Frontier Country

The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania

Patrick Spero

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780812293340
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In Frontier Country, Patrick Spero addresses one of the most important and controversial subjects in American history: the frontier. Countering the modern conception of the American frontier as an area of expansion, Spero employs the eighteenth-century meaning of the term to show how colonists understood it as a vulnerable, militarized boundary. The Pennsylvania frontier, Spero argues, was constituted through conflicts not only between colonists and Native Americans but also among neighboring British colonies. These violent encounters created what Spero describes as a distinctive "frontier society" on the eve of the American Revolution that transformed the once-peaceful colony of Pennsylvania into a "frontier country."Spero narrates Pennsylvania's story through a sequence of formative but until now largely overlooked confrontations: an eight-year-long border war between Maryland and Pennsylvania in the 1730s; the Seven Years' War and conflicts with Native Americans in the 1750s; a series of frontier rebellions in the 1760s that rocked the colony and its governing elite; and wars Pennsylvania fought with Virginia and Connecticut in the 1770s over its western and northern borders. Deploying innovative data-mining and GIS-mapping techniques to produce a series of customized maps, he illustrates the growth and shifting locations of frontiers over time. Synthesizing the tensions between high and low politics and between eastern and western regions in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, Spero recasts the importance of frontiers to the development of colonial America and the origins of American Independence.

CHAPTER 1

The Hidden Flaw

There is a fundamental principle about frontiers in the early modern world. A frontier did not exist without a government to defend it, and a government would cease to exist if it could not protect its frontiers. The developments on the eighteenth-century American frontiers, then, can only be appreciated by understanding the creation of the colonial government to which those frontiers belonged. For Pennsylvania, that founding moment came with the Frame of 1701, a document that scholars have described with many superlatives: “the most famous of all colonial constitutions,” “radically democratic,” “remarkably innovative,” “a landmark of religious liberty,” one of the “most influential documents protecting individual rights,” and “comparable in the development of political institutions to the development of the wheel in transportation.” In its own time, the Frame was credited with the economic prosperity that the eastern areas of Pennsylvania enjoyed for much of the eighteenth century. The colony’s remarkable progress, a leading assemblyman noted in 1739, “is principally, and almost wholly, owing to the excellency of our constitution; under which we enjoy a greater share both of civil and religious liberty than any of our neighbors.”¹

There was, however, a fatal oversight in the Frame of 1701. It failed to address the issue of political expansion. Rather than creating a stable political environment, as most have assumed it did, the Frame created a formula for the colony’s ultimate demise. This flaw only became apparent as the colony tried to incorporate new territory in the eighteenth century. By the time of the American Revolution, the revolutionaries who drafted a new constitution in 1776 knew of this and other problems, declaring “we are determined not to pay the least regard to the former constitution of this province, but to reject everything therein that may be proposed, merely because it was part of the former constitution.” To understand how the authors of the revolutionary constitution of Pennsylvania came to this conclusion, we must turn to where the seeds of this revolt were first planted: the flawed founding.²

Figure 2. This map is based on a colored version of the 1755 London-printed A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America, with the Roads, Distances, Limits, and Extent of the Settlements, also known as the Mitchell Map, named for its designer John Mitchell, a Virginia-born doctor. Pennsylvania’s boundaries in this version are farther north than they are today and include parts of modern-day western New York, while its western border mirrors the Delaware River. The borders appear clear on this British map, although in practice, they were much harder to establish in the colonies. New York’s boundaries, for example, were never quite as expansive as this map depicts.

“A Just, Plain, and Honest People That Neither Make War upon Others nor Fear War from Others”

For three days, the English ship Welcome made its course up the Delaware River, as anxious passengers scanned the shore for signs of life. The vessel carried William Penn and about a hundred others who had come to launch a new English colony called Pennsylvania. On the night of October 26, 1682, they came upon a clearing with a small fort and scattered houses. They had reached their destination.³

The boat’s appearance came as a surprise to those on shore. As soon as the ship moored, several magistrates left the fort and paddled a small canoe out to investigate. Penn showed them his charter from King Charles II declaring Penn the proprietor of the land that these magistrates governed. The magistrates, appointed by the Duke of York, the previous proprietor, seemed uncertain. They took Penn’s papers and told him to stay put while they went ashore to review his documents. The magistrates conferred that night. Given that Penn had sent advance agents to the colony, the magistrates’ behavior was likely a performance of protocol—or at least, they wanted to ensure that the man claiming to be Penn was not an imposter. By morning, they had determined that his charter was valid and readied the ritual that would recognize Penn’s power as the head of this new colony.⁴

Penn had prepared for what happened next. When he went ashore, the magistrates handed him the keys to the fort, the strongest symbol of political sovereignty in the area. Penn unlocked its door, entered, and closed the door behind him. He stood alone in the fort—now his fort—for a moment, then opened the door and walked back out. The magistrates greeted him with twigs from the forests beyond, a piece of earth, and a bowl containing river water, representations of Penn’s new authority over the woods, land, and streams of this English colony.⁵

Penn’s journey to the banks of the Delaware River was an arduous one. Penn, the son of a distinguished naval hero whose exploits had won the family fortune, received art education at the most elite institutions in England and on the Continent. His privilege meant that he had access to the finest things in life. Indeed, a life of indulgent complacency seemed his likely destiny. Penn, however, chose to take a different path while in his twenties. Troubled by the violent world around him, Penn became a critic of the reigning order in England. Always a searcher, he converted to Quakerism after discovering his Inner Light. He rejected the life of compliance and comfort that his father had cleared for him. Instead, he embraced the faith’s tenets of individual introspection and communal harmony. Imprisoned and exiled for his beliefs, Penn fought for years to regain his stature. By 1681, Penn had won the favor of Charles II’s court, and with it, the colony he would call Pennsylvania—or Penn’s woods, named not for him, but for his father, Admiral William Penn, whose past service to the Crown the younger Penn had leveraged to secure a colony.⁶

The ritual Penn performed outside the fort was the culmination of his work. The “turf, twig, and water” ritual was an ancient one, dating to the days of feudalism when warring English lords needed a way to show their lieges that they had surrendered their powers to another. Now, centuries later, the tradition, known more formally as the livery of seisin, found a new purpose in the New World as a symbolic means to establish sovereignty over acquired land. Penn’s acceptance of the keys and the gifts signaled the dawn of a new era. Harkening back to a lord’s feudal controls over people and territory, it also showed just how much power proprietors could have in the colonies they possessed.⁷

The symbolism fit the circumstances. Charles II granted Penn a colony from the Dutch territory the Crown acquired in 1664. Charles’s gift made Penn the largest landowner in the English Empire, save for the king himself. Penn’s charter gave him an expanse that stretched from the Delaware River five degrees west and between the fortieth and forty-third parallels in breadth, more than twenty-five million square acres of land. Charles had carved this territory out of the holdings of his brother, the Duke of York, who held a tract of land that ran from the southern tip of modern-day Delaware all the way north, through New York City, to Canada. With the transfer of twigs, water, and earth at the fort, the Duke of York’s magistrates recognized the shift of sovereignty from their previous master to their new one.⁸

The ritual also encapsulated the very peculiar nature of a proprietary government. In proprietary colonies, individuals—in this case William Penn—were vested with inordinate power. As the person who controlled the waterways, land, and woods, Penn’s powers resembled those of a feudal lord. Likewise, his responsibilities were similar to those that lords had to their tenants. Penn—and, after him, his sons—would dispense land, control the courts, create governments, and form a very personal relationship with colonists based on an allegiance that resembled the loyalties tenants held toward their manorial lords. Every landowner, for instance, was to provide the proprietary with a quitrent, an annual payment given in exchange for the security and prosperity the proprietorship’s good governance provided. This reciprocal relationship in which colonists gave their loyalty in exchange for protection had feudal roots, but it also mimicked the bond that knitted subjects to the English Crown in the early modern world. Indeed, it is what held all colonial governments together.

The ritual also contained an implicit statement about Penn’s vision for the future of the colony. Although the colony contained only a few fledgling communities hugging the Delaware River in 1682, Penn planned for it to realize its full geographic expanse, if not within his lifetime then certainly in his descendants’. Indeed, he was well on his way before he arrived. By the time he left England, he had sold nearly 300,000 acres of land to more than 300 individuals, most of whom were fellow Quakers and many of whom were of middling means but great aspiration.⁹

Indeed, Penn kept expansion in mind in everything he designed, including his government. When Penn arrived on the banks of the Delaware, he carried two founding documents that he hoped would turn his expansionist dreams into a reality: a Frame of Government and twenty laws called “The Concessions” that would regulate the behavior of the first settlers. In the Frame, he transferred most of his political powers to his settlers by creating two legislative bodies and establishing a weak executive that he intended to grow even weaker over time. The two major governing bodies were representative bodies, the Assembly, similar in theory to a Parliament, and the more elite Provincial Council, similar to an upper House of Lords. Penn vested the Provincial Council with the power to control all facets of colonial growth. In consultation with the governor, the Provincial Council was to “settle and order the situation of all cities, ports, and market towns in every county, modeling therein all public buildings, streets, and market places, and shall appoint all necessary roads, and high-ways in the province.” The Assembly, meanwhile, would grow alongside the colony to five hundred members, proportionally represented by the hundreds (an English term to define an administrative region within a county) and counties.¹⁰

Penn also outlined the process through which land acquisition would happen. In his “Concessions,” he declared that the proprietor was the only person who could purchase land from Native Americans. He was aware that Native peoples in other colonies complained of deceptive land practices, and the strife in these colonies often frustrated English imperialists’ plans for their colonial domains. Penn believed that direct negotiations between Indian groups and himself (or his representatives in his absence) would create more formalized and peaceful diplomatic protocols for acquiring land. Such procedures also reduced the chance for individuals to hold competing titles. By purchasing all land directly from Indians through formal diplomatic treaties and alliances, the transfer would thus rest on the theory of consent facilitated through diplomacy between the proprietor and Indian nations. Penn’s approach to land also revealed something else about his vision for expansion. While he was willing to defer to colonists in governing settled areas, Penn’s land policy meant he controlled the acquisition of all new territory.¹¹

There was one thing wrong with the ritual. While Penn planned to assert his rights to all of the land outlined in his charter, he intended this growth to occur peacefully. The livery of seisin, however, occurred at a fort, a symbol of war, militarization, violence, and all the emotions such a structure conjured: fear, anger, hatred, and desperation. Penn wanted none of these things in his realm. As he promised his Indian neighbors, “The people who come with me are a just, plain, and honest people that neither make war upon others nor fear war from others because they will be just.” With his designs for an ordered expansion through just treatment of Indians and good governance, Penn expected to build bridges, roads, and markets connecting people, not forts that divided. There would be no frontiers in Penn’s woods.¹²

Penn knew that good relations with Native Americans were the foundation upon which his promise of peace rested. He used the Concessions to reinforce this pledge by regulating interactions between colonists and Native Americans. Penn acknowledged that disputes over trading practices had led to conflict in other colonies. In Pennsylvania, he wanted to create a means of guaranteeing open and fair trade by regulating it. He limited trading to specific areas designated as public markets, mandated that all traders receive a license through the governor, required all goods to be inspected and stamped by colonial officials to protect against fraud, and placed heavy fines on those dealing in “goods not being good.”¹³

He also knew that the daily interactions of cross-cultural contact caused tensions. He thus declared that Indians should receive the same protections of the law that colonists enjoyed. If any settler wronged an Indian, Penn warned that the colonist should expect to “incur the same penalty of the law, as if he had committed it against his fellow planter.” Penn seemed particularly worried that settlers might seek retribution if they felt wronged by an Indian. Penn warned that under no circumstances were settlers to take the law into their own hands, stating that colonists “shall not be his own judge upon the Indian, but he shall make his complaint to the governor of the province, or his lieutenant, or deputy, or some inferior magistrate near him.” Penn also proposed a novel way to handle the inevitable conflicts that would arise between Indians and colonists: juries composed of equal numbers of Indians and colonists. Penn’s goal was to create an environment of just treatment that avoided rash action.¹⁴

Penn’s laws revealed his political acumen. He was a visionary, a theorist, and an optimist, but he was also a realist. Penn saw trade as an opportunity for both unity and friction. In theory, Penn believed fair dealing and brisk trade would help bring colonists and Indians together. In practice, he recognized that intercultural relationships were difficult and that colonists might try to defraud Indians of goods and lands. Penn the realist visionary anticipated this human inclination and saw government as the only means of safeguarding against it.

Penn applied this same foresight to controlling expansion. He envisioned developing any newly purchased land through a Land Office staffed by a Superintendent and various deputies. He would build some manors, but he would sell other land to individuals, most likely through a public auction that distributed lands fairly and evenly. All landowners would pay an annual quitrent to the proprietor for the protection and prosperity that proprietary offices provided them. The quitrent would not be onerous, but it would give Penn some compensation for his troubles and allow him to continue to develop the colony.

All of this planning would promote prosperity, peace, and stability. It was neither utopian nor cynical. Like so much else Penn had done to prepare, the plan sounded good in theory and appeared realistic from the drawing rooms in London.

“Be Soe Good and Kind a Neighbor”

Soon after arriving in his colony, Penn discovered a challenge to his expansionary vision: the imagined borders outlined in his charter conflicted with those of his English neighbors. Many of these overlapping jurisdictions existed only in the abstract because colonial settlement still hugged the eastern seaboard. No one, for instance, seemed to notice that Virginia’s claims to the Ohio River were the same as Pennsylvania’s, or that Connecticut might assert ownership to parts of the territory. Such was not the case when it came to Penn’s southern neighbor, Lord Baltimore, the proprietor of Maryland. Penn’s charter gave Penn rights to what is today Delaware. Lord Baltimore, however, grew enraged by Penn’s ownership, claiming that Marylanders already legally possessed it. Indeed, Baltimore argued that much of the land granted to Penn, including even Philadelphia, was already his. He also began to grumble that Penn’s western plans interfered with his own. If Baltimore’s understanding proved correct, then Penn’s dreams for his colony’s future would die.¹⁵

The dispute revealed the difficulties i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. Early American Frontiers
• Chapter 1. The Hidden Flaw
• Chapter 2. Growth Arrives
• Chapter 3. The First Frontier Crisis
• Chapter 4. Pennsylvania’s Apogee
• Chapter 5. Becoming a Frontier Country
• Chapter 6. Frontier Politics
• Chapter 7. The Permanent Frontier
• Chapter 8. The British Empire’s Frontier Crisis
• Chapter 9. Independent Frontiers
• Chapter 10. Creating a Frontier Government
• Conclusion. Frontiers in a New Nation
• Coda. Frontiers: Meanings, Controversies, and New Evidence
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments