The Pennsylvania Associators, 1747-1777 (review)

From 1747, when Spanish "pirates" (actually, privateers) first appeared on the Delaware River during King George's War, until the state of Pennsylvania established a militia act in 1777, Pennsylvania was defended by volunteers known as Associators. Although some Quakers believed that even permitting others to defend them might bring down the wrath of God on a province that had survived without a military force for sixty-five years, even most members of that sect recognized that once the mid-eighteenth-century wars troubled William Penn's "Holy Experiment," such extreme pacifism was no longer tenable.

Benjamin Franklin played a prominent role in organizing the first Association of 1747, in which inhabitants of the three "old counties"—Bucks, Chester, and Philadelphia—mobilized to defend a threat to their shipping. But the Associators came into their own during the French and Indian War. No armed forces of any sort protected the Pennsylvania frontier following General Braddock's defeat in 1755, and people in western Pennsylvania had to associate to defend themselves once Indian attacks ravaged the backcountry in the wake of that debacle. Within a year, John Armstrong, Hugh Mercer, and William Thompson were among those who marched from Carlisle to Kittanning in September 1756, surprising a principal Indian base camp. Although it failed to stop the raids, the grateful city of Philadelphia issued the first medal ever coined in the colonies to honor a military achievement.

Pennsylvania Associators also confronted each other. After the Paxton Boys massacred the remaining twenty Conestoga Indians in 1763, they marched on Philadelphia, where they were met by those from the eastern part of the colony, whose show of force persuaded them to turn back with the promise they would be better defended. Pontiac's War, however, proved they were not. In 1765 Associators who met at Mercersburg turned back caravans that were shipping knives and guns to the Indians with the approval of the Pennsylvania authorities and the local British garrison at Fort Loudoun, which they forced to close. This was the first military confrontation between British troops and Americans in the decade preceding the Revolution. (See the essays on the William Smith house published in the Winter 2012 issue of Pennsylvania History.)

When the American Revolution began, the Associators' role expanded, given a conservative colonial government that was reluctant to oppose British policies. They raised supplies to aid Boston after the Coercive Acts shut the harbor, suppressed suspected loyalists by making them sign confessions and (if necessary) confiscating their weapons and imprisoning them, and raised troops and materiel for the Continental Army as well as Pennsylvania's own defense. In 1775 military experience of the western Pennsylvania Rifles prior to the Revolution led to the Continental Congress summoning them, along with their counterparts in Virginia and Maryland, as the first units of the newly constituted Continental Army to join the forces Washington was mustering outside Boston. Thompson, Mercer, and Armstrong became their leaders.

When Pennsylvania became independent, the Associators protested that too many people in a state whose eastern region was filled with Quakers, other pacifists, and loyalists were shunning military service. In 1777 they persuaded the state legislature to end their existence by replacing them with a state militia. As both Associators and militiamen, many Pennsylvanians for the first time became involved in local government, enforcement of economic regulations, mobilization of supplies, and a greater cash economy that flowed from the Revolution's demands. (Frank Fox's article on this subject will appear in the spring 2013 issue of Pennsylvania History.)

Joseph Seymour, a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, DC, has written a fine book. Associators appear here and there in other books, and several articles he cites in his bibliography, but they have never received the attention they deserved for their crucial role in fighting the French and Indian War and bringing about Pennsylvania's Revolution. He concentrates mostly on the nuts-and-bolts...