Peaceable Kingdom Lost The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment

by Kenny, Kevin

• ISBN13: 9780199753949
• ISBN10: 0199753946
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-05-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1682 as a "holy experiment" in which Europeans and Indians could live together in harmony. In this book, historian Kevin Kenny explains how this Peaceable Kingdom--benevolent, Quaker, pacifist--gradually disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for Native Americans. Kenny recounts how rapacious frontier settlers, most of them of Ulster extraction, began to encroach on Indian land as squatters, while William Penn's sons cast off their father's Quaker heritage and turned instead to fraud, intimidation, and eventually violence during the French and Indian War. In 1763, a group of frontier settlers known as the Paxton Boys exterminated the last twenty Conestogas, descendants of Indians who had lived peacefully since the 1690s on land donated by William Penn near Lancaster. Invoking the principle of "right of conquest," the Paxton Boys claimed after the massacres that the Conestogas' land was rightfully theirs. They set out for Philadelphia, threatening to sack the city unless their grievances were met. A delegation led by Benjamin Franklin met them and what followed was a war of words, with Quakers doing battle against Anglican and Presbyterian champions of the Paxton Boys. The killers were never prosecuted and the Pennsylvania frontier descended into anarchy in the late 1760s, with Indians the principal victims. The new order heralded by the Conestoga massacres was consummated during the American Revolution with the destruction of the Iroquois confederacy. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States confiscated the lands of Britain's Indian allies, basing its claim on the principle of "right of conquest." Based on extensive research in eighteenth-century primary sources, this engaging history offers an eye-opening look at how colonists--at first, the backwoods Paxton Boys but later the U.S. government--expropriated Native American lands, ending forever the dream of colonists and Indians living together in peace.

Author Biography

Kevin Kenny is Professor of History at Boston College where he specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic migration. He is author of Making Sense of the Molly Maguires and The American Irish: A History, and editor of Ireland and the British Empire.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: False Dawn
1. Newcomers
2. Settlers and Squatters
3. Expansion
4. Fraud
5. A Hunger for Land

Part II: Theatre of Bloodshed and Rapine
6. Braddock's Defeat
7. Pennsylvania Goes to War
8. Negotiations
9. Westward Journeys
10. Conquest

Part III: Zealots
11. Indian Uprisings
12. Rangers
13. Conestoga Indiantown
14. Lancaster Workhouse
15. Panic in Philadelphia

Part IV: A War of Words
16. The Declaration and Remonstrance
17. A Proper Spirit of Jealousy and Revenge
18. Christian White Savages
19. Under the Tyrant's Foot

Part V: Unraveling
20. Killers
21. Mercenaries
22. Revolutionaries

Appendix: Identifying the Conestoga Indians and the Paxton Boys
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index