Wild Yankees: The Struggle for Independence along Pennsylvania's Revolutionary Frontier

5. “A Perfect Union with the People”: Cultures of Resistance along the Revolutionary Frontier

Chapter 5 “A Perfect Union with the People” Cultures of Resistance along the Revolutionary Frontier By the summer of 1804, Yankee settlers along Sugar Creek found themselves struggling to shield their community from intruding sheriff’s deputies, surveyors, and land agents. In the spring, they got word that a group of Pennsylvania surveyors were at work near their settlements. Three parties of settlers scoured the woods for the Pennsylvanians but failed to intercept them. A short time later, word spread that Lycoming County magistrate Henry Donnell was in the neighborhood cajoling Connecticut claimants into purchasing Pennsylvania titles and bringing ejectment suits against those who refused. Responding to this threat, Sugar Creek’s Wild Yankees rallied and, after “a good deal of hard work,” captured Donnell and submitted him to a gauntlet of verbal and physical abuse before releasing him. Though under increasing pressure, Connecticut claimants along Sugar Creek asserted that there was “a perfect union with the people” and that they were “determined to share an equal fate” in defense of their families and farms.1 After 1800 Yankee resistance changed from a regional movement that enjoyed the support of well-connected, nonresident speculators into a fragmented, highly localized insurgency manned and managed by backcountry settlers. Two developments undermined the settler-speculator alliance that had buoyed Yankee resistance since the 1780s. First, with the collapse of the speculating boom that had swept over northern Pennsylvania in the 1790s, profit-minded land 120 1. Nathaniel Allen to John Jenkins, June 25, 1804, in Louise Wells Murray, A History of Old Tioga Point and Early Athens (Wilkes-Barre, PA, 1907), 420–21. developers fell back from the commitment to the Connecticut claim. Second, the state and its most powerful land speculators moved to impose their authority and soil rights over Northeast Pennsylvania. Through the deft combination of compromise and punitive legislation, Pennsylvania undercut support for the Connecticut claim among Yankee settlers and further discouraged nonresident speculators from sponsoring settler resistance. Eventually, local leading men who were more concerned with protecting themselves and their neighbors from ejectment than defending the integrity of the Connecticut claim filled the leadership vacuum created by the decline of the Susquehannah and Delaware companies. Exploring Yankee insurgency during this period reveals how ordinary settlers battled to defend their farms, neighborhoods, and independence and provides insight into the behaviors and beliefs that constituted rural cultures of resistance. Incidents of unrest highlight that the insurgents waged both an “external” campaign of resistance aimed at protecting their communities from invading state officials and an “internal” campaign of purges and intimidation aimed at Yankee turncoats. They also demonstrate that Wild Yankees drew on venerable traditions of popular protest, the memory and experience of the American Revolution , and the experience of frontier life in mounting these parallel efforts. Most important, the desperate battle Wild Yankees fought after the turn of the century illustrates that ordinary settlers’ efforts to achieve and secure independence continued to propel agrarian unrest in Northeast Pennsylvania.2 “a Determination to Survey Disposes Sel & turn the world upsidedown” That Wild Yankee resistance became more localized and fragmented after 1800 was a result of Pennsylvania’s renewed efforts to win control over the Wyoming region. Pennsylvania offered secure titles to compromise-minded Yankees while meting out harsh punishments to those who continued to support the Connecticut claim. This strategy broke the settler-speculator alliance that had bolstered Yankee resistance. Moreover, the new legislation opened a fissure between settlers who lived in the Wyoming Valley and those who occupied raw backcountry settlements to the north. “A Perfect Union with the People” 121 2. Alan Taylor has uncovered similar patterns and similar ideological components in his examination of agrarian resistance in Maine: see Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), 118–21, and “ ‘Stopping the Progress of Rogues and Deceivers’: A White Indian Recruiting Notice of 1808,” WMQ 41 (Jan. 1985): 90–103. In the spring of 1799, Pennsylvania made the first in a series of moves that would ultimately resolve land disputes in and around the Wyoming Valley. On April 4, the state assembly passed the Compromise Act, which allowed settlers who held Connecticut deeds that predated the Trenton Decree to obtain Pennsylvania titles to their lands. The legislation established a three-man commission empowered to assess the legitimacy of settlers’ claims, survey their tracts, and ascertain their...