speech. He alerted the Conestoga and Conoy Indians, the two groups who lived in the area, to the discovery and asked for help in investigating. They accepted. Lowe then convened a formal inquisition composed of colonists and Indians, a move that harkened back to Penn’s original vision of joint juries working together to maintain peace and cultivate mutual understanding. The jury quickly decided death by murder but concluded that the bodies were too far decomposed to say more than that. More important, they all agreed that Pennsylvanians bore no blame for the deaths.47
Lowe knew there was more to this story, though he did not let his knowledge interfere with the official inquest. In a private letter to Gordon, he said that the dead Indians were likely a Delaware family and that the murderer was suspected to be the jealous husband of one of the Indian women. Lowe noted that since the crime involved an Indian killing another Indian, the colonial government had no responsibility to act. Lowe’s statement shows that the understanding of Indians’ legal status in the colony that had developed over time and through precedent had made its way down to the most local of officials. Through actions like Lowe’s, officials stationed far away from colonial capitals and even farther from the imperial center in England began to expand and assert colonial authority over new ground. While diplomats and political leaders could negotiate treaties, it was here, in areas of new settlement, that the colony was being created through the actions of local officials like Lowe who were implementing and enforcing policies and, in the process, establishing a functional government.48
After the handling of the murders in 1730, Pennsylvania’s relations with Indians stood on solid ground. Later that year, Captain Civility hinted at the successful settlement of the 1728 crisis in a letter he sent to Gordon. He noted that the Conestogas had followed the spirit of Gordon’s 1728 speech—that “wee should not hurt any of your people”—and he thanked Gordon for doing the same by removing the squatters. But Civility’s letter also contained a worrisome subtext. Pennsylvanians—including some of the county officials who had promised Civility that they would stop encroachments—continued to secretly survey lands on the west side of the Susquehanna. New settlers from Maryland also began to appear, claiming that the land was their property and not Pennsylvania’s. The reemergence of this colonial rivalry in the wake of the frontier crisis of 1728 posed novel challenges to Pennsylvania’s colonial government as it tried to maintain an ordered and peaceful expansion while also trying to fend off an aggressive neighbor.49
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
