Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (review)

Despite its title, this well-written book represents much more than another indignant denunciation of Pennsylvania’s well-known frontier rowdies, the Paxton Boys, and their merciless slaughter of some twenty peaceful Conestoga Indians in December 1763. Author Kenny lays out his story in the broadest of contexts, sweeping forward from the founding of William Penn’s colony in the 1680s up to fighting during the Revolutionary War. Dividing his text into five sections, he writes mostly in dispassionate fashion, explaining at the outset that Penn truly believed in the ideal of a peaceable kingdom in which Native Americans and European settlers could co-exist harmoniously. Unfortunately, Penn’s heirs lacked this vision, and they used various means to defraud Delaware Indians and others of their ancient tribal territory, including the Walking Purchase scam of the 1730s, which Kenny describes as “the biggest land fraud in Pennsylvania’s history.” (p. 46). The potential for brutal frontier conflict escalated when thousands of Scots- Irish Presbyterians began migrating to Pennsylvania from Ulster Province in northern Ireland. These folk flocked westward where they mostly squatted and stood ready to fend off anyone, whether natives or Penn family officials, who tried to remove them from land to which they held no rightful claim.

Kenny calls this first section of his story “False Dawn,” which turned into a “Theatre of Bloodshed and Rapine” during the 1750s when events resulted in the Seven Years’ War. Violent incidents became commonplace on the Pennsylvania frontier. Quite often, displaced Indians were the aggressors, such as when Delaware and Shawnee warriors slaughtered some thirteen settlers near the Susquehanna River in October 1755, which provoked bloody retaliatory raids from hastily assembled local militia bands. In addition, these Scots-Irish settlers kept begging for military assistance from the provincial government in Philadelphia but received next to nothing from either the Quaker-dominated assembly or Penn family officials. As Kenny carefully documents, frontier settlers emerged from the bloodletting of the Seven Years’ War loathing not only Native Americans but also the provincial government back east in which they had virtually no voice or influence.

Add Pontiac’s uprising in 1763, throw in continuing bloodshed, and the Scots-Irish Paxton Boys come to the fore in the book’s third section, labeled “Zealots.” No fan of the Paxton Boys or their two murderous rampages, Kenny does acknowledge that one of the Conestoga Indians, Will Sock, may have been involved in some killing of whites during the late war and allegedly made threatening comments to a few settlers in the Lancaster area. However, he calls this “thin evidence” (p. 138), hardly enough to justify murdering Sock or the other Conestogas, most of them innocent women and children.

Kenny proceeds with an account of the Paxton Boys’ attempted march on Philadelphia in early 1764, ostensibly to butcher peaceful Moravian Indians receiving sanctuary there. The Boys and their followers did retreat but not before presenting two documents, a Declaration that attempted to justify their organized butchery and a Remonstrance that demanded greater backcountry representation in the assembly with the goal of obtaining increased military support for likely future conflicts with the native populace. Here in the book’s fourth section, dubbed “A War of Words,” Kenny analyzes the flurry of pamphlets that either supported or denounced the Boys’ butchery (legitimate actions against known enemies during wartime versus needlessly savage behavior by alleged Christians).

Describing this “pamphlet war” as then “unprecedented in American history,” (p. 170) Kenny makes it clear that older interpretations featuring the Paxton Boys as incipient frontier democrats should be forever discarded. Certainly this point is well taken, but then Kenny makes a large leap in interpretive faith in the book’s final section, entitled “Unraveling.” Here he argues that “[i]n the aftermath of the Paxton affair social order on the Pennsylvania frontier disintegrated.” (p. 205). Certainly, some truly ugly incidents...