partnered with the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to digitize both institutions' rich holdings related to the Paxton massacre. Originally conceived as a way to make those records freely accessible via the web, the site quickly expanded to include primary source materials from some two-dozen archives, research libraries, and cultural institutions; a dozen contextual essays from leading historians and literary scholars; and half a dozen lessons from secondary and post-secondary educators.
  • Jump to Credits.
  As of July 2024, the site features 3,225 pages of material, including 41 artworks, four books, 17 broadsides, 236 manuscripts, 27 newspaper issues, 71 pamphlets, and nine political cartoons, many of which have never before been digitized. About half of the collection (108 records) is fully-transcribed and searchable, and new transcriptions are added on a regular basis.
  • Jump to the Digital Collection.
  The site also includes six middle school, 13 high school, and three undergraduate lesson plans; 14 contextual essays written by leading historians and literary scholars; and a crowd-sourced transcription platform.
  • Jump to Education.
  • Jump to Transcriptions.
  Will Fenton has presented Digital Paxton at numerous archival, digital humanities, and public events, and the project has been featured in academic journals (American Quarterly, Common-place, Journal of Interactive Teaching & Pedagogy), general interest publications (Albuquerque Journal, PennLive.com, Philadelphia Inquirer, and WHYY), special interest publications (American Indian, Education Week, History News Magazine, and Humanities Magazine), podcasts (Code Switch and Our Fake History), and other media (C-SPAN and Pennsylvania Cable Network).
  • Jump to Public Outreach.
  Thanks to the support of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Digital Paxton has grown considerably, with new archival materials, contextual essays, and lesson plans. It's also given rise to an exciting new public humanities project: Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga is a Native American graphic novel available both online and in print and a public art exhibition at the Library Company of Philadelphia. To learn more about future plans, follow Digital Paxton on social media or visit GhostRiver.org.
  • Jump to GHOST RIVER.
  To learn more about how to use Digital Paxton, follow this path to "Using Digital Paxton," listed below Contents. To submit questions, share feedback, or get involved in the project, contact the editor.
  • Jump to Contact.
• 1 2016-08-31T12:52:16-07:00 Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Massacres 22 Kevin Kenny image_header 2019-08-11T08:12:53-07:00 The Paxton Boys, frontier militiamen on an unauthorized expedition, struck Conestoga Indiantown at dawn on December 14, 1763. "Fifty-seven Men, from some of our Frontier Townships, who had projected the Destruction of this little Commonwealth," Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, "came, all well-mounted, and armed with Firelocks, Hangers [a kind of short sword] and Hatchets, having travelled through the Country in the Night, to Conestogoe Manor." Only six people were in the town at the time, "the rest being out among the neighboring White People, some to sell the Baskets, Brooms and Bowls they manufactured." The Paxton Boys killed these six and burned their settlement to the ground.
  
  The Conestoga people lived on a 500-acre tract, which William Penn had set aside for them seventy years earlier, near the town of Lancaster, one hundred miles west of Philadelphia. By 1763 only twenty Conestoga people were living there—seven men, five women, and eight children.
  
  After the murders, local magistrates removed the remaining fourteen residents to the Lancaster jail and workhouse for their safety, but on December 27 the Paxton Boys rode into that town to continue the attack they had started two weeks earlier. Fifty men, "armed as before, dismounting, went directly to the Work-house and by Violence broke open the Door," Franklin reported, "and entered with the utmost Fury in their Countenances." Within a matter of minutes they had slaughtered the fourteen individuals sheltering at the workhouse, including the eight children.
  
  The Paxton men were fully aware of the symbolic and political significance of their actions. They murdered unarmed, peaceable Conestoga people to make the point that all Indians were the same. And they slaughtered the Conestogas on government property in broad daylight. In perpetrating the massacres, they repudiated the settlement policy of William Penn.
  
  Inspired by Quaker principles, Penn had founded his colony in 1682 as a "holy experiment" in which Christians and Indians could live together in harmony. He drew the model of his colony from the "Peaceable Kingdom" envisioned in the Book of Isaiah. That dream proved surprisingly resilient. In fact, the nineteenth-century Quaker artist Edward Hicks produced a series of paintings of the Peaceable Kingdom in which he always included Penn's legendary meeting with the Delaware peoples under the elm tree at Shackamaxon, in present-day Philadelphia. In pursuit of his vision, William Penn treated the native peoples in his province with uncommon respect (John Penn to James Harrison). 
  
  Yet for all his popularity, Penn's holy experiment always rested on colony-building foundations. There would have been no Pennsylvania, after all, had he not received a gift of 29 million acres from King Charles II in 1681—a gift that made him the largest individual landlord in the British Empire. Within this immense territory, Penn purchased land from native peoples and, by his understanding, fairly. But he did so because he needed to get clear title to their land so that he could sell it to settlers and try to make a profit from his colony.
  
  The myth of the Peaceable Kingdom, already in decline by the time of William Penn's death in 1718, disintegrated gradually over the next few decades. Penn's son and principal heir, Thomas, cast off the Quaker faith and converted to Anglicanism. He and his brothers continued to negotiate with native peoples but they did not hesitate to use fraud and intimidation. In 1737 they swindled the Delawares out of a huge tract of land in a transaction known as the "Walking Purchase." For the Delawares, the measure of this land was how much a man could walk in a day and a half. The Penns, however, sent out a team of relay runners who marked out a tract almost as big as Rhode Island. Most of the Delawares who lived there were forced to move west of the Susquehanna River, which at that time marked the western boundary of European settlement. The "Walking Purchase" remained their primary grievance when they went to war against Pennsylvania twenty years later.
  
  Immigrants from the province of Ulster, in the north of Ireland, also posed a threat to Pennsylvania's native peoples. These settlers began to arrive in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the eighteenth century and set up as squatters along the frontier, ignoring the land rights of the native peoples and the Penn family alike. They claimed the land by "tomahawk right"—marking trees at a distance from one another with their axes, and declaring the territory between these trees as their own. As early as 1730, a generation before the Paxton massacres, a group of Ulster squatters temporarily occupied Conestoga Manor, declaring that it was "against the Laws of God and Nature that so much Land Should lie idle while so many Christians wanted it to labour on and raise their Bread" (James Logan to John, Thomas, and Richard Penn).
  
  Conflict between western colonists and native peoples intensified during the Seven Years' War (1756–1763). Expelled from their lands in eastern Pennsylvania, most of the Delawares and Shawnees west of the Susquehanna River sided with the French as the lesser of two evils and launched devastating raids on frontier settlers. The colonial government in Philadelphia responded by declaring war on the Delawares and, for the first time, establishing a militia. A handful of strict Quakers remained true to William Penn's pacifist vision, but the Peaceable Kingdom had come to an end. Frontier settlers did most of the fighting during the war and, from their perspective, both branches of the government in Philadelphia—the Quaker-dominated Assembly and executive branch, run by the Penn family—seemed indifferent to their wishes.
  
  No sooner had the British defeated the French in 1763 than Pontiac's War, the largest Indian war in colonial American history, erupted. Delawares and Shawnees once again launched raids east of the Susquehanna River. Frontier settlers re-lived the nightmare of the Seven Years' War. It was in this context, in December 1763, that the Paxton men carried out their massacre.
  
  The Paxton Boys arose directly out of a local militia created by the colonial government in response to frontier demands for defense in the summer of 1763. Colonel John Armstrong of Carlisle commanded a unit west of the Susquehanna River and the Rev. John Elder, the "fighting pastor" of Paxton Presbyterian Church, commanded a unit to the east. These two units were supposed to be strictly defensive, but Elder and Armstrong used them to launch raids against the Delawares. When raids failed, the Paxton Boys, led by Lazarus Stewart and Matthew Smith, attacked the Conestoga people instead.
  
  At the end of January 1764, a month after the massacres, reports reached Philadelphia that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Paxton Boys were marching eastward, threatening to sack the city unless their grievances were met. They also demanded the right to "inspect" 140 Lenape and Moravian Indians who had been removed from the frontier and placed in protective custody. Given what the Paxton Boys had done to the Conestogas, the residents of Philadelphia could only imagine what this "inspection" might entail.
  
  When several hundred Paxton Boys reached Germantown, just six miles outside Philadelphia, they were met by a delegation led by Benjamin Franklin, who persuaded them to write down their grievances. Their spokesmen, Matthew Smith and James Gibson, submitted a Declaration and a Remonstrance for consideration by the colonial government, and what followed was a war of words instead of a war of weapons. Presbyterian supporters of the Paxton Boys in alliance with the Anglican faction surrounding the Penn family battled Benjamin Franklin and the Quaker party in print. The debate, which featured more than sixty pamphlets and ten political cartoons, went far beyond the immediate issue of the Conestoga massacres to address the fundamental question of how Pennsylvania ought to be governed.
  
  Despite Franklin's efforts, the Paxton murderers went unpunished. Nobody was investigated, let alone arrested or prosecuted. As a result, like-minded settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier felt free to behave in similar ways. The result was wave after wave of violence on the frontier, culminating in total war against indigenous peoples during the American Revolution. In Pennsylvania, the Paxton Boys' brutality was the exception as late as 1763, but during the Revolution it became commonplace.
  
  Ironically, Benjamin Franklin and the Paxton men ended up supporting the same side in the American Revolution. But that is because there was more than one revolution going on—the familiar struggle for lofty principles of liberty and equality in the east, and a lesser-known struggle involving land and American Indians in the west. Some historians have seen the Paxton Boys as frontier democrats fighting against the privilege of the Penn family who extended their fight for democracy into the revolutionary era. John Elder, Matthew Smith, John Armstrong, and Lazarus Stewart all rallied to the patriot cause, to be sure, but they were fighting for the same thing as they had fought for in the 1760s—access to land, personal security, and vengeance against indigenous peoples.
  
  In their Remonstrance, the Paxton Boys had demanded greater political representation for the western counties in the Pennsylvania Assembly, but that was only one of nine grievances; all of the others concerned the "savages" in their midst. The American Revolution did more than destroy the privilege of the Penn family; it doomed the region's native peoples. During the Revolutionary War, American patriots enacted the brutal logic of the Paxton Boys on a devastating scale. 
  
  This essay is based on Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (Oxford University Press, 2009).
  
  Further Reading
  • "James Logan to John, Thomas, and Richard Penn, February 17, 1731." Historical Society of Pennsylvania, James Logan letterbooks, vol. 3.
  • "John Penn to James Harrison, August 25, 1681." Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn, eds, Papers of William Penn, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981–1987), 2:108.
• 1 2016-11-30T13:40:58-08:00 Material Culture 12 Judith Ridner image_header 2016-12-12T07:35:37-08:00 The Paxton pamphlet war was waged in physical materials. The pamphlets and prints that circulated in Philadelphia during 1764 were material objects that had value as consumer goods in the marketplace. Yet their worth lay less in the paper and ink that composed them than in what scholars would call their materiality, the power these printed words or images had to evoke ideas about self and society in their readers or viewers. Those ideas assumed forms that reflected the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania culture that produced and consumed them.
  
  Thus, when Paxton critic Timothy Wigwagg called upon his fellow Pennsylvanians to gaze into a collective looking glass (a mirror) to see the Paxton men’s true motives and character, he highlighted the central role of material culture in this pamphlet war.
  
  Thanks to an eighteenth-century consumer revolution, small and affordable hand-held mirrors had become increasingly common goods in colonial America, allowing colonists to gaze at themselves and assess their appearances (Breen). Yet as Wigwagg knew well, mirrors did more than just reflect; they were also optical devices that could magnify and distort images, which gave them magical properties that allowed their holders to see truths and predict the future. Wigwagg was thus confident that his looking into mirror would reveal “Painted in the most striking Colours” the lines of a “design well Plann’d and Judiciously executed” by the Scots-Irish Presbyterian Paxton Boys, a design that would then be “clear to the Understanding of every Person, and Recorded in History as undeniable Facts.” Material objects such as looking glasses, Wigwagg argued, were powerful lenses that could be manipulated to reveal the hidden identities and agendas of the Paxton men.
  
  Wigwagg’s use of the looking glass was metaphorical. Yet it illustrates how the writers and illustrators of the pamphlet war employed a commonly understood language of material goods to mobilize public opinion and persuade their readers. Then, as now, material goods were read as indicators of an individual’s class status and identities. They could also be used in figurative ways to stereotype and stigmatize groups.
  
  Such was the case with the pamphlet war; for when these writers and illustrators depicted the physical appearance of those groups involved in this crisis, including how they dressed, the props or weapons they carried, and the objects they pursued or were associated with, they employed material culture as a rhetorical device to embody group identities and distinguish villains from victims. Yet because the Paxton men had both their critics and supporters, no group involved in the Paxton crisis was spared scrutiny.
  
  The Scots-Irish         
  As the ethnic group most closely identified with the Paxton men, Pennsylvania’s Scots-Irish were the first group pamphleteers caricatured. Benjamin Franklin set the precedent in his pamphlet, A Narrative of the Late Massacres, which sparked the pamphlet war. Franklin was an esteemed printer, editor, satirist, and “an extraordinarily knowledgeable student” in the use of “visual symbols, devices, and heraldry” for maximum impact on his audiences (Lemay 465). In this case, textual representations that would evoke visceral visual images were his weapons of choice. The Paxton men, he charged, were “CHRISTIAN WHITE SAVAGES” who had “inhumanly murdered” the Conestogas “in cold Blood” (8). To confirm, he signaled the Paxton men’s “barbarous” intent (9) with the “Firelocks, Hangers, and Hatchets” they carried with them as they road in to Lancaster on the day of the massacre (5). Readers, he knew, would notice that these Scots-Irish frontiersmen carried not just the muskets and swords typical of Euro-American warriors, but hatchets, items that were manufactured for the Indian trade, and weapons that colonists had come to associate with the most brutal forms of Indian warfare. In linking the Paxton men to a weapon used to stereotype Native warriors as bloodthirsty brutes, Franklin sought to prove their nefarious intent.
  
  Because intense ethnic and religious political rivalries undergirded the pamphlet war, Franklin also sought to undermine Scots-Irish political standing in the colony. To do so, he rhetorically racialized the Paxton men by associating these “freckled Face[d] and red Hair[ed]” Scots-Irish Presbyterians--a stereotyped portrait of an Irishman, even in the eighteenth century--with these heinous acts of violence (Bankhurst; Kenny). His point was clear: Scots-Irish Presbyterians were inherently bloodthirsty and thus stood apart as a savage other. To confirm, he noted how even the Turks, Moors, Popish Spaniards, and “Negroes of Africa” (21)--groups his colonial readers would most certainly have perceived as savage--were more civil than “these People” (13). By reducing the Scots-Irish to an ethnic stereotype, one that played to anti-Irish and anti-Presbyterian prejudices of his time, Franklin discredited these men as members of the provincial society. As he reckoned it for his readers, brutes who had “imbrued” their “Hands in innocent Blood,” thereby breaking the laws of King, Country, and God, did not deserve to be part of the polity (27).
  
  Scots-Irish bloodthirstiness became a popular trope used by Paxton critics. In the satiric, A Dialogue Between Andrew Trueman, and Thomas Zealot another anonymous pamphleteer wrote his narrative in a derogatory dialect meant to mimic an Ulster brogue, using the material sound of language to emphasize the cultural coarseness of the Scots-Irish. The fictional Thomas tells Andrew that while “fechting [fighting] the Lord’s Battles and killing the Indians at Lancaster and Cannestogoe,” he and other Paxton men had “shot six and a wee ane, that was in the Squaw’s Belly; we sculped three; we tomahawked three; we roasted three and a wee ane; and three and a wee ane we gave to the Hogs.” Shooting and roasting women and children were unimaginably heinous acts, but just as troubling, was the fact that these Christian Paxton men scalped and tomahawked them with hatchets in Indian-style.
  
  Paxton critics thus echoed Franklin’s critique of the inherently bloodthirsty nature of the Scots-Irish, while taking it one step further to suggest that these Scots-Irish were nothing more than bloodthirsty Irish Catholics in disguise. “[T]hey are all the same Family,” remarked another critic, “and always attended Mass in Ireland, whatever they may do in Pennsylvania.”
  
  The Quakers
  While Paxton critics ridiculed the Scots-Irish as blood-thirsty brutes, Paxton apologists took up a looking glass of their own and tilted it away from the heinous deeds of the Paxton men and towards their political adversaries, the Quakers. Using their mirror as a kind of magnifying glass, they saw deception. Material goods were not so much symbolic representations as they were props that could be manipulated to disguise Friends’ true character and intent.
  
  Proving Quaker duplicity was the primary intent of Paxton apologists. As the English immigrant pamphleteer David James Dove wrote, the Quakers acted “meek, merciful, [and] compassionate” to the point they “would seem to monopolize Christian Charity, and all the Tenderness of human Nature amongst themselves.” But they were not what they appeared to be to be. Indeed, upon hearing of the frontier depredations of Pontiac’s War, which had forced “near a thousand Families” to flee their homes and farms, Philadelphia Quakers had turned unsympathetically in the other direction, ignoring the plight of frontier colonists. These “compassionate and merciful Christians,” Dove noted with irony, “would not grant a single Farthing … for the Relief of their Fellow Subjects.” Yet they assisted and even sheltered Native American allies, a fact that Dove and other Paxton apologists regarded as particularly galling.
  
  The Paxton men echoed this charge in their Declaration & Remonstrance. As they saw it, Philadelphia’s Quakers “cherished and caressed” the Conestogas “as dearest Friends,” even though frontier residents accused these Native peoples of being allied with the colony’s “openly avowed imbittered Enemies.” Consequently, the Paxton men, who turned the tables on their critics by identifying themselves as “his Majesty’s faithful and loyal Subjects” (10), felt abandoned by Quaker political leaders who ignored their plight while finding the “means to enslave the Province to Indians” (8).
  
  Such favoritism, as the satirical etching Benjamin Franklin and the Quakers illustrates, was driven by avarice. Money served as the material object that Friends’ most desired and would do anything to acquire, even if it meant encouraging Native peoples to make war on frontier settlers. On the left-hand side of the illustration, Quaker merchant Israel Pemberton, signaled with his broad-brimmed hat and initials on the barrel, disperses hatchets to Indians, telling them to “Exercise those on the Scotch Irish & Dutch [Germans] & I’ll support you while I can.” Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin, to the right, calls the shots, urging others on while he holds a bag of Pennsylvania money while a group of Quaker men sit at the table and fret over the colony’s fate. A small Quaker man standing behind Franklin calls attention to the scene, observing: “This is the way our Money goes.”
  
  Diagnosing deception did not fully explain how the Quakers had duped the colony, however. To do that, colonists had to tear off the Quakers’ “Mask of falsely pretended Friendship” and strip them naked in order to reveal the truth of their selfish motives. This call to unmask the Quakers was a metaphorical one, yet it held persuasive power because it posed a head-on challenge to their physical modes of spiritual expression and self-presentation.
  
  Quakerism, as any Pennsylvanian knew, had an embodied quality that placed emphasis on corporeal forms of worship, including the controversial practice of quaking with the divine Light, which critics charged were staged to dazzle, enchant, and deceive onlookers (Tarter 145-151). Then there was the Quaker practice of plainness, which included the adoption of simple dress, speech, and manners. Among Quaker men, hats were especially important objects used to express this group aesthetic. Refusing to doff one’s hat to a superior was a hallmark of the Quaker commitment to denying false distinctions among men (Haulman 22; Kesselring 299-304; Smolenski).
  
  Because Quaker critics disagreed and interpreted Quaker men’s refusal to engage in “hat honour” (Kesselring 302) as a sign of disrespect for others, Paxton apologists frequently used broad-brimmed hats as visual cues to distinguish Quakers from others in the colony. The verses accompanying the illustration, The German bleeds & bears ye Furs noted how the “Hibernian … kicks to fling his broad brim’d Master.” Yet in depicting this plain-dressed, broad brimmed man as the master who rides the back of the Scots-Irishman with a hatchet-carrying Indian and a blindfolded German yoked to his arm (with Benjamin Franklin again overseeing the action from the sidelines) the engraver also captured the suspicions many Pennsylvanians harbored of the Quakers; namely, that these “broad-brims” were really the oppressive “Lords” whose desire of profit from trade with the Indians left a trail of dead colonists and burning cabins in their wake. Plain speech and simple dress were nothing more than disguises that masked the Quakers’ true character and intent.
  
  The Native Americans
  While pamphlet war authors and illustrators targeted Scots-Irish Presbyterians and Quakers as the villains in the Paxton crisis, their take on Pennsylvania’s Native peoples varied depending on their position in this war.
  
  Anti-Paxton writers focused their attention on the Conestogas, emphasizing their victimhood at the hands of the murderous Paxton men. The Conestogas, as Benjamin Franklin noted, were long known for “many Years” living “in Friendship with their White Neighbours” and “their peaceable inoffensive Behaviour.” More significant, he signaled their “poor, defenceless” status by “the Baskets, Brooms, and Bowls they manufactured” and sold to colonists. Their association with domestic tools, ones typically associated with women’s housekeeping and food preparation chores, feminized them, rendering these “trembling Lambs” even more sympathetic victims of the “savage Beasts of Prey,” the Paxton men (6). To make their case, Paxton apologists cast a wider net, drawing no distinction between the peaceful, Christian Indians and the colony’s Native American enemies, those who had “laid waste” to the frontier and practiced severe “Cruelties” on white captives.
  
  Armed with the assumption that all Native peoples were inherently barbaric, they regarded the Conestogas with intense suspicion, and thus deployed the metaphorical looking glass to scrutinize these Natives’ actions and motives. What they found reflected back at them was deception. The Conestogas, charged Thomas Barton “have been Spies upon all our Actions” and “have treacherously held a Correspondence with our avowed Enemies—and have often lent a helping Hand to bring Ruin and Desolation upon the Province.”
  
  This meant that the Conestogas were also artful wearers of disguises. “[T]o Day they are painted red, To-morrow blue, and the next Day they are any other Colour that they think will best prevent their being known,” wrote David James Dove. And once colonists removed their paint, wrote another, the true nature of these “Wolf-like” people was revealed; the Conestogas were not colony’s friends, but its enemies.
  
  Benjamin Franklin
  Paxton apologists, many of whom adamantly opposed his campaign to oust the Penn family proprietorship and replace it with royal government, seized upon the opportunity the Paxton crisis offered to critique of Franklin and his politics. Franklin, they argued, reveled in artifice. Rev. William Smith, the Anglican provost of the College of Philadelphia, charged that Franklin’s “real design … was not to elucidate, but the disguise and conceal the truth; which … according to his usual custom, he has very artfully, but not honestly, done.”
  
  To reveal his trickery, engravers pulled back a curtain and depicted Franklin as the powerbroker on the sidelines who called the shots. In Benjamin Franklin and the Quakers, Franklin holds the colony’s money while inciting action by calling out “Fight Dog[,] Fight Bear[,] I am Content If I but get the Gover’t.” Likewise, in The German bleeds & bears ye Furs, Franklin steps from the left while holding a petition to remove the proprietors; four tethered figures approach him with the Quaker reaching out his hand to greet him. In the verses that accompany the print, Franklin is identified as “the help” who arrives to “hold down the Hibernian[’]s Head” so that all would not “tumble down.”
  
  To his critics, Franklin was the ultimate double-dealer. By terminating the proprietary government so that he might advance his own interests as his goals, he used his “knowing head, and Silver tongue,” as the lyrics of a satirical song suggested, to dupe others, particularly the Quakers, into believing that he was a “gentle humane worthy man, a Pious good Samaritan.” Franklin was thus the real threat to the colony and its people.
  
  The Germans
  While pamphlet war writers and illustrators lampooned many of Pennsylvania’s ethnic, religious, and racial groups, they mostly spared the colony’s Germans. Given the distinctiveness of the German language and material culture, this is a curious omission; the Germans would have been easy to satirize with various visual and material cues (Falk). Ten years earlier, after all, Franklin had characterized them “Palatine Boors,” likening these newcomers to swine who “swarm into our settlements” and “become a Colony of Aliens” (Franklin).
  
  Furthermore, frontier German colonists were Paxton men. As such, they had joined the Scots-Irish who rode into Lancaster and murdered the Conestogas and had marched on Philadelphia, and that was because they, too, were angry about the protected status of these Native peoples. As the Lutheran Henry Melchoir Muhlenberg confirmed, “many of our Germans thought that it could be proved that the Indians living among the Moravian brethren had secretly murdered one or more of the inhabitants” (I:73-78). So why, then, did pamphleteers and engravers mostly ignore them?
  
  Both Paxton critics and apologists mostly agreed that the German were dupes being led along by others during this crisis. Paxton critic Isaac Hunt, charged that the Scots-Irish had tried to “blind the Dutch [Germans] by all the Political Dust [they] can raise.” As the print and verses accompanying, The German bleeds & bears ye Furs, demonstrate, Paxton apologists agreed, the bleeding, blindfolded German who bore “the furs of Quaker Lords and Savage Curs,” was nothing more than a dupe who was led along, not by the Scots-Irish, but by Benjamin Franklin and the Quakers.
  
  The blindfold, then, was the agreed upon material symbol for the colony’s Germans. This is significant because in a print debate that was ultimately a proxy for a larger discussion of power and identity in the colony, dismissing the Germans as easily-led fools also signaled their status as outsiders. Depictions of blindfolded Germans indirectly confirmed Franklin’s characterization of them as ignorant “Aliens,” which, as William Smith wrote in their defense, denied their agency as “the industrious” people” to whom this province is so much indebted for its flourishing state.”
  
  In a colony that was marked by tremendous cultural diversity by the mid-eighteenth century, the writers and illustrators who fanned the flames of the Paxton crisis employed looking glasses of their own making to scrutinize the objects that their ethnic, religious, or racial rivals wore, carried, or desired. Their goal was to reveal truths that would allow them to assess and dismiss their rivals’ claims to status and power in the colony. But context mattered, as these critics knew, because material items could be used in artful ways to disguise, obscure, or even blind. Thus, their works ought to be read as cautionary tales. In an age when consumer goods, including pamphlets and prints, were more readily available than ever before, colonists, these writers and illustrators warned, had to be wary about how they perceived and interacted with the diverse others around them, because not every group was who they appeared outwardly to be.
  
  This essay is based on Judith Ridner’s article “Unmasking the Paxton Boys: The Material Culture of the Pamphlet War” (Early American Studies, 2016). For more about Judith Ridner, visit the Creators 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).
  • 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 media/1717 first map showing Indiantown_edited-1.jpg 2017-02-08T08:18:08-08:00 A History of Conestoga Indiantown 10 Darvin L. Martin image_header 2019-06-01T01:08:15-07:00 Conestoga Indiantown was at the forefront of Native American/Colonial relations in the eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic. The colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia each signed treaties through Conestoga concerning a range of Native American issues that impacted the entire continent as Europeans traveled west.
  
  In hundreds of accounts written between 1701 and its demise in 1763, Indiantown served as a reference point in the first surveys to determine the Pennsylvania/Maryland border 16 miles to the south (Colonial Records of Pennsylvania). The records indicate that as Europeans moved in, Indiantown was increasingly regarded as a reservation and its inhabitants made increasingly dependent on both the Pennsylvania government and their European neighbors for sustenance.
  
  This essay will explore the history of Conestoga Indiantown, its people, and their displacement after the Paxton massacre.
  
  The Susquehannock Nation
  The Susquehannock Nation finds its roots in the Seneca Nation of western New York. Beginning in the early 1400s, Susquehannock peoples differentiated themselves from the Seneca, and migrated south-east, downstream along the river which now bears their name, to settle in what is now Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Kent 13-18). By the mid-1500s, Susquehannock culture dominated trade along the Susquehanna River and established several cities along its eastern shore, both north and south of the confluence of the Conestoga River with the Susquehanna. They grew maize, beans, at least six species of squash, tobacco, paw-paw fruit, at least two species of chenopodium, marshelder and maygrass, and engaged in hunting, fishing, beadwork, weaving, flint knapping, construction, and trade through a network that extended at least from modern-day Louisiana to Quebec (Minderhout 30ff; Ward 231ff).
  
  Captain John Smith referenced the Susquehannock in his account of exploration regarding the Chesapeake Bay in 1608 (Smith 58-61). Smith was surprised to find the Susquehannocks trading French goods from Quebec, a colony founded just a few years earlier. The Susquehannocks were also noted by the Swedish missionary Johannes Campanius, in 1645, when he described a fort located twelve Swedish miles (about 80 English miles) from New Sweden (now Wilmington, Delaware). “They came daily to trade with us…They live on a high mountain…there they have a fort, a square building surrounded with palisades…They have guns and small iron canon.” (Holm 157-158).
  
  Due to colonial pressures and the traumatic effect of disease introduced by Europeans, however, the Native population soon declined precipitously. Europeans considered the effect as “divine providence,” the natural winnowing of a once powerful people (Carlisle and Golson 108ff). In the 1670s, the Susquehannocks, now possessing far lesser influence, moved to the west side of the Susquehanna River, which was claimed by the government of Maryland.
  
  In May 1680, about 300 Susquehannocks were forcibly relocated from the lower village and placed in Maryland on a reservation 100 miles to the south near the first cataracts of the Potomac River (Maryland Archives). The reservation was rampant with disease and created systemic dependency, stripping the Susquehannocks of the ability to practice their culture and teach their children native values. Within two years scores of natives fled the reservation, and by any means possible, attempted to return to their homeland.
  
  Conestoga Indiantown
  Between 1682 and 1685, this group had reconnected with others and settled just south of the 40th parallel on the east side of the Susquehanna, about four miles inland (Jennings 198-199). They numbered about 200 people, and assumed the name Conestoga, and are henceforth known as the Conestoga Indians.
  
  They settled in the heart of what later became Penn’s Manor, and area of 16,000 acres initially restricted from colonial settlement (Kenny 21-22). William Penn allegedly visited the Natives at this location on his second visit to Pennsylvania in 1701. The 1717 Taylor survey of “Conestoga Manor” clearly shows “Indiantown” immediately north of John Cartledge’s 300 acre tract (PA 4:49).
  
  After William Penn’s death in 1718, the established Manor was gradually broken up for European settlement. By the time a new survey was drawn up in 1737, 414 acres remained surrounding the native village of “Indiantown.” The 414 acres were bracketed by farms established by English Quakers and Swiss-German Mennonites.
  
  In 1739, a Swiss-German neighbor by the name of Michael Bachman attempted to obtain the last of the Native lands—the very acres upon which the remaining Susquehannocks had settled. He went to Philadelphia and presented a request in which he claimed he could convince the Indians to remove themselves from the manor so that he could “purchase the spot where the old Indian town stands with the whole vacancy” (Taylor 147). James Logan denied the request, as the Indians of Conestoga were necessary as a listening post for broader Indian affairs.
  
  Seven Years’ War
  English frontiersmen turned against Conestoga Indiantown during the prologue leading into the French and Indian War. Gross atrocities occurred on both sides of the conflict brewing in the 1740s and exasperated into full scale guerilla warfare in the 1750s. However, Indiantown remained reclusive and largely peaceful.
  
  Those joining the war effort left Indiantown for the front lines of battle to the north and west. The small band of Conestogas that remained on 414 acres in southern Manor Township became trapped within this “reservation.” They were fearful of carrying guns to hunt beyond their small acreage. Even traveling outside the reservation to sell handmade baskets and bowls aroused the suspicion of a local public, which grew discontent with the native presence, and sought to take over their lands.
  
  Many of the Conestoga at Indiantown had converted to Christianity. They took on Christian names and named their children after their English and German neighbors. The local Lancaster government distanced itself from the administrative duties regarding Indiantown, and by default such responsibility rested squarely on the Quaker government in Philadelphia. Clinging to a three-generation old arrangement made by William Penn, Indiantown petitioned the Philadelphia government directly to settle its grievances. Quaker justice James Wright and German Mennonite Abraham Herr, who both lived near Indiantown, were appointed by the Pennsylvania government to supply them with flour and basic necessities (“Recollections”). Mennonite gunsmith Abraham Newcomer began to refuse serving the Natives at Conestoga Indiantown for fear that their guns and knives were being used against white frontiersmen (Dunbar 282).
  
  In Colonial Records (Vol. 9, p.88) we find the last address from the Conestoga, dated November 30, 1763:

  To the Honorable John Penn, esquire, lieutenant Governor and Commander-in-chief of the Province of Pennsylvania,
  
  Brother: We (the Conestoga Indians) take the present opportunity, by Captain Montour, to welcome you into this Country by this string of Wampum and as we are settled at this place by an agreement of peace and amity established between your grandfathers and ours, we now promise ourselves your favor and protection, and as we have always lived in peace and quietness with our Brethren and neighbors round us during the last and present Indian Wars, we hope now, as we are deprived from supporting our families by hunting, as we formerly did, you will consider our distressed situation and grant our women and children some clothing to cover them this winter. The government has always been kind enough to allow us some provisions, and did formerly appoint people to take care of us, but as there is no person to take that upon him, and some of our neighbors have encroached upon the tract of land reserved here for our use, we would now beg our brother, the Governor to appoint our friend Captain Thomas McKee, who lives near us and understands our language, to take care and see Justice done us.
  SOHAYS, his mark
  CUYANGUERRYCOEA, his mark
  SAGUYASOTHA (JOHN), his mark (Colonial Records 9:88)

  Pennsylvanian frontiersmen, particularly of Scots-Irish descent, festered increasing resentments against the Quaker-led Pennsylvanian government and its apparent sympathy for the Native people. The frontiersmen sought to defend their squatter properties from both Native American raids and the Pennsylvania Provincial Council. Suspicious that the peaceful natives of Conestoga Indiantown were providing aid and intelligence to the hostile natives on the frontier, these vigilantes formed their own militia with the goal of exterminating the local natives.
  
  Right of Conquest
  The Paxtons’ intent to kill every Conestogan, every adult or child who could claim inheritance, furthered their goals to take control of Indiantown. Immediately following the massacre, the Paxtons cited “the right of conquest,” claiming themselves as victorious with the right to claim ownership of a conquered territory. However, the property had been effectively managed as a reservation for decades by the Pennsylvania government in Philadelphia. Following the massacre, the property’s management was assumed by Sir William Johnson, the British-commissioned superintendent of Indian affairs for the colonies. Johnson appointed Jacob Whisler, a Mennonite neighbor, as the property’s caretaker (PA 1:119).
  
  On March 12, 1764, Whisler wrote an urgent letter to Surveyor General William Peters, in which he said that two men came to his home to inform him that nine or ten Paxton families intended to settle the town by right of conquest. In April, Whisler wrote again, informing the authorities that two families were already living on the land and a third was plowing it. When approached by Whisler, the squatters claimed they would defend their rights for the conquered land to the death. Whisler identified the families as that of Richard Meloon and Robert Bow (Brubaker 131).
  
  The Lancaster Magistrate Edward Shippen also reported to governor Penn that settlers were building new log houses on the Indian land and that an elderly couple named Magginty was living in one of the existing “Indian Wigwams.” However, both Edward Shippen and Thomas Barton, the rector at St. James Episcopal Church, issued pamphlets defending the acts of the Paxton militia. Shippen’s influence in 1763 was extensive. With the Philadelphia government demanding the identity and detention of the killers, the Paxton Boys could not have evaded arrest without the help of Shippen.
  
  Four years later, the land was still occupied. On January 13, 1768, the Pennsylvania assembly, through speaker Joseph Galloway, addressed the governor, reiterating that the respected colonial general Thomas Gage (later Governor of Massachusetts) and Sir William Johnson were dissatisfied with the management of Indiantown and that the perpetrators who murdered “a number of Seneca and other Indians,” had “eluded the hands of justice” (Colonial Records 9:409). The assembly gave voice to a concern among the continental governing authorities that the Indian lands were settled without the consent of the Indians themselves, namely the Seneca nation. A plan was developed to insure that Conestoga Indiantown was “officially” returned to the Pennsylvania government, and no Indian could ever lay claim to it again.
  
  Treaty of Fort Stanwix
  On November 5, 1768, Johnson signed a treaty with the Six Nations of the Iroquois at the strategic Fort Stanwix (present-day Rome, New York). In the treaty the Iroquois relinquished lands beyond their scope, extending the British boundary from the Alleghenies west through the full course of the Ohio River to the Tennessee River. The treaty effectively granted all of Pennsylvania south of the West branch of the Susquehanna, and all of modern-day West Virginia and Kentucky south of the Ohio River. And here, near the end of the verbiage of the treaty, specifically by name, the commissioners presented 500 dollars to the Seneca and Cayuga peoples “in full satisfaction of the ‘Conostoga Lands,’ which by the death of that People became vested in the Proprietaries.” The treaty stated that Pennsylvania “freely gave this sum as a farther Proof of the regard of that Province, for them, and of their concern for the unhappy fate of the Conostogas” (Marshall; full text available here). The payment was not made in standard British currency, but in dollars, presumedly the popular Spanish silver dollar of the time. The approximate exchange of four Spanish dollars equaled one British pound.
  
  Many of the Shawnee, Lenape, Cherokee, and various other tribes who lived throughout the lands negotiated in the treaty, did not acknowledge or agree to the terms and conditions. And as we find later, both Seneca and Cayuga Peoples challenged the claim to Conestoga Indiantown.
  
  Meanwhile, the Philadelphia government considered the Lancaster magistrate responsible for arresting a detaining the perpetrators of the Conestoga massacre. No one was arrested, but instead, after the treaty was signed, Jacob Whister was dismissed from his appointment as caretaker of the property. That responsibility instead was handed to Thomas Barton, the Episcopalian rector who earlier issued a pamphlet condemning Benjamin Franklin’s remarks about the massacre and justifying the actions of the Paxton boys (Myers).
  
  Barton almost immediately moved from his parsonage to Indiantown, and rebuilt the fences, constructed a barn and planted an apple orchard inside 50 acres of cleared land. In December 1770, he wrote a letter to Edmund Physick, the Penns’ land agent and suggested that occupying the land was not solely his idea or Johnson’s. He said his friends and he made the decision, that the governor endorsed such a decision to occupy the land, exactly as Whisler had done. Barton told Physick that he improved the property. At the time he moved there (1768) the fences were decayed, and the property was without “house, barn, nor stable, except two cabins erected by the Paxton people” (Brubaker 140-141).
  
  In May of 1775, eight Cayuga Indians journeyed down the Susquehanna to Conestoga to petition their own claim to Indiantown. They proceeded to Philadelphia, where a council was held with them on May 16th. Three of the eight claimed to be the closest living survivors of Sohays, who lived at Conestoga. One claimed to be Sohays’ brother. The Governor revealed a copy of the Stanwix Treaty and described that the land had already been paid. He claimed that a value in goods equal to “200 pounds York money” was paid to Togaiato, the Cayuga Chief, to be distributed as he saw fit. However, for their trouble and journey, the Governor granted the claimant party of eight a total of 300 dollars. The Cayuga accepted the payment and signed the back of the treaty forfeiting their claim to Indiantown (Mombert 280ff). As before, the Pennsylvania government negotiated with the Indians using Spanish dollars.
  
  The Deed is Done
  On September 16, 1780, an official deed was created for Indiantown. The deed mentioned the original Jacob Taylor Survey of 1717, which partitioned 16,000 acres as Penn’s Manor, including Indiantown by name. The deed also mentioned the treaty at Fort Stanwix, declaring that the next of kin to the murdered Natives forfeit all “right, title and interest to said Indian Town and the lands thereto belonging.” Finally, the deed stipulated 414 ¾ undivided acres, owned in fourths. John Musser, the Mennonite land agent of Lancaster, was granted one-fourth for the sum of 1,244 pounds 5 shillings lawful money of Pennsylvania in gold or silver. The remaining three-fourths were sold to Robert Morris, esquire of Philadelphia, for 3,750 pounds (Deed Book BB-28-38).
  
  The amount that the Philadelphia government paid in 1768 (500 Spanish dollars or 125 pounds) increased forty-fold when the government sold the tracts twelve years later. Over the same time period the farms adjacent to Indiantown significantly decreased in monetary value due to the American Revolution.
  
  Pennsylvania purposely did not pay a fair price to the Indians for these lands. This is a common theme we find throughout this tragic history. While written on September 16, 1780, the deed was not recorded until November 16, 1784. There is no record detailing what happened to the property between 1780 and 1784. It is probably during this period that squatters were removed. The deed would not have been finalized until the land was cleared of potential claims and could be subdivided for new settlement.
  
  John Musser acted as the local representative of Robert Morris’ land speculation. Morris represented Pennsylvania in the Second Continental Congress from 1775 to 1778, and extensively financed the American Revolution, giving one million pounds to pay the Continental troops under Washington. Morris owned numerous ships that carried cargo from Cuba and the West Indies to France, Spain, and Italy. He engaged in profiteering and seized illegal cargo in the West Indies, which is quite possibly why the Pennsylvania treasury paid Indians in Spanish dollars (Rappleye). The new United States Congress appointed Morris as the United States superintendent of finance from 1781 to 1784.
  
  John Musser took the first steps to divide up Indiantown a year after the deed was recorded. He sold 63 acres and 63 perches to the neighbor to the south, James Pratt on January 1, 1786 for 1,014 pounds (Deed Book EE-543). Pratt later transferred this property to his son William. Thirty days later, on Jan 31, 1786, Musser paid Morris for the remainder of Indiantown (Morris’s ¾ investment), for 7,000 pounds (Deed Book FF-122). After this, Musser continued to divide up Indiantown.
  
  Today, Chief’s Hill (also known as Indian Round Top) is the wooded patch inside property #19. The top of the mound is located where the western corner of property #20 is adjacent to the wooded patch. This mound is named for Togodhessah (Chief Civility), who as a young chief, addressed the Philadelphia government council on October 15, 1714, saying, “our Old Queen (Conguegos) is in the Indian mound, the aged warriors are dead; we are young buds of the old tree; we never saw our Great Father (Connoodaghtoh), but we shall keep the peace as long as the waters run or the sun continues to shine” (Colonial Records 2:574).
  
  This essay was derived from Darvin Martin’s “The Case for Conestoga Indiantown” (2015). To learn more about Martin, visit the Creators page.
  
  Further Reading
  • Jack Brubaker. Massacre of the Conestogas: On the Trail of the Paxton Boys in Lancaster County. History Press, 2010.
  • Rodney P. Carlisle and J. Geoffrey Golson, eds. Native America from Prehistory to First Contact. ABC-CLIO, 2006.
  • Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, Vol. 2 & 9. Harrisburg, Printed by T. Fenn & Co. 1831-1853.
  • Deed Book BB-28-38, EE-543, and FF-122. Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
  • John R Dunbar. The Paxton Papers. The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1957.
  • Thomas Campanius Holm. Description of the Province of new Sweden, now called by the English, Pennsylvania in America. Pennsylvania: McCarty & Davis, 1834.
  • Francis Jennings. The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990.
  • Kevin Kenny. Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
  • Barry C. Kent. Susquehanna’s Indians. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 2001.
  • Peter Marshall. “Sir William Johnson and the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 1768.” Journal of American Studies 2 (1967): 149-179.
  • Maryland Archives, Vol. 15, p. 280, dated May 12, 1680.
  • David J. Minderhout, ed. Native Americans in the Susquehanna River Valley, Past and Present. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013.
  • Jacob Isidor Mombert. An Authentic History of Lancaster County. Lancaster: J. E. Barr & Company, 1869.
  • James P. Myers Jr. “The Rev. Thomas Barton’s Authorship of The Conduct of the Paxton Men, Impartially Represented (1764),” Pennsylvania History 61 (Apr. 1994): 155-84.
  • Pennsylvania State Archives, Vol. 1 & 9.
  • Charles Rappleye. Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.
  • John Smith. The Generall Historie of Virigina, New England and the Summer Isles, Book 3, 1624.
  • Isaac Taylor. Dec 3, 1739, Papers Read Before the Lancaster County Historical Society. Lancaster, 1896.
  • H. Trawick Ward. “The Susquehannock Connection.” Excavating Occaneechi Town: Archaeology of an Eighteenth-Century Indian Village in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998.
• 1 2019-01-13T19:33:14-08:00 An Interview with the Paxton Boys: Procedure 8 Montgomery Wolf and Eleanor Andersen plain 2019-02-09T14:08:20-08:00 Setup
  Review resources available on Digital Paxton. Prior to lesson, assign Pontiac's War and the Paxton Boys as background reading. Ask students to bring a laptops or smartphones to class, and reserve communal laptops, if needed. Post learning objectives in classroom. Students should arrive with basic understanding of the Paxton massacre.
  
  Anticipatory Set (5 min)
  • Post do-now instructions, such as: "Pair-share with a neighbor about last night's reading. What happened? When did it happen? Who were the primary actors?"
  • Wait two minutes to initiate sharing portion of exercise. Sits at the front of the classroom and call on students to answer questions (what/when/who) posed in the do-now.
  • Read learning objectives aloud.
  
  Teaching & Modeling & Guided Practice (25-35 min)
  • Begin teaching portion of the lesson, clarifying material that students may have misunderstood in order to establish a shared understanding of the Paxton massacres. (5 min)
    • Key points: The British Empire made a truce with many enemies in 1763, ending years of war (Seven Years' War). A group of Indians continued attacks in western Pennsylvania (Pontiac's rebellion). Some western settlers sought revenge, murdering a group of peaceable Indians residing on a nearby reservation (Conestoga Indiantown). Afterwards, they marched on Philadelphia with the intention to menace Indians placed under government protection, many of whom were Quakers. Benjamin Franklin and his allies convinced the mob to disband just outside of Philadelphia (Germantown) and to publish their complaints.
  • Ask students, "How do historians know what happened?" If students answer, "the reading," ask, "How did the person who wrote the reading know what happened?" The correct answer is "primary sources." Define primary sources. (2-3 min)
  • Distribute the assignment sheet. Explain that students will examine analyze print and visual sources from the 1760s as historians. Then, they will apply what they learn by roleplaying in a podcast interview. (2-3 min)
  • Show The German Bleeds and Bears Ye Furs on the projector.
  • Explain to students that this is a political cartoon sought to bring audiences over to the Paxton Boys' side. Read the bottom text aloud. Cold-call students, asking what they think the creator of the cartoon wants us to notice, see, and believe. Point out that these people feel oppressed. Ask students what else they see. Interject observations throughout the process to model engagement with primary sources. Take notes on student engagement and responses. Help students recognize figures and themes such as (but not limited to): 
    • Figures: Benjamin Franklin (holding the document), the Quaker (wearing broad-brimmed hat), the Scot-Irish settler (carrying the Quaker), the German settler (wearing the blindfold), and the Native American (carrying the hatchet).
    • Themes: master/servant power dynamics, civilization/savagery, religious/racial identity, politics/government, oppressed/oppressors, fake news, and trust.
  • Proceed when students can identify figures and themes without coaxing. (10-15 min)
    • If students have trouble, repeat process with Franklin and the Quakers. Scaffold what students should notice and ask them to elaborate. (5-10 min)
  
  Independent Work (55-65 minutes)
  • Share assignment sheet with students via Google Drive.
  • Call on a student to read assignment sheet aloud. Students will make a 5-10 min podcast using the primary and secondary sources assigned. Students will work in groups of three, with one Paxton supporter, one Paxton opponent, and one host. The host's job is to set the stage and question both versions of the story. Take questions. (5-10 min)
  • Count students off by threes to create groups. (1-2 min)
  • Students read through final two sources. Teacher circulates, checking in and helping students identify key ideas and themes (above) from sources as necessary. Students draft and record podcasts. (50-60 min)
  • Students submit podcast files via Google Drive by the beginning of next class. Uncompleted work is assigned as homework.
  
  Closure & Feedback
  After grading students student assignments, the teacher meets with groups during an Independent Work session. Successful students will present a well-organized podcast with arguments that cite evidence from the primary sources. During a subsequent class on the American Revolution, connect colonial revolt against metropolitan rule in western Pennsylvania and Philadelphia to that of American colonies against Great Britain. Comment on students' participation in the modeling portion of the lesson. Solicit student opinions on the assignment for the purpose of instructional reflection.

  Download a printable version of this procedure.

• 1 2017-03-29T05:15:09-07:00 Historiographic Battles 5 plain 2017-03-29T05:22:35-07:00 Writers published numerous histories of the Pennsylvania colony during the late-1750s, each purporting to shed new understanding on the present conflict. Central of those narratives was whom to blame. Authors variously pointed fingers at the fecklessness of Pennsylvania Proprietors and the pacifism of Quaker Assembly members.

  William Smith, A Brief State of the Province of Pennsylvania (London, 1755).

  Episcopalian priest William Smith attributed the colony’s troubles to Quaker opposition to a militia. His attacks on the Society of Friends eventually alienated him from Benjamin Franklin, whose ally—and recent Quaker convert—Joseph Galloway penned a lengthy retort, A True and Impartial State of the Province of Pennsylvania (1759).

  Richard Jackson, An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (London, 1759).

  This anonymously-published book attacked the Penn family (who were no longer Quakers) and the proprietary nature of the colonial government while defending the actions of Quakers in the assembly during the Seven Years’ War. While originally credited to Benjamin Franklin, it was actually authored by Richard Jackson.

  Anonymous (likely Thomas Penn), Criticism of Franklin’s Historical Review (London, 1759 or 1760). 

  This anonymous, unpublished manuscript critiques Historical Review. The manuscript was written in 1759 or 1760, almost certainly by Thomas Penn.

  Anonymous (likely James Claypoole), Franklin and the Quakers (Philadelphia, 1764).

  Franklin’s associations with the Quakers complicated his political career. Franklin appears in the foreground of this etching, holding a sack labeled “Pennsylvania money.” Israel Pemberton appears inferentially: To the left, prominent Quaker merchant Abel James distributes tomahawks from a barrel labeled “I.P.”
• 1 2019-12-04T11:19:19-08:00 Where are their Voices? 5 Julian Perrin image_header 2019-12-10T06:24:32-08:00 Students will use the graphic novel Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga to give voice to Leni Lenape, Conestoga, and Moravian Indians by analyzing primary source materials from the Paxton massacres and 1764 pamphlet war. This lesson provides a pedestal for students to explore colonial bias and stereotypes. Students will use primary sources to develop an historical understanding of how local Native peoples were excluded from colonial records of the incident.
  
  Essential Questions:
  • How were the voices of local Native Americans suppressed or excluded from the 1764 pamphlet war?
  • How were local Native Americans stereotyped in primary source materials?
  • How do printed materials (e.g. political cartoons) compare to unpublished materials (diaries)?
  • How were the Native Americans interned in Philadelphia used to sway public opinion against Paxton critics such as Benjamin Franklin and the Quakers in the Pennsylvania Assembly?
  • How does Ghost River give voice to those Native peoples?
  
  Objectives:
  • Describe the representation of local Native Americans in primary source materials.
  • Use contrasting primary and secondary sources to understand the perspectives of both colonialists and Native Americans. 
  • Use primary sources (a painting, political cartoon, and diary) to better understand a secondary source (Ghost River).
  • Develop structured and coherent writing that uses textual evidence to make an argument about the Native Americans involved in the Paxton incident.
  
  Grade Level: Grades 9 and 10
  
  Standards:
  • CC.8.6.9-10.C: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
  • CC.8.6.9-10.H: Draw evidence from informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
  • CC.8.5.9-10.F: Compare the point of view of two or more authors for how they treat the same or similar topics, including which details they include and emphasize in their respective accounts.
  • CC.8.5.9-10.I: Compare and contrast treatments of the same topic in several primary and secondary sources.
  
  Historical Background:
  
  Excerpt from Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost:

  The Paxton Boys, frontier militiamen on an unauthorized expedition, struck Conestoga Indiantown at dawn on December 14, 1763. "Fifty-seven Men, from some of our Frontier Townships, who had projected the Destruction of this little Commonwealth," Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, "came, all well-mounted, and armed with Firelocks, Hangers [a kind of short sword] and Hatchets, having travelled through the Country in the Night, to Conestogoe Manor." Only six people were in the town at the time, "the rest being out among the neighboring White People, some to sell the Baskets, Brooms and Bowls they manufactured." The Paxton Boys killed these six and burned their settlement to the ground.
  
  The Conestoga people lived on a 500-acre tract, which William Penn had set aside for them seventy years earlier, near the town of Lancaster, one hundred miles west of Philadelphia. By 1763 only twenty Conestoga people were living there—seven men, five women, and eight children.
  
  After the murders, local magistrates removed the remaining fourteen residents to the Lancaster jail and workhouse for their safety, but on December 27 the Paxton Boys rode into that town to continue the attack they had started two weeks earlier. Fifty men, "armed as before, dismounting, went directly to the Work-house and by Violence broke open the Door," Franklin reported, "and entered with the utmost Fury in their Countenances." Within a matter of minutes they had slaughtered the fourteen individuals sheltering at the workhouse, including the eight children.
  
  The Paxton men were fully aware of the symbolic and political significance of their actions. They murdered unarmed, peaceable Conestoga people to make the point that all Indians were the same. And they slaughtered the Conestogas on government property in broad daylight. In perpetrating the massacres, they repudiated the settlement policy of William Penn.

  
  Excerpt from Scott Paul Gordon, Christian Indians

  The armed frontiersmen who marched to Philadelphia in February 1764 planned to murder 140 Indians gathered in barracks in the city's Northern Liberties. Most of these Indians were Christians, having lived in the Moravian mission towns of Nain and Wechquetank in Northampton County. Provincial authorities decided to “order the Moravian Indians down to Philadelphia” in November 1763, as Governor John Penn wrote, because “the people of Northampton County … were determined to cut them all off” (John Penn to Richard Penn). These individuals were joined by other Native Americans from Wyalusing, an Indian town on the Susquehanna River. Except for their leader, John Papunhunk, who had been converted by Moravian missionary David Zeisberger, the Wyalusing Indians were neither Moravian nor Christian. The Paxton Boys' Declaration and Remonstrance clearly identified the different groups gathered in Philadelphia: “Some of these Indians now in the Barracks of Philadelphia are confessedly a part of the Wyalusing Indians, which Tribe is now at War with us; and the others are the Moravian Indians, who [are] living amongst us under the Cloak of Friendship.”
  
  These Christian Indians were confined at the Philadelphia barracks and on Province Island from November 1763 until March 1765. Many prominent citizens visited them, including Governor John Penn and Anthony Benezet, and mobs threatened them. They tried, as much as possible, to live as a congregation as they had in Nain and Wechquetank. Moravian missionary couples, Bernhard Adam and Margaret Grube and Johann Jacob and Johanna Schmick, lived with them. The diaries kept by these missionaries record regular services, communions, lovefeasts, births, and baptisms. Sadly, these diaries are also filled with deaths and burials. Fifteen Indians died in May and June 1764, and twenty more died the next month: in all, fifty-five Moravian Indians were buried in 1764 in Philadelphia's Potter's field. The Paxton Boys did not reach the Christian Indians in February 1764, but the confinement that their threats precipitated turned out to be more deadly than their guns and sabers.

  
  Materials:
  • Ghost River: The Fall & Rise of the Conestoga (print or digital edition)
  • Excerpts from Ghost River (34-36; 45-47)
  • Franklin and the Quakers (political cartoon and transcription) 
  • Excerpts from Diary of the Indian Gemeine in the Barracks of Philadelphia, Final Draft (Jan. 24 - Dec. 31, 1764)
  
  Procedure:
  
  Warm-up: Write-Pair-Share (10 minutes):
  • Show image of Benjamin West's Penn's Treaty with the Indians (1771-72) and ask students to write and reflect on: 
    • How are the colonists portrayed in this painting?
    • How are the native peoples portrayed in this painting?
    • What might have been Benjamin West's agenda for creating these portrayals?
  
  Notes for the Teacher: Penn's Treaty with the Indians (1771-72) was commissioned by William Penn's son Thomas Penn. It depicts the meeting of William Penn and the Quakers, members of the Leni Lenape tribe, and merchants in Shackamaxon along the Delaware River.
  • Divide students into pairs and have them share their responses with partners.
  • Reset class and ask volunteer pairs describe their responses.
  • Guide students to understanding about how images can shape popular understandings of peoples and histories.
  • Refer to image of page 46 from Ghost River to introduce the lesson's objective.
  
  Guided Review: Mini-Lecture (5-10 minutes):
  • Review chronology of the Paxton incident using Ghost River and historical background excerpts.
  
  Notes for the Teacher: The Paxton pamphlet war features dozens of political cartoons, pamphlets, and broadsides. Engravers like James Claypoole, who created Franklin and the Quakers, used these materials to attack their political opponents and influence popular opinion. This image depicts Benjamin Franklin conspiring with his political allies, the Quakers in the Pennsylvania Assembly, to arm their enemies, the Native American had attacked the colony during the Seven Years' War. It should be noted that the "Christian Indians" that the Paxton mob murdered (the Conestoga people) did not participate in any of that violence.
  
  Activity (20 minutes):
  • Break students into two groups (A and B) based upon their original Write-Pair-Share pairings.
  • Group A will analyze the political cartoon Franklin and the Quakers (1764) and pages 36-40 of Ghost River. Students will draw connections between the political cartoon and the graphic novel using these questions:
    • How are Native Americans stereotyped in the political cartoon?
    • Why might the voices of local Native Americans have been suppressed or excluded from the political cartoons and pamphlets that circulated in the 1764 pamphlet war?
    • How does Ghost River give voice to those Native peoples?
  • Group B will analyze excerpts from Diary of the Indian Gemeine in the Barracks of Philadelphia, Final Draft (Jan. 24- Dec. 31, 1764) and pages 36-40 of Ghost River. Students will draw connections between the diary and the graphic novel using these questions:
    • How do the diaries describe the experience of Moravian Indians interned in Philadelphia? How does that experience contrast with Benjamin West's idyllic scene (Penn's Treaty with the Indians)?
    • How do these diary entries give voice to the interned native peoples? Who gives voice to those peoples?
    • How does Ghost River represent the experience of interned Lenape and Moravian Indians?
  
  Notes for the Teacher: The Diary of the Indian Gemeine in the Barracks of Philadelphia was recorded by Moravian missionaries who accompanied the Lenape and Moravian Indians interned in Philadelphia. These excerpts are recorded in German, and they have been transcribed and translated in order to make them accessible to the students. These excerpts describe their relocation from Province Island (where the Philadelphia Airport currently resides) to the Philadelphia Barracks (in what is today Northern Liberties).
  
  Excerpts for Analysis:

  January 25: We began to settle in a bit. The things that we had left behind on Province Island came to us, although our good Indians missed many things, particularly axes, that had been stolen. In the evening, Br. Grube held a service in his own room.
  
  February 4: Br. Neusser and Ludwig Weiss visited us. We heard a lot of bad reports. In the afternoon, Captain Schlosser came and reported to us that we should move to the second story with the soldiers, because there were no keys if the rooms should be broken into. Because the order regarding the moving of the soldiers came so late, a great confusion arose between them and our poor Indians, who were chased from one place to another, particularly when a couple shots happened outside the barracks, so that everyone got alarmed and made ready to fight. We then had our hands full with our Indians, getting them in their lodgings, and quieting them.
  
  February 20: After the early service, first Br. Schmick and then his wife visited the Indians in their rooms, and they found several sick.

  Partner & Class Discussion (5 minutes):
  • Have students return to their partners from the first Write-Pair-Share exercise and share and record their responses to the two different primary source materials they examined (the diary and the political cartoon).
  • Ask pairs to answer a prompt and be prepared to share it with the class.
    • How were Native Americans represented in the two primary source documents?
    • Why might be these two documents tell such a different story about the Paxton incident?
    • How does Ghost River give Native peoples a voice?
  • Have volunteer pairs share their answers with the class.
  
  Assessment: Students will conduct research on their own by using either Digital Paxton or the Ghost River digital edition to find an additional printed, manuscript, or visual record that gives voices to the Conestoga, Lenape, or Moravian Indians. Students should justify their selections by describing how their records contrast with Benjamin West's Penn's Treaty with the Indians.
  
  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).