Читать книгу Frontier Country - Patrick Spero - Страница 12

CHAPTER 4

Pennsylvania’s Apogee

In the 1730s, as British colonies in North America continued to grow, the Pennsylvania government faced a new test. Maryland began establishing its own claims to land the Penns expected would one day be their own. The dispute over the proper boundaries of Maryland and Pennsylvania had simmered since William Penn received his charter, but only in the 1730s did the rivalry turn into a war, as settlements pushed colonial boundaries closer together and forced the issue to the fore. From about 1732 to 1738, Maryland and Pennsylvania engaged in a protracted border war marked by low-level strife punctuated by moments of extreme violence. Although the idea of a war between colonies seems odd, perhaps even an overstatement, everyone at the time called it one. When the Conojocular War, as it was called at the time, or Cresap’s War, as most recent historians have called it, was over, Pennsylvania had secured its border and vanquished its colonial rival.

The conflict is little studied and underappreciated; yet the episode is essential to understanding the colony’s political development and geographic growth. It forced Pennsylvania’s government to create an ad hoc means of waging war and to change its policy on expansion, the results of which affected the future of Pennsylvania’s relationships with Indian peoples. Indeed, the geographic expansion encouraged Indians dislocated by the war to become closer to New France. When the first war between European empires came to the region with the Seven Years’ War in the 1750s, the effects of the earlier war between Pennsylvania and Maryland still lingered, influencing both the location of frontiers in Pennsylvania and the identity of the colony’s enemies. The frontiers that developed in the 1750s, then, can only be understood through the dramatic changes wrought by this earlier conflict between two British colonies.

Figure 6. The contested borders between Maryland and Pennsylvania. From 1732 to 1738, Maryland and Pennsylvania clashed over control of the western side of the Susquehanna River. Marylanders staked a claim to the land by establishing a community near Thomas Cresap’s house. For six years, Marylanders and Pennsylvanians crossed the river to harass their enemies, culminating in 1736, when a group of Pennsylvanians burned Cresap’s house to the ground.

But what is also notable for our purposes is an absence of frontier language that only becomes all the more illustrative when compared with Pennsylvania’s later border wars. During the Conojocular War, Pennsylvanians still did not speak of “frontiers” or of being a “frontier people” who inhabited “frontier counties.” That such talk did not develop during this colonial conflict helps define the meaning and use of frontier in early America. The war with Maryland did not create “frontiers” because the battle was fought against a fellow British colony over expansion and control of western land within the empire rather than against a clear external enemy. The lack of such zones during the war shows that frontiers in the geopolitical imagination of colonists appeared only when Native groups or European rivals invaded—or threatened to invade—a British colony.

When compared to later border wars, the lack of frontiers in the 1730s helped Pennsylvania secure victory over its rival. In this earlier case, as colonists with malleable loyalties compared the two proprietary colonies, they expressed their preference for Pennsylvania’s model with its promise of peace and prosperity, giving Pennsylvania the backing it needed to displace Maryland and secure its future expansion west. But in the 1770s, in the conflicts that Pennsylvania lost to Virginia and Connecticut, colonists possessed a far different geopolitical imagination. After the Seven Years’ War, a large portion of the colonial population in the contested regions believed they inhabited “a frontier” against Indians. Instead of embracing Pennsylvania’s promise of tranquility with Native neighbors, those once again caught in the middle blamed the colony for their inadequate defense of frontier people. To make sense of this later collapse of Pennsylvania, it is important to understand the colony at its apogee, when it was able to defend itself against a colonial competitor and win the allegiance of settlers who had the power to choose the government they preferred.

Before moving to the action, however, the name of the conflict should be discussed. People have labeled it various things over time: Cresap’s War for the leader of the Maryland cause, the Conojocular War for the Indian name of the contested region, or occasionally the Maryland War by Pennsylvanians who fought in it. The Conojocular War may be the most accurate and was the term most people used at the time (often spelled various phonetic ways). The name also better reflects the nature of the conflict. The war was fought over territory called the Conegehally. It was not a war of Cresap’s making, since Pennsylvanians were often the instigators, nor was it Maryland’s War, since from the Marylanders’ perspective, Pennsylvania was the one invading their land.¹

“One Crissop, Particularly, Is Very Abusive”

The conflict between colonies began almost as soon as Lancaster County was created. One of the first hints of trouble came on an otherwise inconspicuous late September afternoon in 1731 when a group of men gathered at a cleared lot in Lancaster, the seat of the new county with the same name, to erect a courthouse on the town square. The new court symbolized the expansion of the colonial government and all that its creators hoped to accomplish with it. In this building, legal disputes could be mediated, offices filled, and punishments meted out. Within a year, however, these county offices and the powers they held would be used for an unexpected purpose: war.²

Samuel Blunston stood at the head of the operations that fall day. Blunston held the titles of justice of the peace, recorder of the deeds, and county prothonotary—a central position in county government that had important powers of oversight. Blunston had the perfect pedigree for the job. His roots in Pennsylvania went back to the colony’s founding. His father followed William Penn’s call and eventually rose to the highest levels of government, serving in various local offices and in both the Assembly and Provincial Council. Samuel, now forty-two years old, was following in his father’s footsteps. Blunston arrived on the banks of the Susquehanna in 1728 after purchasing a three-hundred-acre farm.³

By 1731, after only three short years in the area, Blunston had become more than a leading figure in the new county. Blunston’s many roles meant that he was the new government. His task was no small one. It fell to him to establish the colony’s authority in a region populated by, in his words, the “idle and dissolute persons who resorted hither to keep out of the hands of justice.” A functioning courthouse was going to be essential to his success. He would administer its daily operations, ranging from marriage licenses to road maintenance; enforce its laws; and oversee its expansion through a land office. The courthouse may have been the symbol of the expanding colonial government, but it was Blunston who would give it real force.⁴

As Blunston helped the other men from Lancaster raise the walls of this courthouse, Captain Civility, the Conestogas’ chief representative to Pennsylvania, approached him with an interpreter in tow. Civility, worried that the burst of colonial settlement would fray the good relations Gordon had recently cemented, came to express his concerns. He began by presenting a “string of wampum” before Blunston that carried the following urgent message for the governor:

That the Conestogoe Indians have always lived in good friendship with the Christian inhabitants of Pensilvania, and have behaved themselves agreeable to their treatys with them. That William Penn had promis’d them they should not be disturbed by any settlers on the west side of Sasquehannah, but now, contrary thereto, several Marylanders are settled by the river, on that side, at Conejohela; and one Crissop, particularly, is very abusive to them when they pass that way, and has beat and wounded one of their women who went to get apples from their own trees…. And further says, that, as they shal always take care their people do us no hurt, so they also expect we shall protect them.⁵

Civility’s message came as no surprise. The border controversy that Penn first confronted in 1682 still simmered. For most of the intervening fifty years, the dispute was a minor squabble between proprietors based in England. Occasionally, testy neighbors in the disputed southern region would use their loyalty to one lord as a way to exacerbate a personal feud that they had with someone loyal to the other. More recently, however, Maryland began to assert its rights by instigating jurisdictional clashes in an attempt to regain territory Pennsylvania occupied. Most of these disputes occurred on the Delmarva Peninsula in which Delaware and Maryland jurisdictions collided. Early in 1731, as Captain Civility was then discovering, Maryland moved to gain control of the western side of the Susquehanna. By settling the territory, Maryland forced an issue that had only been considered in the abstract until that time: both colonies needed to agree to a border between them if the empire was to function properly. Civility felt the pressure of this uncertainty, and he looked to his allies in Pennsylvania for protection from Maryland.⁶

Maryland, however, had a strong case in the west. The charters of Pennsylvania and Maryland both contained vague wording about the fortieth parallel of latitude forming the extent of each colony. When the charters were first written, no one was sure of the precise location of the line. In fact, most of the Greater Philadelphia region fell under the parallel; a literal reading of the charters employing what eventually became the fixed fortieth parallel line meant that the capital of Pennsylvania belonged to Maryland. While Baltimore demanded compensation for his loss, the Penns argued that Baltimore had it all wrong. They pointed to an early map that gave Penn control of territory well south of the fortieth parallel, evidence they said of the true intent of the Crown. Still, the wording of the charters gave Baltimore the ground, and the competing interpretation created an opportunity for the current Lord Baltimore to reassert his claims.⁷

There was another significant difference in the dispute over the west—the man named “Crissop.” Thomas Cresap arrived in Maryland from England sometime in the 1720s. His early years in North America remain unclear. There is evidence that after finding little initial success in Maryland, he traveled to Virginia and rented land from the Washington family. In any case, by the 1730s, he had developed a reputation as a wily and pugnacious individual. Having no particular loyalties to Maryland or its Catholic founding—though rumors circulated that he harbored sympathies for Rome—Cresap’s sole purpose in the colonies was to better himself. Rather than follow the staid, conformist path of the Blunstons, Cresap seized opportunity, if necessary, by force. He was perfect for Maryland’s plans. In time, Cresap showed a devotion to Maryland and Lord Baltimore as strong as Blunston’s was to Pennsylvania. He also possessed an audacity that made his gambit nearly successful.⁸

Evidence suggests that in 1730 or early 1731, Cresap received a patent from Lord Baltimore for land on the western side of the Susquehanna River. He made quite a show of it too. He built a sturdy homestead near the burned remnants of squatter Edward Parnel’s place, a clear sign to his Pennsylvanian neighbors that he would not be so easily cowed. Friends and family members joined him—people “of loose morals and turbulent spirits,” according to Blunston. Soon, Maryland had a bustling and tight-knit community on the contested western bank, situated just north of Lancaster.⁹

Cresap’s thriving community left Pennsylvania officials flummoxed. Cresap was no squatter, like Edward Parnel, who Pennsylvania’s government could evict through force. The Marylanders all possessed a legal claim from a neighboring colony, a partner in the British Empire who shared a common sovereign. Pennsylvania might dispute the validity of the Maryland land deeds, but it could not displace the residents without undermining the authority of its fellow British colony. Worse still for the Pennsylvanians, Maryland appeared willing to actively support the rights of these settlers. As James Logan remarked, because their opponent was another British colony, he did not “know … how to make war with them.”¹⁰

“Lands … Are More Valuable Now, Then They Were Before Any Form of Government Was Settled, Any Plantation Made, or Any Markets Found”

Fights between Maryland settlers and Pennsylvania officials over property rights and jurisdiction marked the first phase of the war as each side tried to accomplish their goal of establishing an undisturbed claim to the western side of the river. For Pennsylvanians, their challenge was to preserve that side of the river as undisturbed land still in Indian hands to honor the implied rights conveyed to the Conestoga at the Treaty of 1701. The way to do that was to remove the irritant, which meant they needed to target Cresap. For Marylanders, who were not party to the same treaty, their strategy was to persist by attracting settlers and to prevent Pennsylvania from establishing its authority over the region. The situation thus called for Pennsylvania to take offensive actions, though Pennsylvanians clearly saw the Marylanders who had built homes on the western side as the original offenders.

Civility’s message that October day provided Pennsylvania officials with the opportunity to seize Cresap. Before the meeting, James Logan had confided to Blunston that “he should be glad if Crissop could be taken.” The problem was the government lacked the legal pretext to do so, at least until Civility showed up. When Blunston relayed Civility’s concerns to higher officials, he also noted that Cresap harbored Samuel Chance, a runaway servant of Edmund Cartlidge, a prominent Pennsylvanian trader. Cresap, Blunston reported, “threatens to shoot any person who shal offer to take away said servant.” Blunston saw in Cresap’s seizure of Pennsylvania property a cause to act, writing “if you think it will be of service to the government to have him taken, I believe it may be done.”¹¹

Though there are no records of the government’s response, a few weeks later Edmund Cartlidge orchestrated a ruse meant to capture Cresap. On October 31, Cresap heard three shots from the eastern side of the river, which was the usual call for his ferry. On crossing the river with Chance, the servant in question, he met Edward Beddock, Rice Morgan, and “a Negroe man belonging … to Edward Cartlidge.” Beddock and Morgan both asked to cross the river. After Cresap had rowed them seventy yards from shore, the two men drew guns and yelled, “Damn you, Cresap, turn to shore or you are a dead man.” Cresap immediately tried to pull in his oar. Rice Morgan, believing Cresap was preparing to strike his assailants, “knocked him down … with his gun, and one or both of them threw … Chance over board.”¹²

Cresap recovered and tried to subdue his captors with his oar. The long pole proved too unwieldy for the task, so he took to his fists. Morgan managed to get the better of Cresap. Morgan and Beddock then grabbed Cresap and threw him into the river. Cresap held onto the side of the barge “for the safety of his life” while both men “endeavoured to force [him] to quit” his grip and vowed to murder him. As both sides struggled, the current carried the boat south until Cresap could feel ground under his feet. As soon as he could stand, he let go of the boat and worked his way to an island where an Indian rescued him and brought him back to his house. He did not see his boat for three weeks, and when he finally did, “it was much damnified.”¹³

After drying off, Cresap sought Andrew Cornish, the sheriff of Lancaster County, to lodge a complaint with Pennsylvania justices of the peace against Cartlidge and his agents, who were duly—if weakly—punished with a fine. Cresap also brought the matter to Samuel Ogle, the Maryland governor, who wrote angry missives to Patrick Gordon about the unjust treatment of the Marylanders. Gordon took the opportunity to point out that by appealing to Pennsylvania officials for justice, Cresap had implied that his home was under Pennsylvania jurisdiction. Thus, the attempt to capture Cresap, even though it failed, had strengthened Pennsylvania’s case. The turn of events taught Cresap a valuable lesson in the way the competing legal systems on contested borders could work to bolster or undermine one side or the other. He would not make the same mistake again. Ogle also seemed to recognize the error and decided to appoint Cresap a justice of the peace, thereby extending Maryland’s legal jurisdiction to offer protection to its residents in the region. With both sides exerting competing claims to the land, legal confrontations continued, and the ensuing low-level violence defined life on the banks of the Susquehanna.¹⁴

With Pennsylvanians vowing to fight Marylanders “to … the knees in blood” and Marylanders promising to “repel force by force,” Gordon soon worried that the situation could escalate into something worse: civil war. He therefore tried to appeal to the goodwill of Maryland’s governor, Samuel Ogle, by evoking the one thing they were supposed to share: an interest in advancing the Crown’s aims in North America. Gordon wanted them to work together, lest their civil war create an opening for the French to gain ground in the west. Gordon thus argued that Pennsylvania’s model of ordered expansion and peaceful relations with Native peoples was the best means to secure broader imperial interests.¹⁵

He began his plea by outlining the uncertain nature of imperial North American geopolitics and playing upon the fears of a French invasion to unite the colonies, writing that “the French … possessed … Canada and that vast country they call Louisiana” and thus “enclose all of these British colonies.” Gordon worried that unrestrained expansion on the part of British colonies only played into French hands by sending wavering Native groups closer to New France’s imperial orbit. Of particular concern were the Shawnees. Gordon received reports suggesting the Shawnees had “given some offence” to the Six Nations Iroquois and had “retired to a branch of the Mississippi called Ohio” away from their enemies (and by default the British sphere of influence). Gordon heard that once in the Ohio region, “some French spies” had convinced the Shawnees to swear allegiance to Canada. Gordon sought to secure the Shawnee alliance by surveying “10 or 15,000 acres of land round the principal town where [the Shawnees] were last seated.” The willingness to grant such a sizable tract demonstrated how seriously Pennsylvania officials took the Shawnees’ potential to upset the precarious balance of imperial rivalries. Gordon essentially had carved out an area of Indian autonomy and independence as a way to ingratiate Pennsylvania with much-needed allies, while also providing the colony with a buffer against the French, similar to the one Logan had hoped the Scots-Irish would provide if a frontier against Indians formed.¹⁶

Of course, Gordon also complained to Ogle of “that rude fellow Cresap’s behavior.” Cresap, Gordon argued, could upset Native American relations in the empire because “those Indians consider us all as subjects of the same great Empire and their resentments against one part will unavoidably be attended with further unhappy consequences to others.” Likewise, Gordon concluded that complaints about Cresap’s actions should “concern Maryland as well as Pennsylvania, and as the British Interest may be affected by them, undoubtedly every good subject is concerned.”¹⁷

Gordon’s call for comity fell on deaf ears. Imperial interests seemed far removed from the banks of the Susquehanna in the 1730s, especially since no one had any imminent fear of invasion. In other words, because no one believed frontiers existed in the region, colonies could pursue their own self-interest rather than worry about a common external enemy like France. Another part of the problem that only exacerbated matters was that Gordon and Ogle were not the usual type of governors. They were executives of proprietary colonies, and they had to worry about their proprietors’ interests as much as, if not more than, the often vague and ill-defined interests of the empire.

Meanwhile, half a world away, the three Penn brothers, who had inherited the colony when their mother died, and Charles Calvert, the Fifth Lord Baltimore, stood around a large map of the region trying to find a permanent settlement for the dispute. The proprietors carried an air of formal diplomacy throughout the negotiations, as if they were kings of independent nations. They had good reason to act that way. Proprietary colonies were, in some respects, feudalistic fiefdoms in which the proprietors, as lords of the manor, could negotiate with other political entities over jurisdictional and diplomatic matters. In theory, proprietors were subordinated to the monarch, but in an empire in which communication was slow and control weak, proprietors could operate with only minimal oversight from the Crown. Left to their own devices, the two proprietary families agreed to mediate the dispute themselves rather than depend on the whims of the empire, an entity neither family fully trusted because it had no clear means of solving these disputes.¹⁸

Early on in the meeting, the Penns had agreed to let Baltimore commission a map that would serve as the basis for their negotiations. Baltimore decided on a map drawn by his agents in Maryland, which he sent to an English engraver to have further refined. Once Baltimore’s map had been done to his liking, the two proprietary families began divvying up the Middle Colonies. The negotiations lasted throughout the spring of 1732. Finally, on May 10, 1732, the two proprietary groups signed an agreement at Baltimore’s palatial home.¹⁹

There was a problem for Lord Baltimore, however, one that he would realize only after it was too late. The map used to draw the lines was deeply flawed. Somehow a “false cape” existed on the map that led Baltimore to agree to give away far more land than he intended. Evidence suggests that the Penns knew of the error, but they said nothing. Baltimore’s eventual discovery of the mistake (he would say deceit) after it was too late would doom the agreement and signal the escalation of hostilities.²⁰

But for the moment at least, optimism reigned. Since everyone knew that the boundaries sketched neatly on the map would be tougher to draw in reality, in the summer Baltimore and the youngest Penn, Thomas, departed for the region to oversee the official surveying. Thomas was a smart choice. Aged thirty-one, he was the youngest of the three Penn sons born to William’s second wife, Hannah. Thomas, like his brothers, had lived through his father’s shaky finances. Indeed, Thomas had felt their father’s financial straits more than the others. As the youngest brother, he had been apprenticed to a merchant in London because the family expected he would have to find his own way in the world. When Thomas and his brothers inherited Pennsylvania, they knew their future depended upon realizing what their father could not: the vast wealth a proprietary colony was supposed to offer its owners. The older brothers thus turned to the youngest brother, whose business acumen left him well-equipped to lead a proprietary colony.²¹

They all recognized that the Agreement of 1732 was an important step toward solvency. Land grants and the collection of quitrents in the contested region had virtually stopped in both colonies because new settlers refused to pay for land with uncertain titles. The slowing of revenues left the Penns in a precarious financial position, but they expected the new agreement would change that. The proprietors realized that the recent expansion of the colonial government—its legal institutions, markets, and order—had made these lands all the more valuable. Richard Penn, for instance, speculated that the quitrents on new grants could be higher than ever before because the “lands … are more valuable now, then they were before any form of government was settled, any plantation made, or any markets found.”²²

As Charles Calvert, the Fifth Lord Baltimore, crossed the Atlantic, he harbored similar dreams. While Baltimore was only two years older than Thomas, he had had a far different upbringing, and he had developed a different character. Baltimore grew up the privileged oldest son of a wealthy baron. His father died when he was sixteen, leaving him a fortune, including the rights to Maryland. By 1732, Baltimore had controlled his colony for more than half of his life. As he matured, he became enmeshed in imperial politics by holding various court appointments and several ministerial posts. His personality mixed with his background left him far more brash, assertive, and abrasive. He was prepared, like his grandfather before him, to confront the Penn family if necessary.²³

Baltimore and the Penns did have one thing in common. The patriarchs of both families secured their charters in spite of their contentious religious beliefs. By the early eighteenth century, their heirs abandoned the faiths of their fathers and joined the Church of England, a move meant to ingratiate them with the Crown. Baltimore’s father renounced his Catholic faith and joined the Anglican confession in 1713. The conversion allowed him to regain control over Maryland’s government, something the family had lost with the ascension of William and Mary. The Penns, meanwhile, knew that Quakerism created political problems at a time when they could ill afford such hassle, and so they distanced themselves from the meetings. Thomas would make the split complete with his marriage in an Anglican Church in 1751. Unlike Baltimore’s move to conformity, Penn’s conversion only distanced him from the Quaker governing elite in Pennsylvania, even as it drew him closer to imperial circles. It also allowed him to embrace the military means necessary to defend his colony from a rival.

After arriving in their respective colonies in the fall, the proprietors and their commissioners met to implement the agreement on October 6, 1732, in Newtown, Delaware. The conference began with a bang—Thomas Penn spent over £100 treating the Marylanders to drinking and displays of gunfire—but ended with a thud. For almost a year, commissioners met sporadically to discuss the articles but were never able to agree on the proper boundaries. The diplomatic charade went on until November 1733, when the warring commissions finally agreed to disagree and wrote an official report about their failure. Indeed, once Baltimore saw the land in person, he was sure that the map used in 1732 was not only inaccurate but somehow the work of the Penns to defraud him. Incensed, Baltimore left for England in May 1733, effectively declaring the agreement dead. At the time, James Logan, who had once wondered how two colonies could go to war with one another, concluded “tis now all over … the dye is cast and nothing but war remains.”²⁴

“He Would Defend Him from the Proprietor of Pensilvania”

By the time Baltimore left, he and his agents had designed a new strategy for Maryland to win the disputed land. First, Samuel Ogle had to establish Maryland’s firm control over the land west of the Susquehanna by convincing settlers to become loyal tenants of Baltimore. Second, Ogle had to establish Maryland’s legal jurisdiction through the appointment of justices of the peace and other offices. Samuel Blunston described these tactics as an effort “to alienate the minds of the inhabitants of this province and draw them from obedience to their party.” In England, meanwhile, Baltimore prepared to press his case in court using the loyalty of the settlers, the establishment of legal offices, and the taxes paid to him as evidence supporting the validity of his claim. In short, Baltimore hoped that a functioning legal jurisdiction would equal political possession.²⁵

Ogle knew that the implementation of such a plan would require muscle, and he looked to Thomas Cresap to supply it. When Baltimore made Cresap a justice of the peace sometime in 1732, he expected that Cresap’s ardor would serve his purposes well. The terms of Cresap’s commission reinforced the often personal relationship between proprietors and their tenants. Proprietors felt duty-bound to protect those loyal to them, and settlers would only give their fealty to a government that proved it could provide security. As one of the Marylanders stated, because Baltimore “had recd money for that land on which … Cressop lived, he would defend him from the proprietor of Pensilvania.” Cresap soon enlisted others to support him, formed militias to protect Marylanders, and empowered constables, all of which built a bulwark to fend off Pennsylvanian attacks at the same time that it established Maryland’s legal jurisdiction.²⁶

Cresap also initiated a policy of accepting a variety of people seeking refuge, such as runaway servants from Pennsylvania and new immigrants, and he invited a number of relatives to join him. Moreover, sometime around 1732, a German community, which had settled near the Codorus Creek on the west side of the Susquehanna River before the conflict between the colonies began, decided to pay taxes to Maryland in exchange for formal recognition of their land ownership. The community was considered a large settlement for the time, with at least fifty heads of household. Their allegiance to Baltimore was crucial because he could use their fidelity as evidence that those who already lived in the region recognized his claims as legitimate.²⁷

With Baltimore in England and Cresap operating with a commission on the western side of the Susquehanna opposite Lancaster County, Thomas Penn began to orchestrate Pennsylvania’s counterstrategy through Samuel Blunston. Penn once again aimed his institutional powers at Cresap, the representative of Maryland’s claim to absolute legal authority over the area. By the winter of 1733, Thomas Penn approved an arrest warrant for Cresap, and rumors that were probably true circulated that there was a £50 reward for his capture. Around that time, Andrew Hamilton, the Penns’ main legal adviser, met with Blunston and gave him specific orders for arresting Cresap. Although no record exists of his instructions, correspondence between Penn and Blunston suggests that Hamilton advised the latter to arrest Cresap at any point when he was not at his house. This was likely done for technical reasons. Cresap possessed a grant for his home, which meant Pennsylvania would violate Maryland’s sovereignty by raiding it. The area outside of Cresap’s home, however, was, in Pennsylvania’s view, under its jurisdiction.²⁸

During the winter of 1734, Blunston plotted with his aides to snatch Cresap. As a pacifist Quaker, Blunston delegated the violence to the Scots-Irish settlers from Donegal and the Scots-Irish sheriff of Lancaster County, a pattern that would come to define this war and the ones that would follow. The situation escalated on January 29, when Lancaster County sheriff Robert Buchanan received intelligence that Cresap planned to leave his yard to help his workmen cut logs for a new home and a ferry. It was the exact legal opening they had sought. Buchanan rounded up a crew and headed across the river. Cresap, having received advance word of the Pennsylvanians’ plan, stayed back and sent his wife to the field to watch for the impending attack. The Pennsylvanians, meanwhile, seized eight of Cresap’s men for various complaints, carted them off to Blunston’s house (which served as Lancaster’s jail), and left the rest. Cresap’s wife, meanwhile, escaped and raced back to their home to warn Thomas of the assault.²⁹

Some of the disappointed Pennsylvanians decided to head to Cresap’s home to capture their prize, contravening the instructions of Hamilton. This smaller group arrived at Cresap’s at about seven o’clock in the evening. At first, they asked for nighttime lodging, a ploy to get into the house, but Cresap refused and bolted the door. A standoff ensued with both sides shouting threats through cracks in the logs. Eventually, Cresap opened the door to fire a warning shot. The Pennsylvanians seized the opportunity and began to push in the front door. Cresap and his tenants, frightened by the action, released the door and ran into the back room. The Pennsylvanians tumbled into the house. Two Pennsylvanians rushed after Cresap, but Cresap’s assistants beat them back while Cresap nailed the inside door shut.³⁰

Outside, the Pennsylvanians realized that Cresap’s warning shot had hit Knowles Daunt, one of Emerson’s servants. Daunt’s leg was crushed above the left knee with fragments of bone protruding. The Pennsylvanians, upon realizing the severity of the injury, retreated from the house and asked Cresap’s wife for a candle to aid Daunt. She refused, shouting through the walls that “she wold gladly wash her hands in said Daunt’s heart’s blood.” The Pennsylvanians, shocked and confused at the deadly turn, headed back across the river, abandoning the immobilized Daunt. A fellow servant, Michael Dooling, eventually rescued him. Daunt lasted a few days in Lancaster but ultimately succumbed to his injuries. Cresap remained secure on the western side, but Daunt’s murder would eventually catch up to him.³¹

Such deadly violence surprised Penn. The thing that concerned him most was that his colonists had operated outside of the law, which he worried could upset his standing if imperial administrators tried to intervene. Up until this point, most of the conflict had occurred through legal channels. This violence, however, resembled war, and he worried that to an impartial judge Pennsylvania could appear the instigator. Because of the bloodshed, Penn, after consulting with Andrew Hamilton, instructed Blunston, who as a justice of the peace presided over the county court, to “calmly” deal with the eight prisoners grabbed in the initial action. Penn, however, did “not mean that they should not be told how much we shal resent any such incroachments and that all persons must expect to be punished who will be guilt[y] of such irregular practices.” Blunston appears to have released them on bail. Necessity likely also drove the leniency, since, as he reported at the time, there were “more prisoners then guards.”³²

Cresap, for his part, left for Maryland to report on what happened. When his superiors heard of the skirmish, they decided to launch a counterattack that was meant to assert Maryland’s sole control of the western territory. Cresap returned with twenty militiamen in tow, the undersheriff of Baltimore County, and a resupply of “guns … swords, cutlasses and clubs.” Their aim was to capture the strongest symbols of Pennsylvania’s authority on the western side. They hoped that by doing so, they could show the strength of Maryland’s government and better establish their legitimacy.³³

As the band approached the contested region, the group split into two. One group surrounded Pennsylvania loyalist John Hendricks’s house while the other blocked the river to stop an escape. After seizing Hendricks, the group then moved on to Joshua Minshall’s house, a Quaker loyal to Penn, and took him. They carted the two men to a jail in Annapolis. The arrest warrants for both Minshall and Hendricks rested on depositions that accused them of aiding the assault on Cresap’s house and, in the case of Hendricks, stirring up the Indians to attack Marylanders and giving “menacing speeches” to Marylanders that “they should not hold such lands … unless they would become tenants to the [proprietor] of Pennsylvania or acknowledge him as their land lord.” Hendricks’s words, the deposition stated, had created a “great terror” in Marylanders’ minds. As the protector of Baltimore’s tenants, Ogle arrested them in order to secure his tenants from their “great terror.”³⁴

The seizure of Penn’s tenants escalated the cycle of violence in which both sides were competing to accomplish the same thing: securing absolute legal control of new ground. A key part of what drove the violence was each government’s desire to show that they could provide protection for their residents and that the other government lacked the ability to provide the security colonists expected. The wives of the imprisoned Pennsylvania men knew of the proprietor’s responsibility to them and they pleaded with Penn directly that “proper care … be taken for their husbands defence.” Penn understood his responsibility and sent money to the prisoners and their families, as well as securing a strong legal defense for them in court. It was a smart choice. Hendricks and Minshall, stuck in a “stinking louses hole” and surrounded by those they called their “enemys,” promised Penn “to stand and maintain” his rights. They refused to sign anything that Maryland could use to strengthen their legal case because they knew Penn upheld his side of the bargain.³⁵

Sparks flew throughout 1734 and 1735 as both sides continued to try to bully their rival into submission. The leaders of both sides added regular colonists who were vocal partisans to their list of targets, hoping that intimidation could sway their allegiance and those still caught in the middle. Marylanders seized one of John Emerson’s servants stationed in the contested zone, leaving the man’s nursing wife “to fend for herself.” Emerson tried to retaliate by seizing Cresap, but he failed to find him. Instead, he arrested William Cannon, Cresap’s brother-in-law. Ogle responded to Cannon’s imprisonment with a proclamation calling for the arrest of Robert Buchanan, the sheriff of Lancaster, and John Emerson. In the winter of 1735, Buchanan and “thirty men several of whom were armed with hangers and pistols” seized seven Germans working on Cresap’s plantation; their crime, a captive would later testify, was “for working for the said Cressop on his land.”³⁶

Cresap, understandably, grew more paranoid. He worried that Pennsylvanians plotted to “kill and destroy” him and “burn” his house. In such a state of constant fear, Cresap was often seen standing in his doorway “armed with pistols in his belt, a Gun in his hand, and Long Sword by his side Like Robinson Crusoe.” Other Marylanders lived in fear of arrest, complaining that Samuel Blunston and the Pennsylvanians used trumped-up warrants to arrest “a great many people over the river for some debt and some quarreling.” As these patterns of legal intimidation grew stronger, nearly everyone in the region became affected by the conflict; one historian has estimated that over two hundred households took up active arms for one side or the other. As on Pennsylvanian noted, “the people” did “not seem well pleased with this state of war.”³⁷

“Surveying Lands to the Inhabitants over Sasquehannah Is What Should Not Be an Hour Neglected”

Amid all of these legal entanglements and bloody assaults, Penn realized that he needed a new strategy if he was going to secure victory. He had to maintain the allegiance of Pennsylvanians already in the region, win new converts, and actively assert his claim to the land, all of which meant that to combat Maryland, he would have to appeal to the needs of settlers. He thus began to learn the political art of colonial competition in which colonists’ choice mattered more than proprietary dictate.