In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 2 Quakers in Pennsylvania, Settlers in Backcountry North Carolina Daniel Boone was born in 1734 into a Quaker family in Pennsylvania . Although Boone’s father was expelled from his Quaker meeting when Boone was fourteen, and Daniel as an adult never went regularly to any religious services, Quaker principles surely shaped his values. Daniel’s father, Squire Boone—“Squire” was his first name, not a title—was a weaver by trade, whose family came from near Exeter, in Devonshire, in southwestern England. They were Friends, or Quakers, members of a Protestant group often persecuted in England. Quakers refused to pay tithes to the established Church of England. Consistent with their belief that all men had an inner light—had within their souls an element of the divine goodness—Quakers would not doff their hats to others and addressed all men with the familiar secondpersonsingulartheeandthou,notthemoreformalsecondpersonyou. This practice irritated people who thought themselves socially superior. Nor would Quakers take oaths, including the required oath renouncing Catholicism . For all of these reasons Quakers in England often ended up in prison.1 In 1681 William Penn, a rich Quaker, was granted Pennsylvania as a colony by King Charles II, partly to pay off a debt the king owed to Penn’s father . Penn, who had been imprisoned in England for his beliefs, set up Pennsylvania to be a haven for Quakers and other persecuted Protestant sects, a colony in which people could live together in “love and brotherly kindness .” In that spirit Penn named the colony’s principal city “Philadelphia”— “brotherly love”—and proclaimed that “liberty of conscience is every man’s natural right.”2 Penn also set up the colony in the hopes (shared by many who came to America or who moved west as the American frontier shifted west) of substantial income from selling land to settlers. Between 1681 and 1685 alone, Penn sold over 700,000 acres of land in Pennsylvania.3 Frontiersman 4 Quaker settlers by the beginning of the eighteenth century made up at least half of Pennsylvania’s population. In 1713 Squire Boone became part of the Quaker emigration from England to Penn’s colony. Seven years later he married Sarah Morgan, before a Quaker meeting in Gwynedd, some twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. Daniel Boone was born on November 2, 1734, the sixth of eleven children of Squire and Sarah Boone.4 Boone’s family was then living in a log house in Oley Township, about fifty miles northwest of Philadelphia, near what is now Reading. The Oley Valley had rich farmland and a diverse group of settlers—English, French, Germans, Irish, Swedish , Swiss, and Welsh. Squire Boone owned a dairy herd as well as several looms and a smith’s forge. The area where the Boones lived, named Exeter in 1741 after the town in England from which the family had come, was close to the western end of British settlement in Pennsylvania. At the time Britain ’s settlements in America on average were not more than a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.5 Indians lived not far to the west of the Boones— Delawares mostly, but also Shawnees, Tuscaroras, and others. Penn and his agents sought to treat the Indians fairly. They paid for land, rather than killing for it.6 There had been some Indian-white friction and fighting near where the Boones lived. In 1728, a few years before Daniel Boone was born, a Shawnee and two settlers had been killed, and Boone’s grandfather George Boone, a local magistrate, had rescued two Indian girls from some angry settlers.7 Until the French and Indian War started in the 1750s, however, Indian killings of whites (and vice versa) were far less common in Pennsylvania than they were to be in Kentucky in the 1770s and 1780s and less common than they were in Virginia and the Carolinas during the first half of the eighteenth century. The relative absence of violence between Indians and whites in Pennsylvania during this period (known as the Long Peace) resulted in part from the Quaker policy of treating the Indians fairly—coupled with the less aggressive penetration of western lands by Pennsylvanians at that time and the Pennsylvania proprietors’ frugal reluctance to incur the heavy expense of warfare against the Indians.8 Boone would have seen Indians passing near his family’s house. In 1736, for example, the Delaware chief Sassanoon and a party of twenty-five Indians stopped at George Boone’s house on...

Share