Customer Reviews

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

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This is a fine scholarly book with an interesting thesis that would have been rated with five stars except for problems in repetition, source identification and for a little unevenness in presenting settler versus Indian atrocities. The author clearly identifies with the modern, politically correct approach by mentioning that the Paxton Boys were defended strongly in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. The clear meaning is that they can no longer be defended. Well, maybe not today since we no longer find our neighbors murdered, tortured and mutilated beyond belief by Indians and expect to be next at any time. The point is that the events in 1763 have to be viewed in the context of the intermittant warring situation and the fears and aspirations of people on the frontier in 1763, not in a peaceful and comfortable New York penthouse in 2009.

The thrust of the work is that William Penn originally meant to establish a peaceable place on earth, perhaps even a utopia where everyone could realize their dreams, but conflict between the warlike Indians and the equally warlike Scotch-Irish Presbyterians forced the colony to face the political reality of competing peoples for the same land. This reality aided by the bumbling administration of the Penn heirs and Quaker party brought about the destruction of the Penn colony's peaceable kingdom. This thesis is accurate, and the story is compelling. The reader should remember that today we have diverse peoples competing for ever-scarcer resources, and politics have to be realistic above all to work out the problems. I need not remind other readers that this attitude is in very short supply at the present. There is much to learn from the example of the Penn colony.

The Paxton Boys were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians living in the Susquehanna River valley and lived on the sharp edge of the divide between the secure Quaker towns in Pennsylvania and the Indians, mostly Delawares and the Iroquois confederacy of six nations. The Scotch-Irish were hated by the pacifist Quakers, Germans and English Anglicans, although later where they made up the bulk of the Continental Army and supplied the majority of Continental governors and most of the Continental general officers (also four of the first five Commander-in-chiefs of the United States Army), their efforts were seen in a somewhat different light. They had been persecuted greatly by the English, forced out of Scotland, and then Ulster, Ireland, in the 18th century by the English landlords and government policies. After centuries of conflict when they generally got the worst of the bargains, they were ready to fight anyone for land and a right to determine their own political and economic fates. First it was the Indians, then the Quakers who seemed to support the Indians against the Scotch-Irish, and in 1775 it was the British in general. When given the chance to point their rifles at Redcoats, they did so with relish. It is no exaggeration to say that had the British not persecuted the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians so strongly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the United States might still be in the British Commonwealth.

Many if not most of the Scotch-Irish in Pennsylvania were squatters on the frontier without clear titles to the land they developed and made productive. Because they turned "wasteland" (forest) into productive farmland, they expected to be rewarded with its ownership. Secondarily, if they squatted on land supposedly reserved for Indians, then when they successfully fought off the Indians, such land should become theirs by right of conquest. The reader may note that these principles were generally held throughout the American colonies, whether the land was purchased (essentially always fraudulently in modern legal terms) from the Indians or not. The same principles were at work in the 20th century in Israel and espoused unabashedly by Zionists.

The snakes in the grass to the Scotch-Irish way of thinking were the pacifist Quakers who seemed to take the side of the Indians in every instance. The Quakers essentially made excuses for the Indians, even for their most horrible tortures, murders, kidnappings, slavery, and murders, always blaming the Scotch-Irish for every Indian outbreak (sounds like the far-left today.) The Pennsylvania political regime, however, was unable to protect the settlers or even to fund a militia in a timely and effective manner to repel Indian attacks. The Scotch-Irish were required to fall back on their own resources and defend themselves.

Author Kenny does a fine job in wading through the political bickering and presenting the problems and viewpoints of all concerned. The reader can see the peaceable kingdom start to unravel, but then in 1763 the Scotch-Irish lashed out literally in all directions out of sheer frustration. Differentiating in no way between Indians or tribes, a group of Scotch-Irish from the Paxton Presbyterian Church (thereafter "Paxton Boys") rode to a peaceful settlement of Conastoga Indians and massacred all they found. Those Indians who escaped this massacre were lodged by Pennsylvania authorities in Lancaster's workhouse for their protection, but the Paxton Boys attacked the remainder in the workhouse and slaughtered them to the last man, woman and child. Predictably, the Quakers rose in protest and called for the arrest and trial of the Paxton Boys for murder.

The third act to this drama was played out when a group of Indians was being sheltered in Philadelphia after attempts were made to send them to safety in New York, and the Paxton Boys rode into Germantown to attack Philadelphia. The Quakers panicked, and most eschewed their pacifist principles and took up arms to defend the Indians and Philadelphia. The Paxton Boys were met with negotiators, and the attack of Philadelphic never took place. The war devolved into a war of words, but the net result was that the Penn colony became a royal colony, the Paxton Boys were never prosecuted, most of the Paxton Boys either fought in the Continental Army or were killed by Indians in the Wyoming Valley, and Benjamin Franklin, who played an interesting part in all this, became reconciled eventually with the Scotch-Irish.

The primary negative that disturbed me was the author's penchant for correcting contemporary source information with other comments or statistics without offering sources or proof of his statements. An example of this is on page 25 where the author presents William Smith's breakdown of the ethnic composition of Pennsylvania's total population of 250,000 in 1759 as 25,000 Anglicans, 50,000 Quakers, 55,000 Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, 10,000 Catholics and the remainder of 45 percent being Germans and others. Then the author says, "In reality, the European population ... was closer to 220,000 of whom one-third was German." But the author gives no source for his correction of Smith. Given that there were no census at the time, how does the author arrive at his statement? Unfortunately, this situation is not an isolated example in this work and led me to question some of the author's presentation where no sources were given.

All in all, this was a fine work that brings the Pennsylvania pre-Revolutionary days into focus. During the Revolution the Scotch-Irish made up the vast majority of the Pennsylvanian patriots, and the legislature adopted probably the most radical constitution ever seen in this hemisphere. The reader is invited to do a little research and see how the Scotch-Irish revolutionaries felt about government and how they wished to maximize their liberty and freedon.

One must always remember that government is a de facto opponent to liberty and freedom, and that's why the Founding Fathers sought to limit the Federal Government through the Constitution. At that time the Scotch-Irish were liberals to an extreme -- today they are conservatives calling for decreasing government and increasing liberty while today's liberals call for increasing government and decreasing liberty. The world has truly been turned upside down.

I recommend this book to all who are interested in colonial times, the Penn Colony, the development of American government and the issue with dispossessing the Indians of their lands.

I grew up in Pennsylvania. So my public schooling included a couple doses of Pennsylvania history -- or, perhaps more accurately (as I continue to learn in adult life), Pennsylvania mythology. One pillar of the myth was the special loving and benign relationship that existed in Pennsylvania between the European settlers and the native Indians. This had been the idealistic vision of William Penn as he established his proprietary colony - that Christians and Indians would live together harmoniously in a "Peaceable Kingdom".

PEACEABLE KINGDOM LOST is an historical antidote to my public school mythology. The reader learns that even under William Penn, who was a reasonably pragmatic businessman in addition to being a pacifist Quaker, Pennsylvania was not quite the multicultural and multiracial Eden of legend. But almost immediately after he suffered a stroke in 1712 and died in 1718, his utopian principles were renounced, practically if not explicitly, by his widow and then his sons. In 1737, two of William Penn's sons pulled off one of the early land-grab frauds on the Indians, in an episode now known to history as the "Walking Purchase", which appropriated to the Penns and European settlement an area the size of Rhode Island. The dispossession of the Indians continued until it morphed into extra-legal extermination, genocide even - atrocity after atrocity that the colonial government back in Philadelphia did little to investigate and less to punish and rectify. A culmination of sorts occurred in December 1763, when a group of about sixty frontier militiamen, known as the Paxton Boys, slaughtered the last twenty Conestoga Indians, who had been living peacefully on a small tract of land that William Penn had set aside for them in 1690. Needless to say, the Conestoga Indiantown massacre of 1763 was not part of any Pennsylvania mythology curriculum I was exposed to. (Nor do I recall any mention of Indian massacres of European settlers, which also occurred in Pennsylvania.)

History, of course, is never simple, and a host of interlocking factors and developments brought about the eventual displacement of Native Americans by Europeans. Even so, I sense that a certain historic fatalism was unleashed by Christopher Columbus in 1492, and that the dispossession of the Indians was inevitable. One wishes that it had occurred more honorably and humanely, but it was inevitable. (And, I wonder, is the displacement of the Palestinians in Israel similarly inevitable, at least once the United States recognized Israel in 1948?)

PEACEABLE KINGDOM LOST is not a general history of the displacement of the North American Indians. Rather, it reviews aspects of that displacement in the microcosm of Pennsylvania between 1690 and 1782. There and then some of the dynamics were peculiar to the colony of Pennsylvania - such as the conflict between the Quakers and the Presbyterians. The vast majority of the Paxton Boys were Scotch/Irish Presbyterians, who professed to be doing God's work by throwing heathens off the land and transforming it to productive farmland. And the differences between those two influential religious groups of settlers went beyond the treatment of Indians: one pamphleteer of 1764 commented that "To govern is absolutely repugnant to the avowed principles of Quakers," whereas "To be govern'd is absolutely repugnant to the avowed principles of Pr[esbyteria]ns."

Indeed, there is a bit of confusion of focus in the book as between (a) Indian/settler conflicts and (b) colonial Pennsylvania politics. Continuing with my reservations: the writing, while serviceable, is not distinguished; the organization is not optimal; and in his narrative author Kenny relies far too heavily on quotes from contemporary sources. On the plus side: to the best of my understanding, the history is sound; the Introduction is excellent (and in eight pages provides a good summary of the book); and a number of useful maps and illustrations are included. Three-and-a-half stars.

The information provided before purchasing was complete and accurate. The book was very readable, entertaining and believeable. It is a remarkable addition to American history for someone with an Ulster Scot background as I have

I live two farms west of the Conestoga Indian Town where the first killings occured. In Lancaster, nine, not five miles away as Kenny states, stands the wall of the workhouse where the second massacre took place. Right outside my shop's door. So I live on the two sites. Anybody who looks at this as a morally justifiable incident is outside the realm of ethical discourse. No verbal response is adequate.

It's still interesting territory out here in Manor Township where I live, still woodsy and often poor along Indian Run. Indian Run winds down to the Conestoga and the Susquehanna's first portage up from the Chesapeake Bay, Safe Harbor, and on a little flat on that little creek stood their dwellings. Going north, over a couple of sharp ridges, you're right on the Lancaster Plain, sraight, flat shot to town. My house, 1729, was located to take advantage of the downriver fur trade (with the Indian Town a neighbor to collect furs rafted from the Susquehanna existing right down the creek) on the one hand and the unbelievably fertile land where the terrain slopes flat to farm. Even now, it's almost possible to eat with out work from a few acres. Everybody was here, French in the '80's, Quakers, Mennonites and Ulster Irish soon after.

It's damn sad reading this to come up against once again the disgraceful conduct of the Euro's over here. By the time whitey made his real appearance out here a good strong site of prehistoric natives had already been reduced to a hundred or so by disease and intra-tribal conflict. The Quakers (often the still the goats in PA, imagine that...I'm one) come out pretty well, all told, I think. The main lesson from the book is almost Thucydides-like (I'm seriuos). Fiddling away at politics and allowing evil to work its first deeds unchecked, men of goodwill were pulled into a black place by that dangerous element which we will have with us even longer than the poor. Not maybe Thucydides' moral, but the moral of this book.

This book is good from in every way, the author has a dry humor. Especially, if you're from the area, every bit of history is Pennsylvania Dutched-up and so its good to see a neutral work. I finally understand colonial Pa history politically. The details of the working out of that, again, provide a sad mirror for our times. Even the dogood radical left is there doing their thing under Isaac Pennington and again excoriated by everyone! It's an interesting moral excersize to put yourself there and asks "where would I have been?". Our local feeling about the killings at the workhouse is that they happened despite the locals. This book would have us believe otherwise.

(If Indiantown WERE five, not nine miles from town and thus not in the dark "river hills" those Paxton Boys may have been sent to hell before they got there.)

The book arrived in new condition, on time and I am almost finished reading this excellent book. Since I have been a lifelong Pennsylvanian, a Presbyterian and a history major this was an excellent slection.