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

Farmers considering a move to the Potomac interior in the early 1740s were well advised to proceed with caution. Part of the problem lay in their cultural predilection for boundaries, which was near the heart of the English relationship with the natural world. The need for precisely defined boundaries had spawned an elaborate system of surveys, plats, patents, and deeds. All of this generated considerable paperwork, which had to be coordinated and recorded by a central bureaucracy such as a provincial government or the land office of one of the great proprietors: Fairfax, Baltimore, or Penn. But which bureaucracy would rule? And what about Native American claims to the same lands? In the early 1740s the uncertainty bred by this situation rapidly escalated into a serious diplomatic crisis. The crisis, however, was neatly resolved by the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster, a watershed event that spared backcountry residents from a war they were not prepared to fight and solved most of the outstanding boundary disputes over the Potomac interior. Shortly afterward, the Privy Council rendered its long-delayed decision in the Northern Neck boundary dispute. The effect of these developments was to suddenly throw open the backcountry to colonial farmers, who could now know with some precision which proprietor or colony had won the right to sell or grant lands there. Finding colonists to repopulate the backcountry proved not to be a problem, because the Treaty of Lancaster and the resolution of the Fairfax-Virginia boundary dispute coincided with the peak of eighteenth-century German and ScotsIrish emigration through Philadelphia. Thousands of emigrant farmers and artisans rushed into the booming interior settlements after 1744. There, in a marked contrast to the tobacco-and-slaves economy and landscape of the coastal plain, German and Scots-Irish farmers created a distinctive landscape tailored to the demands of a grain-and-dairy economy. These migrations from central Europe and the British borderlands perpetuc h a p t e r ฀ t w e lv e The Backcountry Transformed ., The Backcountry Transformed 207 ated the centuries-old division between the coastal plain and the interior. Once again, the decisions made by Native Americans in the centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans turned out to be binding on their successors, for the geography of war and diplomacy that they had created during the ecological crisis of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries persisted even into the mideighteenth century, a full two generations after the departure of most Conoys for Pennsylvania. Although they surely would have preferred some other result, the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples who had forged that regional diplomatic configuration over the centuries had effectively regulated the timing, extent, and character of European colonization in the backcountry. Reopening the Backcountry On 30 June 1742, Jacob Pattasahood, a Nanticoke from the Eastern Shore, came before Maryland’s council to warn of yet another“Popish Plot.”Pattasahood said that he had visited the Conoys’town on the Susquehanna River, where he learned of a scheme among the French and Indians to “cut off the English inhabitants in Pensilvania Maryland and other adjacent parts.” The Senecas, he noted, were about to go to Philadelphia to collect the last payment for the Susquehanna River lands they had sold in 1736. Once they had done so they and “other Indians” would begin preparations for an autumn attack:“in roasting ear and apple time” they would “fall upon the back inhabitants and at the same time the French who was to come by sea.”1 The Six Nations were indeed at Philadelphia in July 1742 to renew the treaty of 1736 and to collect payment for selling the lower Susquehanna out from under the Conoys—a payment that included guns and ammunition. At Philadelphia, the Onondaga orator Canasatego complained about the people of Maryland and Virginia, “from whom we have never received any consideration” for backcountry lands. “We now renew our request,” Canasatego said, emphasizing that “that country belongs to us in right of conquest, we having bought it with our blood and taken it from our enemies in fair war.” If no payment was forthcoming “we are able to do ourselves justice, and we will do it, by going to take payment ourselves .” Pennsylvania’s council immediately dispatched a special courier to warn governors Ogle and Gooch of Canasatego’s “threats . . . against the inhabitants of Maryland.”2 Maryland’s Governor Benjamin Ogle dashed off a warning about the “conspiracy ” to Virginia’s Governor Gooch, and Gooch in turn smoothly integrated...

Share