Conceived in Liberty (105 page)

New England hostility to Presbyterian newcomers was, moreover, not overcome by any great need for more indentured servants. By the eighteenth century, the greatest need for more forced labor was on large farms and plantations, and aside from the Narragansett Country there were few such opportunities in New England—in contrast to the Middle Atlantic and Southern colonies. As a consequence, religious and ethnic hostility could reign unbridled,
and therefore few Ulstermen settled in New England. Instead, they chose Pennsylvania, the great haven of religious freedom and of separation of church and state. As for the other Middle Atlantic colonies, New York, with its feudal land structure, was singularly unattractive to would-be farmers. Furthermore, while there were many English Presbyterians on Long Island, the persecution of the revered elder statesman of Presbyterianism, the Reverend Francis Makemie, an Ulster Scot, by Lord Cornbury, did not endear New York to the Ulstermen. In late 1706, Lord Cornbury, royal governor of New York, arrested and imprisoned Makemie for allegedly preaching without a license. Though Makemie was eventually acquitted, he was compelled to pay the costs of his prosecution and was imprisoned a long time before trial. Furthermore, the ordeal hastened Makemie’s death.

Delaware, to be sure, contained numerous English and Welsh Presbyterians, but tiny Delaware was already pretty thoroughly settled, and there was little good virgin land available. New Jersey was also heavily Presbyterian, but these Presbyterians were either from England or from Scotland proper, including Highlanders escaping after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Here again, there was little need for indentured servants.

The other great group of immigrants who concentrated in Pennsylvania were the Germans. In contrast to the earlier German migration of Quakers and other pietist sects, the mid-eighteenth-century German influx was either Lutheran or Reformed (Calvinist). These people came to America to escape feudalism, exorbitant taxes, and the pillaging endemic in wartime. The German migration began around 1720, started in earnest in the late 1730s, and reached its peak in the early 1750s, ending rather abruptly with the French and Indian War of the late 50s. By the end of the colonial era, one-third of the Pennsylvanians were Germans, or “Dutch” as they were often called. The Germans followed the same route as the Ulster Scots, westward down the Susquehanna and Cumberland valleys. They too were valley farmers, and German and Scotch-Irish settlements alternated down the valley route. The two groups had very little contact with each other: their differences were too great—in language, religion, and character. Not only did the Germans keep to themselves; they were also sober, hard-working, thrifty and highly productive farmers. They treated the Indians justly and peacefully.

The Germans, then, followed the great valley route, down the Shenandoah and into the Carolina Piedmont, where they founded such settlements as Orangeburg, South Carolina—but to a much lesser degree than did the Ulster Scots. The Germans were largely content to remain in Pennsylvania, especially in Lancaster County, where they could work their farms productively and profitably. In addition to being superb farmers, the Germans proved highly adept at establishing glass factories and ironworks. The Germans produced the first iron stoves and long rifles in America, as well as the first Conestoga wagons.

While the great bulk of Pennsylvania Germans were Lutherans or Reformed, a small but influential group of Moravians, or United Brethren, a pacifist pietist sect, came to Pennsylvania in the 1740s. Founding such towns as Bethlehem and Nazareth, the Moravians furnished many missionaries to the Indians, as well as virtually introducing choral music and establishing numerous schools and ladies’ seminaries in Pennsylvania.

The mid-eighteenth century, indeed, saw a considerable expansion of higher education in America. The Southern gentlemen had William and Mary College, the liberal Puritans had Harvard, and the rigidly orthodox, Yale. Now several influential new colleges were founded in the colonies. The Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in 1746. Although Princeton was founded by English and mainland Scots rather than by Ulstermen, the college provided the indispensable source for training new ministers for the Scotch-Irish and for educating their leading citizens. In Philadelphia, the Reverend William Smith and Benjamin Franklin organized in 1755 a new liberal nonsectarian college, the Academy, which later became the University of Pennsylvania. And in New York City, King’s College (later Columbia) was founded in 1754. Organized by Anglicans, it nonetheless included on its board men of various religious persuasions, and hence soon emerged as a liberal and secular institution.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the original, purely individualist Quaker principles had been modified by the proprietor of Pennsylvania, William Penn, and by the ruling proprietary party headed by Pennsylvania’s agent, James Logan. The libertarian Quaker opposition continued to be strong, however, and was led by David Lloyd, many times Speaker of the Assembly. Lloyd led the struggle against feudal quitrents, against attempts to aid wars and to impose increased taxation, and against a proprietary veto or the power of the governor to dissolve the Assembly.

William Penn died in 1718, in a period of confusion and tumult over the inheritance of the proprietorship. These disputes were settled by the late 1720s with Penn’s younger son assuming the proprietorship. But when Thomas Penn succeeded to the proprietorship in 1746, rule over Pennsylvania passed out of Quaker hands. For Thomas Penn and his heirs had left the Quaker fold to become Anglicans, and after Logan’s death the proprietary agent of Pennsylvania was an Anglican, the Reverend Richard Peters. With the proprietorship no longer Quaker, the Quakers tended to unite against the proprietary and to recover some of the purity of their principles.

Even when modified, Quaker principles were radical enough to be unique in the colonies. Nowhere was this uniqueness more outstanding than in military affairs and in their treatment of the Indians. William Penn had from the beginning set the pattern of peace and justice to the Indians, and scrupulously purchased Indian land claims even when the claims themselves were dubious. Pursuing a policy of peace, incomprehensible to most of the other colonists, who were generally conscienceless in slaughtering the Indians, the Quakers of Pennsylvania built no forts, established no militia, and hired no
scouts and Indian fighters. And by
pursuing
a policy of peace and no armaments, they found,
mirabile dictu,
that they had nothing to fear. They had earned and gained the lasting respect of the Indians, and fair play met with fair play in its turn. As in New Jersey, where Quakers were influential in shaping Indian policy, there was no Indian war in the history of the colony so long as the Quakers ruled.

The non-Quaker historian Herbert L. Osgood, paid high and eloquent tribute to Quaker policy:

[The Quakers] would not make their religion, though Christian and Protestant, a cause for war with either the heathen or the Catholic. It is true that they based their views on literal reading of scripture texts... but beneath this procedure lay a true consciousness of the essentials of humanity which transcended all differences of color, race, nation, or creed. Quakers shared in the movement westward... so far as was a necessary consequence of the growth of population. But with the artificial stimulation of these tendencies by military and commercial exploitation, accompanied with the partial or complete destruction of native peoples, they had no sympathy.... to the great majority of people in their time, this attitude seemed perverse and purely obstructionist. But for the modern man it appears worthy of all honor as a dim foreshadowing of what human relations should everywhere be.
*

But as the eighteenth century wore on, the Quakers began to lose control of Pennsylvania policy. We have seen the Ulster Scot propensity for indiscriminate land grab and savagery toward the Indians. Furthermore, the new Anglican proprietary was not interested in peace or fair dealing. In 1737, for example, the proprietors engaged in chicanery in extending a tract bought from the Delaware Indians in Bucks County at the junction of the Delaware and Lehigh rivers (“the walking purchase”). The government then proceeded to insist that the Indians leave the land they had settled, but the Quaker-dominated Assembly refused to vote funds to allow enforcement of this outrageous demand. But most serious was the eagerness of the proprietary party to participate in the English aggression against the French and their Indian allies on the other side of the Appalachians. For the French had explored and occupied the Mississippi River and the Ohio Valley east of the Appalachians. Now this extensive territory seemed ripe for the grabbing.

In 1739, England broke a quarter-century of European peace by going to war with Spain, and then escalated the war to include France. The Penns and their appointed governor, George Thomas, were eager to enter the fray. Thomas urged the legislature to appropriate money for “defense”—the age-old verbiage of the aggressor. The Assembly replied that the royal charter of Pennsylvania permanently guaranteed freedom of conscience. A cardinal point of the Quaker creed, they pointed out, was to be “principled against bearing
arms in any case whatsoever.” Therefore, forcing them to fight would constitute persecution of the Quakers. As for non-Quakers, it would obviously be unjust to conscript them for war while exempting Quakers; therefore,
all
militia service should be voluntary.

Governor Thomas replied with three arguments: (1) the futility of voluntary defense—that is, presumably people were not as eager to defend themselves as Thomas and the militarists were to “defend” them; (2) were not the Quakers interested in righting the “bloody religion of France and Spain” (Catholicism)? (3) why would the Quakers not hesitate to kill a burglar, and yet not defend themselves against an invading army? To the last point, the Assembly trenchantly replied that the burglar was committing a conscious wrong, whereas the soldiers in an army probably did not know that they were acting as criminals. They also properly deprecated any supposed threat of French invasion, noting that the English colonists overwhelmingly outnumbered the French. The governor ended the discussion by charging that Quaker principles were incompatible with government itself, and urged on the proprietary that Quakers be made ineligible for public office. In this he was, in effect, joined by James Logan, ever ready to bend Quaker principles to the proprietary interests. Logan urged the Quakers to resign from the Assembly.

The Assembly cause was led by Speaker John Kinsey, who was also the attorney general of the province; the Quakers were supported by the Germans, who agreed with the Quaker policy of peace and fair-dealing with the Indians. Other Quaker leaders in the Assembly were Isaac Norris and Israel Pemberton. John Conrad Weiser, the expansionist German-born adviser to Governor Thomas on Indian affairs, rebuked his fellow Germans for their propeace policy, but to no avail. The Assembly also effectively used the tactic of withholding the governor’s salary to win their points.

Passions intensified in this conflict between proprietary and Assembly. In the fall elections of 1742 a riot broke out in Philadelphia, where a goon squad of anti-Quaker sailors raided the polls. Despite the deliberate failure of the pro-Thomas magistrates to suppress this criminality, the Quakers won both at the polls and in the streets, staunchly backed by their German allies.

Unfortunately, the Assembly did not stick completely to its principles. While consistently refusing to vote funds for a militia or for direct military purposes during the War of the Austrian Succession (known in America as King George’s War) with France in the 1740s, the Assembly repeatedly evaded the issue by voting funds “for the King’s Use,” which funds the Crown could and did use for war. The Quakers did try to assuage their rather elastic consciences by rationalizing that they had not explicitly voted funds for war, and that warlike use was decided by the Crown—the same flimsy argument that the Logan party had used during Queen Anne’s War earlier in the century. At one point New England asked Pennsylvania for money to buy gunpowder for an aggressive assault on the French fort of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island
(Nova Scotia). The Assembly, urged to grant the money by Governor Thomas, slyly assuaged their consciences by voting a grant to New England of the large sum of 3,000 pounds. The funds were to be spent by Thomas on “bread, flour, wheat,
or other grains”
and it was well understood in the colony that “other grains” meant nothing less than gunpowder.

In the meanwhile, Pennsylvania was storing up further trouble with the Delaware Indians by completing the brutal eviction of the Delawares from their lands in upper Bucks County. After having used fraud to claim the “walking purchase,” and having been thwarted by the Quaker Assembly in imposing eviction of the Indians, the Pennsylvania government turned to the aggressive overlords of the Delawares, the Iroquois—the long-term allies of the English. At a conference in Philadelphia in 1742, the Iroquois agreed in return for bribes to recognize the English purchase of Delaware Indian land. The lordly Iroquois chieftain not only ordered the Delawares off their own settled land, but also reviled these Indians, calling them “women,” and asserted that they had no right to sell their own land without consulting their overlords. The Pennsylvania government was happy to make all future land “purchases” from an Iroquois tribe that had no connection with and no personal commitment in work and energy to the land. The Delawares complied with the order, storing great bitterness in their hearts.

One of the most enthusiastic participants in King George’s War against the French was George Croghan, an Ulster Scot Indian trader in Pennsylvania. Like John Conrad Weiser, also an Indian trader, the swindling, nearly illiterate Croghan had a direct economic interest in liquidating his French competitors in the Indian trade. Penetrating beyond the Appalachians into the French territory of the Ohio Valley, Croghan stirred up the Indians to massacre his French competition. Beginning by murdering five French traders at Sandusky, the Croghan-directed Indians burned French settlements during 1747 and murdered traders throughout the Ohio Valley. A fellow English trader well summed up Croghan’s activities: “Croghan... had at all times persuaded the Indians to destroy the French... by the presents he had made them... that self-interest was his sole motive in everything he did, that his views were to engross the old trade and to scare the French from dealing with the Indians.” Croghan, delighted with his Indians, sent a scalp of one of the murdered Frenchmen to Governor Thomas, and boasted that the Indians would soon seize the French port of Detroit. This hope proved vain, but Weiser and Croghan persuaded the Pennsylvania government to grant a 400-pound reward to the pillaging Indians—a gift hardly in line with Quaker principles.