one final, controversial step to try to preserve his colony from a Crown takeover. The Crown was facing another war with France. While Penn remained a dogged pacifist in his personal beliefs, he proved less doctrinaire in his governmental policy once he realized that the Crown might revoke his charter if his colony proved recalcitrant in defending imperial frontiers. In 1701, as Penn prepared to return to England to protect his colony, he aligned his stance on frontiers to fit imperial prerogatives.41
Penn made his case for raiding defense monies to the Assembly before he left for England. He had received a personal request from the Crown to raise funds to support New York’s frontiers, which Penn thought might make for a strong inducement for the legislature to act. In a speech to the Assembly, he described New York “as a frontier government” because its vulnerability left it “exposed to a much greater expence in proportion to the other colonies” due to potential invasion by Indian and French enemies. Penn asked the legislature to offer financial support to this “frontier government,” which he argued would serve the interests of the empire without contravening Quaker principles of peace. Aid to a neighboring colony was not the same as active support of war, he contended. The Assembly, meanwhile, remained unyielding: New York would go without Pennsylvania help.42
From the colony’s founding, then, government support for and policy toward frontiers, competition with neighbors over land, proprietary oversight of Indian diplomacy, and tensions between the Assembly and proprietor defined the colony’s politics. After Penn departed in 1701 and succeeded in defending himself in England, the colony settled into a period of relative peace and harmony. No one seemed to notice that the much-vaunted Frame of 1701 contained the seeds for the colony’s demise. Indeed, the founding’s fatal flaw—the failure of the Frame of 1701 to create an explicit means for the government to handle expansion and to manage zones that could become frontiers—remained submerged until the colony experienced the growth Penn so deserved.
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
