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INTRODUCTION

Early American Frontiers

In January 1765, as Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were busy surveying the line that now bears their names, a morbid “curiousity” led Charles to stop his work and take a journey to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As he later recorded in his diary, it was “the place where was perpetrated last winter, the horrid and inhumane murder of 26 Indians: men, women, and children, leaving none alive to tell.” Mason had to see the site of this depravity to understand it.¹

The brutal event that drew Mason to Lancaster is now known as the Paxton Boys’ Rebellion. It began in December 1763 when a group of colonists living outside of Lancaster massacred their neighbors, the Conestoga Indians, who resided on a nearby manor reserved for them by the Pennsylvania government. A couple of weeks after their initial assault, the Paxton Boys raided a building in Lancaster that housed the few surviving Conestogas, killing all alive. The murderers became rebels when hundreds of supporters joined them in a seventy-mile trek through the rough winter to Philadelphia, the colonial capital, to defend the Paxton Boys’ actions and protest what they saw as the government’s overly benevolent policy toward Native people. The march was likely the largest political mobilization in the history of colonial Pennsylvania.

Mason was surprised by what he found when he visited. Lancaster was not some lawless frontier outpost, but instead a bustling and vibrant inland port. Its location a few miles from the Susquehanna River, a central artery that in 1763 connected the vast interior of North America to the Atlantic, meant that the town was an important waypoint for the British Empire as it expanded west across the Appalachian Mountains. Lancaster was “as large as most market towns in England,” Mason noted in his diary before leaving. He was right; it was the largest inland town in colonial America.²

Mason’s trip took another unexpected turn a few days later when he met a fellow traveler named Samuel Smith. Smith told Mason a strange tale about Lancaster and its role in creating the border Mason was then in the business of surveying. About thirty years earlier, Smith recounted, Pennsylvania was “in open war” with Maryland over control of the Susquehanna and all lands to the west. Smith, who was the sheriff of Lancaster County at the time, controlled a militia that laid siege to the home of the leader of the Marylanders, one Mr. Cresap. In the ensuing melee, Cresap’s house was engulfed in flames, one Marylander died, and the Pennsylvanians captured and jailed Cresap and many of his men. Mason seemed surprised by Smith’s story of two neighboring colonies engaged in such a violent conflict. It is even more surprising that Mason was unaware of this “open war” because it had led to his current assignment. When the king heard that two of his colonies were fighting, he drew a temporary boundary between them. After a court case to settle the dispute, Mason was dispatched with Dixon to establish a permanent line.³

During this brief but eventful trip to Pennsylvania, Mason encountered the twin problems that plagued the British Empire on its North American frontiers in the years before the American Revolution: establishing social harmony within the empire, especially between colonists and Native Americans, and creating borders between the polities that composed the empire. While Mason and Dixon were in the midst of marking a line between colonies, imperial officials were trying to create clearer boundaries between colonial settlements and Indians. Throughout the 1760s, officers of the British Empire hoped to stabilize relations with the Indians by granting them specific territories and by opening a brisk trade with Native allies. These imperial officials envisioned a porous border—an “open road” was the catchphrase of the time—that would maintain a lasting peace by incorporating Native peoples into the empire economically while also granting them some political autonomy.

The policies meant to integrate Indians into the British Empire, however, only added to colonists’ growing frustrations. The Paxton Boys epitomized this viewpoint. After living through the Seven Years’ War (1754 to 1763) and Pontiac’s War (1763 to 1765), colonists who had experienced this decade of strife saw Indians—all Indians, even their Conestoga neighbors—as enemies rather than friends with whom they wished to trade. They viewed imperial policies, traders, and a colonial governing elite as disconnected from—even hostile to—their needs. Where imperial officials stationed in London or the eastern seaports aimed to incorporate Indians into Britain’s mercantile system and increasingly global trade, many colonists on the frontiers of the British Empire wanted to exclude Indians from the rights and privileges of the imperial system and shift political power away from the east and to the west.

The Paxton Boys’ massacre of the Conestogas and subsequent march on Philadelphia was the first in a series of frontier rebellions that aimed to challenge these imperial regulations in the decades before the American Revolution. A few months after Mason’s venture to Lancaster, another group of colonists calling themselves the Black Boys launched a raid on a British fort near Fort Pitt, one of the most audacious attacks on imperial authority in colonial America. Three years later, another mobilization occurred to defend Frederick Stump, a man arrested for murdering a group of Indians in an attack eerily reminiscent of the Paxton Boys.

These colonial protests against their government in the 1760s were just as important to the coming of the American Revolution as such better-known urban revolts as the Stamp Act protests and Boston Tea Party. But the cause of the western discontent was far different from that of easterners. More than a decade of living on the frontlines of war transformed the worldview of colonists on the edges of Great Britain’s North American Empire. During the Seven Years’ War, the countryside they inhabited, once renowned for its peace and prosperity, turned into what was increasingly called a “frontier country,” an important description they had not used previously. During and after the war, people in western regions that had been called the “back parts” or “back counties” before the fighting began to refer to themselves as a “frontier people” who lived in “frontier counties.” Many wrote about the traumatic process of “becoming a frontier,” an event marked by profound fear, utter desperation, and an abiding hatred for those that caused these feelings. These self-described “frontier people” were civilians who had turned into unwilling combatants, and they looked to their government for the military protection they believed they deserved. When the government failed them, they looked to themselves and their neighbors for security. The perception of being a people ignored by their governments lingered after peace in 1763 and animated their actions in the years before independence.

When Mason fell into the company of Samuel Smith after investigating the Paxton Boys, he stumbled upon the second problem of imperial governance: establishing political borders in the empire. Mason’s lack of awareness of the border war that led to his current appointment suggests that few people outside of these contested areas were familiar with this type of intercolonial strife. For those living in the British Empire’s North American holdings, however, border conflicts between colonies were a common occurrence. From New Hampshire to the Carolinas, boundary controversies were a regular part of governing. Indeed, Smith and other combatants regaled visitors with stories of colonial conflicts decades after they occurred because they still mattered to colonists at the time, many of whom lived in similarly unstable areas.

Located at the center of Great Britain’s North American holdings, Pennsylvania experienced more border conflicts than any other colony. After its clash with Maryland in the 1730s, Pennsylvania waged two separate fights in the 1760s and 1770s, one against Virginia and another against Connecticut. Unlike the Maryland War, Pennsylvania lost these later battles. By 1775, the colony—once the literal and figurative heart of North America, the home of the largest city in the colonies, and the seat of the Continental Congress that was then preparing to declare thirteen colonies independent of the empire—had collapsed. Although the colonial government claimed sovereignty over the region that we today associate with Pennsylvania, its governing authority had largely vanished. Connecticut controlled the northern third of the state, while Virginia controlled the western region. In the interior portions, groups like the Paxton Boys and Black Boys ignored their government, and many renounced their allegiance to Pennsylvania so they could help other colonies establish toeholds in areas that Pennsylvania’s government claimed. The failure of the British Empire and its colonies to establish clear political borders without resorting to intercolonial warfare reveals another fundamental failure of imperial administration.⁴

Indeed, in 1776, those in Philadelphia who were rejecting the British Empire thought a great deal about the frontiers and borders of the nation they were creating. As patriots explained their reasons for declaring independence, they looked west. Thomas Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence that one of King George III’s crimes against his colonists was encouraging Indians to launch raids “on the inhabitants of our frontiers,” a reference to events that were then occurring around Fort Pitt. And when revolutionaries thought about the powers of the government they were creating, they again looked west. John Dickinson, a Pennsylvanian well versed in the colony’s travails, made sure that the Articles of Confederation contained a clear means for states to mediate their border disputes.

Figure 1. Pennsylvania and its contested borders. Pennsylvania fought a war against Maryland over its southern and western boundaries from 1732 to 1738. In the 1770s, Pennsylvania clashed with Connecticut and Virginia over their competing claims and lost.

But these attempts to solve the problems of the British Empire during the American Revolution beg the question: what caused the disintegration of government power in the years preceding American independence? The answer has less to do with the structure of the British Empire and its officials and more to do with, in Jefferson’s words, “the inhabitants of our frontiers,” people such as Samuel Smith and the Paxton Boys. Like the border wars that we should take seriously because people of the time did, we should take Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence seriously and try to understand what he meant by them. In fact, one of his well-chosen words connects these two problems of governing North America and helps explain the collapse of colonial and imperial rule in the west: frontier.

Frontier: the border … which the enemies find in the front when they are about to enter.

—N. Bailey, The New Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1776)

Words, like people, shape history. Words can command action, convey feelings, or encapsulate beliefs. People deploy certain words to drive events. Words are often the best—and sometimes the only—things historians have to access the past. And words, like people, possess a history. The meaning and import of a specific word may change, sometimes dramatically so. To a historian, knowing what a word meant and how its definition shifted over time can help reconstruct the way people experienced their past, show the way they used words to explain their present, and explain the course of the history these people made.

Frontier is such a word. Colonists used frontier to describe the world as they understood it. Specifically, a frontier in early America was a zone that people considered vulnerable to invasion, one that was created when colonists feared an onslaught from imperial rivals and other enemies. As such, it was a word that colonists used to explain their geopolitical landscape. For our purposes, an English dictionary published in 1776, the year Jefferson cited attacks on “our frontiers” as a reason to declare independence, distills the way that people thought of a frontier at the time of the American Revolution: “the border, confine, or boundary of a kingdom or province, which the enemies find in the front when they are about to enter the same.”⁵

According to this definition, a version of which appeared in print at least as early as 1730, frontier zones were the opposite of how they appear in today’s popular imagination. Frontiers were not areas of active expansion, exploration, and economic opportunity; they were contingent (a clear enemy threat created such zones), defensive (threatened areas required fortifications to ward off an assault), and prone to contraction (if a colony failed to adequately fortify a frontier, then the enemy would be able to push the borders of the territory inward). So defined, frontiers were often specific communities that an enemy would attack first as part of a larger invasion. Indeed, a later dictionary copied the 1776 definition verbatim and added, “thus we say, a frontier town, frontier province.”⁶

As political theorists developed the idea of the early modern state, frontiers defined in this way became important parts of the larger body politic in which they existed. Frontiers were the limbs of a polity; they warded off assault and provided the first and most important protection for the heart, or capital region. The relationship between these two parts was thus based on reciprocity. While a frontier helped protect the heart, frontiers themselves depended upon the heart—the capital, the government—for sustenance and support. A diseased political body saw its frontiers wither, while a healthy political body, one that had a strong heart, sustained its limbs. As Walter Raleigh wrote in the early seventeenth century, “As health and soundness of the hands, legs, and other outward members cannot continue life, unless the heart and vital spirits within be strong and firm; so fortifications and Frontier-defences do not prevail.” Such a conception of frontier crossed the Atlantic with British colonists, who adapted their language to describe their new geopolitical terrain, with officials and colonists often describing their various frontiers as “naked,” “open,” and “exposed,” a desperate situation that demanded more military aid from the government.⁷

This reciprocal relationship, one in which those on the frontiers provided the heart of the polity with some measure of protection while those in the heart supplied the support necessary to ward off an attack, formed the fundamental contract between the government and the governed that was so important to those living in the early modern world. In fact, it was on frontiers that early modern governments were made or lost, especially colonial initiatives that projected power into North America. Benjamin Franklin expressed such an understanding when he declared in his popular pamphlet Great Britain Reconsidered that “the Frontier of any dominion being attack’d, it becomes not merely ‘the cause’ of the people immediately affected, (the inhabitants of that Frontier) but properly ‘the cause’ of the whole body. Where Frontier People owe and pay obedience, there they have a right to look for protection. No political proposition is better established than this.”⁸

In short, frontier was a politically potent word in the eighteenth century. A successful frontier policy was supposed to make “frontier people” feel secure. As Franklin noted, in exchange for this security “frontier people owe and pay obedience” to their government. If the government ignored their pleas or failed to protect them against an attack, then anxiety could turn into anger so strong that it would break the bonds between the governed and the governed. As Franklin concluded, “No political proposition is better established”; it was an essential part of governing in early America.

The structure of the British Empire in North America meant that most colonies were responsible for providing for their own frontiers. In fact, most colonies passed laws from their inception to aid areas designated as such because providing security was where a colony began. Governing frontiers was thus essential to the success or failure of colonial projects. It was in these zones that colonies proved they could maintain their fundamental obligation to their constituents. If a colony could manage its frontier regions and provide the type of protection colonists sought, then the colony would secure the fundamental contract between the Crown and its peoples. From there, colonies could help establish the rest of their governing capacities and serve larger imperial aims. Such a process played out in most British colonies early in their history, as colonists waged a series of wars against their Indian neighbors or their European competitors. These colonies established militias, raised taxes to support wars, and crafted policies to strengthen frontier regions, often by encouraging more colonists to settle in them. Indeed, most colonies from their founding successfully integrated frontier policy into their governing with little controversy. They were, as William Penn described New York in 1701, “a frontier government.”⁹

Pennsylvania, however, avoided a direct confrontation with a European rival or a major war with its Native neighbors for the first seventy-three years of its existence. Influenced by the pacifist ideals of its founder, William Penn, government officials took pride in their good Indian relations, often boasting that their model for colonization was superior to that of other colonies. They also benefited from their location, protected on the east by New Jersey and with New York as a buffer from French Canada. From 1681 until the 1750s, Pennsylvania flourished because it was able to win the loyalty of its colonists through peace and prosperity, providing colonists with a sense of security without warfare against Indians or European adversaries. In short, Pennsylvania lacked frontier regions because no one feared invasion. While that history makes Pennsylvania different from other British colonies in North America, it also makes the role of frontiers in early America particularly revealing.

After war with an external enemy finally came to the region in the 1750s when joint French and Indian raids attacked Pennsylvanian settlements during the Seven Years’ War, many Pennsylvanians who faced such deadly incursions believed their homes in a once peaceful countryside now formed a dangerous frontier. They sought the same militarization for their communities that other British colonies had long offered their colonists. In the postwar years, the period marked by rebellions like that of the Paxton Boys, colonial and imperial officials wanted to reestablish security on former frontiers through peace with Indians and demilitarization. But colonists in the region demanded a very different policy, one more akin to the defensive and militaristic one adopted by most other colonies that continued to act as if they had a frontier region to protect. Thus, the fundamental bond between frontier people and their government began to break down in Pennsylvania as these views diverged in the 1760s. The governing crisis created on the colony’s frontiers—indeed a disagreement between colonists and their colonial and imperial governments over whether the colony even contained frontiers—would only be solved by a revolution that would overthrow the colonial establishment and create a new governing contract on the terms frontier people demanded.

“Distresses of a Frontier Man”

To introduce these eighteenth-century “frontier people,” let us turn to one of their most astute chroniclers, Hector St. John Crevecoeur, author of the famous work Letters from an American Farmer. Crevecoeur traveled throughout British North America in the 1760s and wrote about the people he met and the society he observed. Crevecoeur’s perceptions were so shrewd that his book is still required reading for people seeking to understand eighteenth-century North America. As his biographers say, with little hesitation, “His writings show more detailed knowledge of American geography and life of the settlers than those of any other writer of the period.” The question at the heart of his work, posed in his most famous letter, “What Is an American?” resonates still. Often overlooked, however, is the book’s last chapter, titled “Distresses of a Frontier Man.” His treatment of the “frontier man” provides a window into the lives of the people who form the subject of his book.¹⁰

“Distresses of a Frontier Man” is set at the beginning of the American Revolution. Crevecoeur’s protagonist, whose name is James, lives on a farm in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In Crevecoeur’s earlier essays, the farm represented hope and opportunity. Though isolated, James nonetheless feels connected to the rest of society through his bountiful harvests that tied James’s labors to the rest of the society through the market. But in the final chapter, war has turned his farm into a place of fear, desperation, and isolation, a living death. The fear of invasion looms in all that he does, and life itself becomes muted. Night is the worst time. “Whichever way” James looks, he sees “the most frightful precipices.” When he looks to the mountains, he imagines “our dreadful enemy” racing down its ramparts and destroying his farm. Darkness “renders these incursions still more terrible.” That is when the invasions most often come, or at least, that is when the dread of them most haunts James’s imaginings. Daytime is not much better. “We never go out in the fields,” James tells his friend, “but we are seized with an involuntary fear, which lessens our strength and weakens our labor.”¹¹

Fear interrupts the simple rhythms of life. Wracked by constant anxiety, James and his family lose their appetites and “eat just enough to keep alive.” When they do find the energy to eat, “the slightest noise” disrupts meals and sends his family seeking cover. Their sleep is “disturbed by the most frightful dreams.” Although James and his wife try to protect their children, every morning the young ones wake with tales of their nighttime horrors. Sometimes the howl of James’s dogs stirs him from sleep and sends him running for his gun, while his wife takes the children to the cellar where they await the onslaught of Indians. “Fear industriously increases every sound” as James stands by his windows, his hands clutching his gun, expecting to receive fire at any moment: “We remain thus sometimes for whole hours, our hearts and minds racked by the most anxious suspense: what a dreadful situation, a thousand times worse than that of a soldier engaged in the most severe conflict!” Stories of “successive acts of devastation” spread through frontier homes, “and these told in chimney-corners, swell themselves in our affrighted imaginations into the most terrific ideas!” Fear more than actual warfare defines frontier society for James and his neighbors.¹²

Crevecoeur’s depiction is more than mere fiction. The historical record bears out the sentiments he conveys. The emotions of that came while being holed up in their small homes, huddled around fires, fearing that an attack would come any moment, forged a distinct sense of self: a frontier people, a political identity that shaped the actions of anyone who believed that they were such a person. Treating frontier on its own terms gives us a way to understand how colonists and Europeans imagined the spaces they inhabited and how this imagination shaped their politics.¹³

“A Strange State of Society”

Frontiers should not be confused with our idea of borders. The two were not synonymous in the eighteenth century, though as geopolitical regions in a colony they could overlap. Frontiers appeared at moments of war to mark the colonial settlements vulnerable to invasion. And there were many different frontiers, depending on who was doing the strategizing. There were imperial frontiers that referred to the empire’s holdings and could stretch across colonies and into areas not yet acquired. And there were colonial frontiers that were specific to a colony and required the attention of governors and legislatures. That is, grand strategists in England could draw clear, often contiguous lines to mark areas of expected invasion, while those tasked with governing colonies could imagine more local zones of invasion with greater specificity than those in the faraway halls of London. And finally, living on a frontier was a real experience for colonists who inhabited such zones. Sometimes these three perspectives agreed on where frontiers existed, and sometimes they did not. But even when they disagreed, there was general consensus about what a frontier was: a zone of potential, if not active, assault from an external enemy.

Borders, in contrast, were more permanent, though their specific location could be just as contested as the location of frontiers. Colonial governments, rather than the empire, most often dealt with establishing the exact location of the political borders that separated colonies from one another and distinguished between Native American land and colonial land. Colonies thus possessed many different borders that they often had to manage simultaneously. At their founding, colonial charters projected imagined borders far away from the settled coastlines. Borders, as such, were less of a concern in this earliest phase of colonization. Early maps, for instance, were often borderless. As colonies expanded, however, and came into contact with neighboring polities, often other British colonies, they began to solidify intercolonial borders. Colonies also had borders with Native American groups and with their imperial rivals that they negotiated or fought to secure, which is when frontiers and borders often overlapped.

Fixing these political boundaries between rival colonies required a distinctive type of governing. Here, colonial officials had to operate within a larger imperial framework that had its own laws and precedents for establishing jurisdiction. While colonial officials caught in the midst of a border dispute were always cognizant of the larger superstructure to which they belonged, as we shall see, during border wars they regularly ignored these laws in practice. The most distinctive part of these conflicts was the means to secure victory. While martial strength often played a role in the course of the conflict, what mattered more for victory was the ability for one of the competing colonies to appeal to the needs of local colonists and secure a loyal following that would bolster the victorious colony’s governing authority. In this process of border creation, regular colonists got to pick the government they preferred and, by doing so, shape the contours of the empire through the terms of their allegiance. In the end, establishing borders, a political designation meant to create stability in the empire, fostered animosities as warring colonies adopted tactics that divided colonists, bred uncertainty, and created political disorder.¹⁴

When colonial border wars increased in the greater Pennsylvania region during the 1770s, the politics of frontiers, something that had been absent from previous intercolonial clashes, fused with colonial competition over borders, allowing frontier inhabitants to use their power of choice to remake the colonial and imperial governments to which they belonged. It was, as one of the people who lived at the time would later remember, “a strange state of society” in which colonists rejected the Pennsylvania model of security through peace and used colonial competition to empower the vision of a more militarized government that would come to define the future of governing American frontiers.

It is no mistake, then, that Thomas Jefferson was thinking about Indian relations on the new nation’s frontiers as he penned the Declaration of Independence or that John Dickinson dedicated the longest section of the Articles of Confederation to establishing peaceful borders between the newly independent states. These two issues were a central part of the crisis of empire and among the reasons for revolution. Putting colonial competition alongside the development of “frontiers” creates a more complete—though still imperfect—picture of politics in the colonies at the very moment the British Empire in North America experienced a precipitous fall.

The politics of frontiers and border creation are the intertwined issues that form the core of this book. The story begins with Pennsylvania’s founding and follows the colony’s political expansion, tracing the colony’s early successes in managing frontiers and border conflicts to its later catastrophic failures in both areas. Combined, the events show that the ultimate cause of Pennsylvania’s collapse during the 1760s and 1770s was its inability to govern frontiers, a problem that the colony avoided during its first decades. The unstable political borders in the 1770s only exacerbated the underlying problem frontiers posed to governing Pennsylvania and the British Empire more generally. The story ends with the American Revolution, when self-described “frontier people” seized political power and remade government to do the one thing the colonial government could not: provide for frontiers.