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
