Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania by Patrick Spero (review)

Patrick Spero opens his new book, Frontier Country, with a vignette from 1765. We meet a surveyor as he visits Lancaster, Pennsylvania, curious to learn about a semi-recent massacre committed by the Paxton Boys on the neighboring Conestoga Indians. What did our surveyor find? "A bustling and vibrant inland port," not the "lawless frontier outpost" he had expected (1). Spero gives us this story to prepare us. "Frontier" does not mean what you think it does.

The book proceeds chronologically, interweaving three threads of Pennsylvania history, namely warfare, boundaries, and political negotiation (especially between capitol and back-country). It begins in the era of William Penn and ends roughly during the Revolutionary War, with a trickle of later material. Spero's love of language manifests in his lucid writing style and the way he unpacks his terms, which forms the argument of his book. He breathes life into linguistic relics. The reader comes away not only with a crisp understanding of the words in their full historical context but also the worlds that the words helped to make.

"Frontier" receives the most attention. Spero defines it as a "a zone that people considered vulnerable to invasion, one that was created when colonists feared an onslaught from imperial rivals and other enemies" (6). The definition comes into focus as the book progresses. Essentially, this is a psychological space in which some people feared others. Fear was the crucial ingredient, aided by a sense of expectation: People living in frontiers would buffer the rest of the colony from danger in exchange for the resources to protect themselves. Rarely did it actually work out that way.

Spero distinguishes boundaries from frontiers but notes that a lack of clarity regarding the former often helped to produce the latter. Boundary disputes between Pennsylvania and other colonies often turned violent. The ambiguous place of Natives within the jurisdiction of colony and empire had similar consequences. Europeans living at the edge of empire wanted the certainty of a strong state. They wanted the security it was supposed to bring too—although we readers become so acutely aware that they would have rarely needed help if they could have just found a way to live peacefully with their neighbors.

The big problem in the book emerges from framing "frontier" entirely around subjective emotional experience. More attention to people's perceptions of space and place would have helped orient us. How are these historical actors thinking about movement, proximity, or distance? How do actual features of the landscape shape those perceptions? Fear alone does not a frontier make. That fear must in some way be rooted in somebody's understanding of geography. Otherwise, the term would apply to almost every last place in the barbarous world of early America from slave plantation to abusive household.

We encounter the problem of subjectivity in Spero's introductory story. The people in Lancaster perceive themselves in frontier country. The surveyor, however, does not see it. Spero later points to memory as the thing that keeps the frontier alive when war dies down. Somehow this just seems unsatisfying. An argument chasing its own tail. Especially given the influx of new immigrants across the study period, including after the bouts of violence. So, how and why does fear move in these peripheral spaces when it mostly seems unmoored from lived experience?

Defining the frontier as an emotional condition poses certain methodological challenges. Limited disciplinary training does not really prepare the historian to plumb the depths of psychological interiority—to explain from whence fear arises. Or prove whether it was fear at all.

Did people actually fear their Native neighbors? I suspect Spero takes people at their word a little too much when they are testifying in court. Perhaps this particular emotion drove some to violence. It may have also been a rationalization made after the fact or a legal argument that somebody was acting in self-defense. We...