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1. 1 2016-12-12T15:59:32-08:00 Will Fenton 82bf9011a953584cd702d069a30cbdb6ef90650a Criticism of Benjamin Franklin's Historical Review [Thomas Penn?] Will Fenton 3 Criticism of Franklin's historical review of the constitution and government of Pennsylvania gallery 2018-02-12T23:26:57-08:00 1759 Penn, Thomas, 1702-1775 Call Number: Mss.974.8.C86 This manuscript offers a critique of A Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (1759). A Historical review was anonymously published, but it has been credited to either Benjamin Franklin or Richard Jackson. Written in the wake of the politically divisive 1750s, the pamphlet attacked the proprietors of Pennsylvania and the proprietary nature of the colonial government and defended the actions of the Assembly and Quaker Party during the Seven Years' War. The manuscript in the APS's vault was written in 1759 or 1760, likely in London. It defends the proprietor and the government in general. Largely unknown to historians, this manuscript provides insight into the deep political divisions within colonial Pennsylvania by offering a clear view into the beliefs of the proprietors and the proprietary party. The anonymous author of the work is almost certainly Thomas Penn. The manuscript was never published. American Philosophical Society. Will Fenton 82bf9011a953584cd702d069a30cbdb6ef90650a

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• 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 2017-03-29T05:15:09-07:00 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.”