Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania

Chapter 5. Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, I: Life on the Colonial Borderlands

c h a p te r 5 Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, I Life on the Colonial Borderlands robert suder had bad news. The Anglican clergyman’s 1698 report home described a colony in disarray. Desperate to hold on to their power, Pennsylvania ’s ruling Quakers worked to undermine their Anglican opponents at every turn. One poor soul even claimed that Friends held ‘‘Negroes’’ and other heathens in higher esteem than churchmen. Worse, they denied the power of parliamentary statute and royal prerogative. He also marveled at the colony’s lack of military defense and Friends’ complete unwillingness to rectify the problem. Provincial politicians had even arrested one colonist who petitioned the king for military aid and bound him over to the peace repeatedly to keep him silent. These actions masked a deeper motive, Suder warned. Colonial Friends did not fear French pirates because they were in league together, with each taking orders from the recently deposed King James.1 Suder’s letter provides crucial insight not merely into life in fin de siècle Pennsylvania but also into a particular colonial mindset. Some of his descriptions had a ring of truth, as Griffith Jones could attest. But others seem implausible, if not downright risible. How could Anglicans take seriously claims that blacks had been elevated above them? Why did they believe the Quakers had made common cause with Jacobite forces? The willingness of Suder and other anti-Quakers in America to entertain these fantasies stemmed from the anxiety they felt living on a colonial borderlands .2 Pennsylvania existed in a culturally and politically contested space ‘‘in between.’’ The religious dissenters who populated the colony aroused the ire of Anglicans leading attempts to revitalize the presence of the established Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, I 179 Church in North America. The rumors of Quaker collaboration with French pirates captured the uncertainty of English authority along its imperial boundaries, as had earlier rumors about French and Indian forces massing along Pennsylvania’s western frontier. Military indeterminacy mirrored other colonial indeterminacies within Pennsylvania. Suder’s acute consciousness of living on the colonial fringe stemmed from his fear that British culture and power might truly unravel there. Efforts to make order out of this chaos acted as a kind of productive friction that generated new identities among colonists and Native Americans in Pennsylvania. Delaware, Shawnee, and Conestoga Indian peoples created new political realities for themselves as they fended off the imperial ambitions of British colonists to the east and the Iroquois nations to the north.3 The stories critics told to justify tighter imperial controls in the colony prompted a series of counternarratives by those resisting this imposition of authority. The results roiled provincial law, politics, and diplomacy during the decade and a half after the Keithian controversy. To ‘‘feel the injury of Pennsylvania’’: Resisting Imperial Control Francis Nicholson had strong feelings about Pennsylvania that he had no compunctions about sharing. In letters to his superiors in London, the Maryland lieutenant governor listed the faults of his neighbor to the north in exacting detail. Pennsylvanians thumbed their collective nose at royal authority , consorted with England’s enemies, invited pirates to visit their ports, and violated imperial laws with impunity. Nicholson had seen colonial intransigence before, having served as lieutenant governor in Virginia as well. But Pennsylvania seemed worse, unrulier and more disruptive, than its Chesapeake neighbors.4 Other fearful provincials shared Nicholson’s views, sending similar accounts back home. It was no wonder that Englishmen hearing these reports believed ‘‘That Pennsilvania is become the greatest refuge & shelter for pirates & Rogues in America,’’ as William Penn reported in 1698.5 These tales of rampant piracy accompanied litanies of frustration at Pennsylvanians’ repeated refusals to comply with the Navigation Acts governing transAtlantic trade and outrage over a perceived indifference to imperial authority. At the heart of these complaints lay a single issue: the place of Pennsylvania , a proprietary colony populated and governed by religious dissenters, in an expanding Anglo-Atlantic world. British imperial policy toward its Ameri- 180 chapter 5 can colonies had been somewhat haphazard during the decades leading up to Pennsylvania’s founding. The seventeenth-century English government showed little interest in planting colonies on its own initiative. Nearly all the Anglo-American colonies in 1680 had proprietary or chartered forms of government. Those few with royal governments had either been acquired through conquest, as in the case of colonies like New...