Читать книгу Frontier Country - Patrick Spero - Страница 10

CHAPTER 2

Growth Arrives

After departing in 1701, William Penn would never again see his colony, though the management of it consumed his mind, his time, and his health. The confrontational politics in Philadelphia continued on the same course, English politics always threatened Penn’s position, and Penn’s finances grew worse. He even considered selling the colony to cover his debts before suffering a stroke in 1712 that left him crippled until his death in 1718. His widow, Hannah, assumed oversight of the colony until her death six years later. Aided by a trust composed of advisers in Pennsylvania, she managed to keep the colony afloat. Then Penn’s three sons, Richard, Thomas, and John, inherited the proprietorship. They, more than their father, would have to deal with managing the expansion of a colony that lacked the means to do so.¹

While Penn suffered, his colony thrived in his absence. Tens of thousands of colonists from Germanic principalities and the British Isles arrived in Pennsylvania beginning in the 1710s, at around the time of Penn’s stroke, and immigration further increased in the 1720s. In 1728 alone, between three thousand and six thousand people arrived from Ireland, while an annual average of one thousand migrants arrived from Germany between 1727 and 1740.²

These numbers may appear small to modern readers, but placing these migration figures in their historical context shows how astounding the population growth was—and how dramatically such arrivals were changing colonial society. By 1740, recent non-English arrivals composed nearly half the population. Penn had expected, even hoped for, such growth. But “such numbers of strangers,” as the government referred to them, threatened to upend Pennsylvania’s dominant Quaker society and exposed the challenge of governing an expanding colony. In the 1720s, government officials responded to this dilemma by creating new administrative layers and laws to strengthen the colonial government in the east and protect the Quaker majority. In the west, however, governing officials faced different issues. Here the colonial government was just trying to establish its authority, and colonists took advantage of its weakness. Laws were ignored, and magistrates often lacked, often in violation of Penn’s diplomatic agreements, sufficient support to enforce policies. Colonists squatted near Indian lands. Indians and traders conducted deals; many did not adhere to colonial regulations. Some went smoothly, others less so.³

Figure 4. Pennsylvania’s early western settlements, 1715–1730. Many new arrivals to Pennsylvania headed toward the Susquehanna River. These new settlements provided opportunity, but government control was far weaker and violence and disorder were more frequent. In 1727, Indians murdered a colonist outside of Snaketown during a trade deal gone bad. The incident revealed a number of governing challenges to those in Philadelphia who were tasked with managing the colony’s peaceful expansion.

No person took better advantage of this situation than Indian trader John Burt, perhaps the most dangerous man in the colony. Indeed, Burt’s business dealings at a short-lived trading town called Snaketown led to a murder in 1727 that forced Philadelphia officials to reassess the government’s role in regulating areas of new settlement. Government officials knew that they had to address the troubles that arose because of men like Burt. The need to create policies aimed at better ordering the colony’s expansion also provided eastern-based policymakers an opportunity to further protect the Quaker and largely pacifist core of the colony. Through the distribution of land and the arrangement of new settlements, proprietary officials were able to redirect new colonists, many of whom were well versed in the violent warfare of Europe and had few qualms with the use of firearms, away from the predominantly Quaker regions and place them in areas that could become defensive frontiers in the event of war. This approach, on the one hand, helped address the problem of governing frontiers in a Quaker-led colony. But the distribution of new settlers also placed these colonists further from the strongest arms of the colonial government.

“A Frontier in Case of Disturbance”

On a late November day in 1724, Henry Hawkins sat in the Chester County jail, alone in the world, penniless, bruised, and battered. He waited for John Mitchell, one of the justices of the peace for the county, to arrive so he could plead his case. When he did arrive, Hawkins told him a story of his travels and travails through “the woods” of Pennsylvania that left many who heard it appalled. For us, Hawkins’s story provides a glimpse into the uncertainty that marked the lives of those who would in time become, in their own words, “frontier inhabitants.”⁴

Hawkins arrived in Pennsylvania hoping for a new start in the new world. His prospects looked bright at first. Hawkins agreed to a five-year indenture to John Burt, an Indian trader who also claimed to be a gunsmith. Burt promised to train Hawkins in the gun trade, a skill in high demand, in exchange for five years of Hawkins’s life. From Hawkins’s perspective, in five short years he would be free to strike out on his own. Armed with his new skill and maybe some capital and social currency, Hawkins would have secured the foundation for a profitable and independent business, an opportunity unlike any that the old world offered. Hawkins probably felt like it was more of an apprenticeship than servitude, an investment for his future rather than the forfeiture of his personal freedom. Or so he thought.⁵

Burt, it turned out, cared more about trading than making or repairing guns. Rather than learning the art of the firearm, Hawkins said he was “forced to go along with the said Burt Indian trading.” Worse still, when they returned from their journey into the woods, Burt still refused to train him. Instead, he sent Hawkins on another trading adventure, this time to Philadelphia to acquire “more goods to go trading again.” Burt placed his servant under the care of Jonas Davenport, a well-connected trader who had secured a tract of land in a Scots-Irish settlement called Donegal near Burt’s home. Davenport disliked Hawkins, who likely complained mightily that this was not the work he had signed up for. “Sorely beat and abused by said Jonas Davenport,” Hawkins refused to return to his master and instead stayed in Philadelphia.⁶

Hawkins’s recalcitrance, however justifiable, nonetheless made things worse. Burt decided that Hawkins was too much trouble to bear and sold him to a local plantation. Hawkins now found himself a farmhand, laboring away in fields and learning little that would help him in the future. That job did not work out either, and he soon found himself again in the hands of Davenport, who then sold him to “an Indian.” The Indian, named Chickoekenoke, took Hawkins “back into the woods several hundred miles.”⁷

Hawkins’s stay there was short too. Chickoekenoke grew frustrated with his servant, just as all his other masters had, and brought Hawkins back to Davenport seeking a refund. At Davenport’s place in Donegal, Hawkins saw an opportunity to escape and ran to seek a justice of the peace, hoping the law could provide some protection. An angry Davenport intercepted him, bound his hands, tied him to the tail of a horse, and “ha[u]ld [Hawkins] on the ground a considerable way through a thick muddy swamp.” The brutality of the public beating—which shocked a group of women onlookers—drew the attention of the law. Davenport, facing charges of abusing his servant, turned Hawkins over to the authorities, “sorely beat and bruised on the body and one eye almost beat out and like to have broken both arms.” Sitting in the jail, “destitute of friends,” Hawkins told John Mitchell his tale of woe and hoped the court could intercede in his case, to give him the freedom he so desperately wished he had never given up.⁸

Hawkins proved a poor commodity because he possessed a strong spirit, and because of that, we have his story today. However unusual Hawkins’s tale may be, his travels are emblematic. Hawkins witnessed the Indian trade, once the economic foundation for those who lived in the western areas of Pennsylvania; worked on a farm, a new and bountiful industry that had recently begun to lay a new economic foundation for these western areas; traveled through the woods and saw Indian society, a culture whose history predated William Penn’s arrival; stayed in a small trading enclave with Burt; and spent time in Donegal, a burgeoning and bustling Scots-Irish community formed in 1720 of recent immigrants like himself. It was a rough-and-tumble world where the only certainty was imminent danger. It was also a fluid society in which Indians and colonists interacted easily and regularly; Hawkins, for instance, was sold as an indentured servant to an Indian, a transaction that would be considered unusual in a few decades. And, as Hawkins’s story ends with him racing to find the protection of a justice of peace, it was a world in which the law was a presence but hard to reach, a figment of what it should be. Government officials, from high proprietary officials stationed in Philadelphia like James Logan who expressed dismay and surprise at Davenport’s actions, to the local justice of the peace John Mitchell, who indicted Davenport for his abuse of Hawkins, knew that this world on the fringes of Pennsylvania existed. They hoped to put an end to it, for the disorder, violence, and uncertainty it bred threatened their hopes for peace.⁹

Hawkins, meanwhile, was encountering a western Pennsylvania that was fast changing. Once composed of a small, interwoven society of traders and roughnecks, the west was bustling with new arrivals who carried different dreams. The Scots-Irish, of which Henry Hawkins was likely one, were the first to arrive in substantial numbers. This group’s cultural lineage came from Scotland, but they passed through Ulster in Northern Ireland, where they provided a toehold for Protestantism, before coming to Pennsylvania, a path that has earned them their name Scots-Irish. Predominantly Presbyterians, they came not to escape religious persecution but economic stagnation. Irish landlords had raised rents on their Scots-Irish tenants in the early eighteenth century, making the Pennsylvania countryside an attractive alternative. Little did these immigrants know that this region would prove to be more than just adequate. The lands in the Susquehanna Valley turned out to be among the most fertile in all of colonial America. The Scots-Irish came to Pennsylvania in large numbers first in 1717. James Logan placed their settlements, such as Donegal and Paxton, near the banks of the Susquehanna, far beyond the Quaker-dominated cultural and political center. By 1729, there were at least six Scots-Irish settlements along the river.¹⁰

The “Pennsylvania Dutch,” a nickname likely rooted in the pronunciation of Deutsch, meaning German, arrived in fits and starts, and their composition changed over time. Religious refugees seeking asylum were the first group to come to Pennsylvania. These early German colonists often migrated in large, organized groups and sought isolation. Government officials placed them beyond Philadelphia, either west, near the Susquehanna River, or to the northeast, along the Delaware River. According to demographers of colonial Pennsylvania, 1727 marked the first of three massive immigrations from the Rhineland to Pennsylvania. That year alone saw over a thousand Germans arrive at the port of Philadelphia, surpassing the entirety of German immigration in the first thirty-five years of colonial settlement. Most new arrivals traveled in family groups and came to Pennsylvania because of connections to those already settled in the colony. Unlike the previous immigrants, however, these Germans were not small sects that sought seclusion but more mainstream Protestant groups, like Lutherans, who expected to participate in society.¹¹

The immigration of Scots-Irish and Germans did more than increase population numbers and expand the geographic reach of the colony. These new arrivals changed the face and faith of the colony, turning a once Quaker-dominated society into perhaps the most diverse in North America. While William Penn had once dreamed of such change, the Quaker elite who ran the colony in the 1720s was unsure about it. As one historian aptly summarized, the original Quaker colonists and their heirs “assumed that Pennsylvania would remain predominantly a Quaker colony in which ‘weighty Quakers’ would always shape public policy.” Quakers had, so far at least, created an ordered and peaceful colony, one that had begun to prosper without encountering many of the problems with Native Americans that other colonies had experienced when they began to flourish. The Scots-Irish and German populations, pushing the bounds of the colony and changing its cultural makeup, posed no small threat to this carefully established harmony.¹²

Government officials adopted a number of policies to ease their fears of and solidify their authority over this new population. In 1727, the first year of sustained immigration from the German Palatinate, Pennsylvania instituted a new policy that required all captains carrying German immigrants to register those over sixteen years of age. Also in 1727, Governor Patrick Gordon decided to enforce a long dormant naturalization law that required all arrivals to make a statement at a local courthouse affirming their allegiance to the proprietor, their loyalty to the British Crown, and their support for the legitimacy of George II’s ascension. A public declaration of allegiance was an important political act that carried great legal weight in the eighteenth century. The significance of such a declaration was all the more powerful for German settlers, many of whom had lived under seigniorial law in which their liberty was owned by their lords. In effect, the Pennsylvania statement was a renunciation of their previous feudal allegiances and an affirmation of their new ones to a British king and proprietor.¹³

The Scots-Irish, meanwhile, carried a reputation for bad behavior that worried officials as much, if not more, than the Germans’ loyalty. Many of the original settlers in Pennsylvania depicted the Scots-Irish as poor, violent, and backward, a marked contrast to the educated, sensible, and prospering culture the Quakers had sought to cultivate in the colony. To deal with this threat, officials created settlements and manors in western areas to house the Scots-Irish, far away from the Quaker core around Philadelphia.¹⁴

The author of this plan was James Logan, who was William Penn’s protégé and closest adviser. Logan came from meager means in Ulster, but, when Penn noticed the young Quaker’s brilliance, he enticed him to come to Pennsylvania in 1699. Logan served in a variety of high offices and had his own interests tied up in land speculation and the Indian trade. From the vantage point of his multiple positions, Logan understood the colony’s internal politics and its geopolitics better than anyone. He thus knew how to ensure I had Scots-Irish migration and settlement patterns maintained Quaker power in the east, while also helping fill proprietary coffers. By 1726, extant tax lists from Chester County, then the county that stretched to the Susquehanna, suggest that 2,300 settlers took up residence in the far western areas of that county. In addition to the official settlements near the Susquehanna River, Logan estimated that in 1726 new settlers cleared and occupied over a hundred thousand acres of previously undeveloped land without license. The changes in the cultural landscape of the colony thus had real physical effects on its countryside.¹⁵

There was more to Logan’s thinking than maintaining stability among and preserving the power of the “weighty Quakers,” however. Logan had an intimate understanding of the Scots-Irish, for he, an Ulsterman, was one of them. Instead of sharing the Quakers’ dour assessment of the Scots-Irish, he viewed these immigrants and their new western settlements as a benefit. The Scots-Irish at Donegal, a new settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna, were a “good, sober people,” Logan wrote to William Steel, a friend and fellow official. Best of all, they were of the stock that “had so bravely defended Londonderry and Inniskillen,” a reference to a 105-day-long siege of Ulster in 1689 in which Catholics loyal to James II tried to oust Protestants supportive of William and Mary’s ascension. “Those people,” he continued, “if kindly used, will I believe, be orderly, as they have hitherto been, and easily dealt with.”¹⁶

Logan realized that these Scots-Irish settlers could help solve one problem frontiers posed to a colony that rejected militarization: they could serve as the first defenders against invasion, just as they had in Ireland. Logan made this rationale explicit in 1729 when he wrote that he decided “to plant” the Scots-Irish settlements near the Susquehanna so they could serve “as a frontier, in case of disturbance” with “Northern Indians,” a reference to unallied Indian groups in neighboring French Canada and the Ohio Valley. In that way, colonial officials created an ad hoc means to facilitate expansion that also served the geopolitical interests of the colony. Logan’s actions represented an unspoken part of the political settlement forged in 1701. Proprietary officials had the dual tasks of developing western land and providing colonists with legal and defensive protection in these new areas of settlement. The Quaker-dominated Assembly, focused as it was on the concerns of the eastern counties, was happy to outsource such responsibilities in 1701.¹⁷

But as these new settlers populated areas near Indian settlements, their interactions with their Native neighbors began to affect Indian relations with the colony, often pushing them in directions colonial officials did not want. We cannot know exactly what these settlers thought of Native Americans when they left Europe, but it is more than likely they carried across the Atlantic fear and trepidation about their soon-to-be neighbors, baggage that weighed heavily on their actions with Indians once they arrived. Reports of vicious Indian wars in other colonies and ideas of Native savagery circulated widely in Europe, affecting settlers’ perceptions and playing heavily on their imaginations before they set out. The idea of Indians as peaceful allies, although cultivated by Penn and others, was counterintuitive to settlers who heard little of such things. The insecurity and violence that people like Henry Hawkins experienced only added to their worries. Indeed, while Logan hoped they might become “a frontier in case of a disturbance” with Indians, John Burt, Henry Hawkins’s former master, proved that colonists could be the cause of a disturbance.¹⁸

“The Said Burt Is the Principal Occasion of It”

We know almost nothing about Thomas Wright except that he died on the night of September 11, 1727. His death, however, was the first in a chain of events that pushed Pennsylvania toward the brink of war and revealed the precariousness of the peace that existed in Penn’s woods.¹⁹

Things started out well for Wright on the evening of his demise. His friend and fellow trader John Burt had invited him to a trading party with some Indians who had goods to sell. The group gathered around a campfire near Burt’s home in a place called Snaketown, a short-lived trading community that never appeared on a map. Although we may not know Snaketown’s exact location, we do know that it sat on the eastern banks of the Susquehanna River about forty miles north of Conestoga. Desolate and small, Snaketown was nonetheless an important part of Pennsylvania because it connected Indian Country to the European markets in the east. Wright knew of the huge demand for such goods, and he figured that if he and Burt acquired the Indians’ wares, then they could resell them for an easy profit.²⁰

The Indians and the colonists seemed quick friends that night. Burt brought some rum to help lubricate the transfer of goods. After a few drinks, the Indians began to dance around the fire. Wright, feeling playful, stood and joined them, singing and dancing “after their manner.” As often happens, the boozy play turned violent when “some dispute arose” between an Indian and Wright. Perhaps the Indian viewed Wright’s dance as a mocking gesture; perhaps it was. In any case, tempers flared. As the confrontation heated up, Burt egged Wright on, telling him to “knock down the Indian.” Wright grabbed one of the Indians and appeared ready to strike, but he thought better of it. Burt was not satisfied. Instead, he unleashed a volley of unexpected blows on the Indian. Burt and Wright then surveyed the wreckage, saw that they were dangerously outnumbered, and retreated to Burt’s home.²¹

The Indians, angry at the insult, pursued and crashed through the door. Wright tried to calm down the drunken melee. While he tried to mediate, Burt only grew more enraged. Burt threatened to kill the Indians and sought his gun. Instead of grabbing his weapon, he grabbed the chamber pot and threw, in the words of the colonial records, “dung” on the Indians. Things seemed ready to explode. Wright grew terrified and fled the scene. The Indians followed. The next morning Burt found Wright’s body in his henhouse, his head bashed in.²²

It fell to John Wright, the local justice of the peace and of no apparent relation to Thomas Wright, to sort through this mess. Wright was an active Quaker who took his public service seriously, sometimes to his personal detriment. Though born into the middle class in England in 1667, his personal finances took a turn for the worse when he was in his forties because he spent more time paying attention to the Friends’ concerns than his own. Seeking a new opportunity, he left for Pennsylvania in 1714, embarking for the colonies at the unusually late age of forty-seven and settling in Chester County. He gained instant respect and served in the Assembly, but when he was sixty years old, his economic fortunes took a turn for the worse for the second time. Once again, he headed west in search of more opportunity, purchasing a large tract of land on the banks of the Susquehanna a few miles south of Snaketown. As more people settled in the area, the governor appointed the well-connected and respected Wright as an early justice of the peace. His new position required him to establish government authority and maintain good order as the colony expanded to areas that lacked both.²³

When Wright learned of the murder at John Burt’s, he organized a grand jury to investigate. The jury had no question of guilt. Depositions stated that when Thomas Wright fled, “the Indians pursued him.” “It’s very certain the Indians killed Thomas Wright,” the grand jury declared. But the jurors did not think the colonists wholly blameless, adding “that the said Burt is the principal occasion of it.” Jonas Davenport, likely the same man who had beat Henry Hawkins, served on the grand jury, showing just how small and intimate governing these new communities could be. Davenport held little regard for Burt, later saying that had Burt not “provoked and abused” the Indians, then the initial dispute would have been resolved “amicably.”²⁴

With the grand jury’s inquest complete, John Wright had to take the next unpleasant step in this already sordid affair. Since the fallout from an Indian murdering a settler could lead to more violence, Wright had to notify his superiors in Philadelphia so they could take the appropriate steps to deescalate tensions. Wright sent Jonas Davenport to Philadelphia to bring official news of the murder to the government. On the night of September 26, Davenport reached the Philadelphia home of James Logan, then the secretary of the Provincial Council, and told him of the proceedings in Snaketown. Known as a man with a ferocious intelligence and as a man ferociously loyal to the proprietor’s interests, Logan quickly realized how dangerous the events in the west could be to the colony’s stability.²⁵

The next day Logan gathered the members of the Provincial Council together in a private room at the Philadelphia County Courthouse to address the issues the murder raised. The council was a central, if often overlooked, body in the governance of the colony. Although it wielded little direct power, the council helped governors make all decisions, small and large. Most of the members of the Provincial Council served for many years and provided governors, whose tenures could be short, with the type of wisdom that came with continuity. There is even evidence that the governor needed a quorum of his council present before making a decision.²⁶

At the head of the council sat the governor, Patrick Gordon, who had arrived in the colony only a year earlier with his wife and five children. Sixty-two years old, Gordon had a distinguished military career, a cool temperament, and a retiring personality. But having served in Europe and spent most of his adult life in England, the problems of colonial governance struck him as wholly unfamiliar. As he confessed in his inaugural address to the Assembly, he was unschooled in the art of “refined politicks,” which, he added, “often serve to perplex mankind.” A man as experienced as Gordon knew that he had to rely on the advice of his council to chart a safe course in this still strange land. One of his first acts was to reinstate the powerful James Logan, who had been removed from the position because of disagreements with the previous governor.²⁷

Dealing with the fallout of the Wright murder forced Gordon to become familiar with the many roles the colonial governor had to play. Officially, the proprietor was the governor of the colony, while his appointed deputy who served in the colony was the lieutenant governor, but most people called the lieutenant governor “Governor” because he exercised all the day-to-day powers that such officials held. All matters of law enforcement rested with the proprietor, who conveyed them to his governor in residence. The governor in residence was also the chief diplomat for the colony. In that capacity, he had to maintain good relations with Indian allies and manage the geopolitical interests of the British Empire in the region. Finally, the governor was the captain-general, meaning commander in chief, during times of war. In this case, Gordon hoped that the successful deployment of his two other responsibilities would prevent his use of the latter.

Gordon and his council recognized that Wright’s murder was an important test of the colony’s authority in the newly settled regions. Indeed, the meeting began with a discussion of the murder’s significance to the colony’s history. “This was,” they observed, “the first accident of the kind they had ever heard of in this province since its first settlement.” They knew that they would have to respond with care. As they noted, the Indians had “received very high provocations,” but in their estimation that still did not justify murder. Moreover, since “a subject had lost his life,” the government was duty bound “to take notice of and move in it.”²⁸

The council then debated how the government should react. The councilors recognized that if they let a murder against a colonist go unpunished, then colonists might question the proprietor’s authority, since his promise of protection served as the basis for colonists’ loyalty to the colony. At the same time, because the violence was between Indians and colonists, it was necessary that the government’s response did not upset the alliances the colony had with Native groups in the region. After weighing their options, the group concluded that since Wright’s murder happened in an area in which the colony exercised legal authority and because Wright was a “subject,” then the governor needed to publicly condemn the murder and demand the guilty be brought to justice to reassure the colonists he promised to protect. Privately, however, they believed that it would be impossible to identify the guilty Indians and foolish to try. Instead, they told the governor to deal with the murder through diplomatic channels.²⁹

The colony had pursued this course of action before. Although Wright’s murder was the first in which Indians had slain an Englishman (or at least the first the council knew of), the colony had a history of mediating crosscultural violence. They had learned that English-style retribution—arrests, trials, and hangings—was an ineffective way to punish violence that occurred between colonists and Indians. Most recently, in 1722, a powerful trader, Edmund Cartlidge, had brutally murdered an Indian in a deal gone bad. The Cartlidge case happened west of the Susquehanna, an area that Pennsylvania had not officially settled and therefore exercised no legal control over. Traders and others often called such areas of legal and political ambiguity “the woods.” Dealing with problems of violence in the woods meant that the colonial government could pursue nontraditional justice. In this earlier case, the colony provided reparations for the crime through Indian means: a formal treaty at which the colony offered gifts of condolence and sincere apologies. Faced with the Wright murder in 1727, the council again decided that official diplomacy was the best way “to make the Indians in general sensible of the outrageousness of the action and to oblige them to make such satisfaction as the nature of the case will admit of,” even as they publicly called for more traditional punishment to assuage colonists’ desires for justice.³⁰

But admonishing Indians was not the primary focus of discussion at the Provincial Council’s emergency meeting. After settling on the proper course of action, the council shifted topics and used the murder as an opportunity to examine the state of Indian relations in the colony. They offered a dour assessment. From the time of Penn’s founding until about 1722, the colony had what the council called “a good understanding and an uninterrupted friendship” with Indian groups in the colony. The problem, all agreed, was that the previous governor was too inattentive to Indian affairs, leaving Indians feeling “slighted.”³¹

The council went even further. Citing Burt, the Indian trader, as the root cause of this trouble, the council began to examine their regulations concerning trade and internal policing. Since the colony’s founding, government officials had viewed trade as a beneficent means of tying Indians and colonists together and ushering in an era of prosperity, but they realized the promise of trade also carried with it potential pitfalls. William Penn had realized the perils and opportunities of trade when he called for government-regulated trading towns, heavy fines for duplicitous traders, and juries composed of equal numbers of Indians and colonists to mediate disputes.³²

While the government never put this last policy into practice, it had followed Penn’s other proposals by regularly passing regulations meant to ensure trading happened on equal and just terms. By 1727, laws limited all trade for profit to specific market towns and Indian villages, under the assumption that those locations would allow the government to enforce its policies. Indians complained that colonists had often used alcohol to swindle them, so the Assembly banned its use during exchanges. The government also required all traders to receive a license from the governor. In order to qualify for a license, they needed to have a letter of recommendation from their local justice of the peace. Fines for breaking fair trading practices had grown only heavier over time. The point of these regulations was not to limit trade but to ensure that the market was as free from coercion and deception as possible. It was part and parcel of Penn’s founding belief that the government needed to play an active role in maintaining peaceful relations with Indians in order to prevent frontiers from forming.³³

Before the Wright murder, government officials and most civically minded Pennsylvanians took pride in their successful track record. When the Assembly renewed a law entitled “For the Continuing Friendly Correspondence with the Indians” in 1715, it sent a letter to the Board of Trade stating its rationale for doing so. “The whole intent of this act,” they wrote, “is to prevent the Indians being imposed upon or abused in trade or otherwise by ill-minded persons, which experience hath shown is impossible to prevent if all manner of persons, without some restrictions and regulations, should be suffered to live among the Indians.” Like William Penn, assemblymen saw such laws as setting Pennsylvania apart from other colonies. They observed that their “English neighbouring Collonies, have felt, in the late warrs, with those savages … the loss of great numbers of Christians killed, and their houses, plantations, goods, and cattle burnt, destroyed, or carried away, by those heathen.” Pennsylvania had not, they pointed out, “lost the life of any one Englishman, by their means, from the settlement of the Collony, to this day, that we know, or have heard of.” They told the board that they had accomplished this “peace and tranquility” by “treating and dealing with the Indians honestly,” and implied that the empire should advise other colonies to follow their model.³⁴

The council expressed similar sentiments in 1727 as it reflected upon the Wright murder, noting “that this government had been formerly happy above most of our neighbours, in preserving a good understanding and an uninterrupted friendship with all our Indians.” Gordon shared a common vision for the colony, noting in his inaugural address that his goals were: “to discountenance parties, divisions, and factions in government, to maintain right and justice, to promote vertue, to suppress vice, immorality and prophaness, to assist and protect the magistrates in discharge of their duty herein, to encourage legal trade, and to use the Indians well.” The Wright murder threatened the Pennsylvania model of harmony through justice.³⁵

During its investigation, the council found that the government’s recent performance had failed to live up to the promise of its laws. The situation leading to Wright’s murder illustrated all the ways they had failed. The council observed that “it was scarce possible to find a man in the whole government more unfit” for trading than Burt, and yet Burt had received a license to trade on recommendation from the Chester County Court. Burt’s license, the council went on, “clearly shews the necessity of having that trade, and qualifications of the persons admitted to it more narrowly inspected, than is at present provided.” They also pointed out that laws had long barred the use of alcohol during trading, and yet it flowed freely that night in the woods. The very promise of security that the colonial state was supposed to offer to its members seemed at stake. “Unless some more effectual provision is made,” they concluded, then “the publick tranquility,” the hallmark of early Pennsylvania life, “will ever be in danger.”³⁶

Gordon agreed with his council that the government needed to change its ways and become more proactive in regulating trade and managing its alliances with Indian groups. Gordon ordered the chief justice of the colony to issue warrants for Burt’s arrest. He also agreed that he needed to craft a treaty with Indians to repair any damage inflicted by these events and renew bonds of friendship. The only problem was that the calendar and custom of the Indians made such a treaty unlikely in the short term. Most of the Indian diplomats “were abroad on hunting” until the spring. The council thus resolved to begin planning for a major treaty after the spring thaw. In the meantime, they hoped that the precarious peace would hold.³⁷